biography of barack obama

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a White mother and a Black father. His mother Ann Dunham was an anthropologist, and his father Barack Obama Sr. was an economist. They met while studying at the University of Hawaii. The couple divorced in 1964 and Obama Sr. returned to his native Kenya to work for the government. He rarely saw his son after this separation.

In 1967, Barack Obama moved with his mother to Jakarta, where he lived for four years. At the age of 10, he returned to Hawaii to be raised by his maternal grandparents while his mother completed fieldwork in Indonesia. After finishing high school, Obama went on to study at Occidental College , where he gave his first public speech—a call for the school to divest from South Africa in protest of the country's system of apartheid. In 1981, Obama transferred to Columbia University, where he graduated with a degree in political science and English literature.

In 1988, Obama began studying at Harvard Law School . He became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 and spent his summers working at law firms in Chicago. He graduated magna cum laude in 1991.

Michelle Obama / Twitter

Obama married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson—a lawyer from Chicago he met while he was working in the city—on October 3, 1992. Together they have two children, Malia and Sasha. In her 2018 memoir Becoming , Michelle Obama described their marriage as "a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.” Barack supported Michelle when she chose to leave private law for public service, and she supported him when he decided to enter politics.

Career Before Politics

Upon graduating from Columbia University, Barack Obama worked at Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonpartisan political organization. He then moved to Chicago and became director of the Developing Communities Project. After law school, Obama wrote his memoir, Dreams from My Father , which was widely acclaimed by critics and other writers, including Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison .

Obama worked as a community organizer and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years. He also worked as a lawyer during this same period. In 1996, Obama made his foray into political life as a member of the Illinois State Senate. He supported bipartisan efforts to improve health care and increase tax credits for child care. Obama was reelected to the State Senate in 1998 and again in 2002.

U.S. Senate

In 2004, Obama launched a campaign for U.S. Senate. He positioned himself as a progressive and an opponent of the Iraq War. Obama won a decisive victory in November with 70% of the vote and was sworn in as a U.S. senator in January 2005. As a senator, Obama served on five committees and chaired the European Affairs subcommittee. He sponsored legislation to expand Pell grants, provide support for victims of Hurricane Katrina, improve the safety of consumer products, and reduce homelessness among veterans.

By now, Obama was a national figure and a rising star in the Democratic Party, having delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In 2006, Obama released his second book, The Audacity of Hope , which became a New York Times bestseller.

2008 Election

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Obama began his run for U.S. president in February 2007. He was nominated after a very close primary race against key opponent Hillary Clinton , a former U.S. senator from New York and a future U.S. secretary of state, who was also the wife of former president Bill Clinton . Obama chose then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate. The two campaigned on a platform of hope and change; Obama made ending the Iraq War and passing health care reform his primary issues. His campaign was notable for its digital strategy and fundraising efforts. With support from small donors and activists across the nation, the campaign raised a record $750 million. Obama's main opponent in the presidential race was Republican Sen. John McCain. In the end, Obama won 365 electoral votes and 52.9% of the popular vote.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Within the first 100 days of his presidency, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a piece of legislation designed to address the worst effects of the Great Recession. The Recovery Act was a stimulus package that injected about $800 billion into the economy through tax incentives for individuals and businesses, infrastructure investment, aid for low-income workers, and scientific research. Leading economists broadly agreed that this stimulus spending helped reduce unemployment and avert further economic challenges.

Obama's signature achievement—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as "Obamacare")—was passed on March 23, 2010. The legislation was designed to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health insurance by subsidizing those who meet certain income requirements. At the time of its passage, the bill was quite controversial . In fact, it came before the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2012 that it was not unconstitutional.

By the end of 2010, Obama had also added two new judges to the Supreme Court— Sonia Sotomayor , who was confirmed on August 6, 2009, and Elena Kagan , who was confirmed on August 5, 2010. Both are members of the court's liberal wing.

On May 1, 2011, Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, was killed during a Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan. This was a major victory for Obama, winning him praise across party lines. "The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda," Obama said in a public address to the nation. "Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people."

2012 Reelection

Obama launched his campaign for reelection in 2011. His main challenger was Republican Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts. To make use of growing social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the Obama campaign hired a team of tech workers to build digital campaign tools. The election centered on domestic issues, including health care and Social Security, and in many ways was a referendum on the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession. In November 2012, Obama defeated Romney with 332 electoral votes and 51.1% of the popular vote.   Obama called the victory a vote for "action, not politics as usual," and promised to work on bipartisan proposals to improve the American economy.

Second Term

Sonya N. Hebert / The White House

During his second term as president, Obama focused on new challenges facing the country. In 2013, he organized a group to begin negotiations with Iran. An agreement was reached in 2015 in which the United States would lift sanctions and steps would be taken to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, Obama signed a series of executive orders designed to reduce gun violence. He also voiced support for more comprehensive background checks and a ban on assault weapons. In a press conference at the White House, Obama said, "If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there is even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try."

In June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that marriage equality is protected under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This was a major milestone in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. Obama called the ruling a "victory for America."  

In July 2013, Obama announced that the United States had negotiated plans to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba. The following year, he became the first American president to visit the country since Calvin Coolidge did so in 1928. The shift in U.S.-Cuba relations—dubbed the Cuban thaw—was met with approval by many political leaders around the world.

Obama also had a number of accomplishments in climate change and environmentalism in general. The Environmental Defense Fund noted his top accomplishments, stating that Obama:

• Made progress on the national climate: "His Clean Power Plan was the first-ever national limit on carbon pollution from its largest source," the EDF stated.
• Completed an international climate agreement: "(His) work with China led to a long-sought global agreement among 195 nations to reduce climate pollution," according to the EDF.
• Mandated cleaner cars and trucks: "Obama’s EPA moved on in his second term to tackling truck emissions, reining in methane leaks from the oil and gas industry and updating energy efficiency standards for home appliances," Marianne Lavelle wrote in a 2016 article published on the website Inside Climate News.

Additionally, the EDF noted, Obama mandated pollution limits on power plants, made clean-energy investments (such as in wind and solar power technology and companies); signed "the first major environmental law in two decades, passed with bipartisan support, fixing our broken chemical safety system;" established systems to increase sustainable agriculture, western water, and protect endangered species; implemented laws that reduced overfishing and led to a rebound of fisheries in U.S. waters; and designated 19 national monuments—"more than any of his predecessors"—thus preserving "260 million acres for future generations."

Facing Racism

In A Promised Land , a 768-page autobiography (the first volume in a planned two-volume set) published in November 2020 and covering his early years through most of his first term as president, Obama wrote surprisingly little about the racism he personally faced growing up and during his political career—except as it was experienced by Michelle and his daughters. But, reflecting on his experiences as a young man, Obama wrote that at one point in his presidency he reflected on:

"The multiple occasions when I'd been asked for my student ID while walking to the library on (Columbia University's) campus, something that never seemed to happen to my white classmates. The unmerited traffic stops while visiting certain 'nice' Chicago neighborhoods. Being followed around by department store security guards while doing my Christmas shopping. The sound of car locks clicking as I walked across the street, dressed in a suit and tie, in the middle of the day.

"Moments like these were routine among Black friends, acquaintances, guys in the barbershop. If you were poor, or working-class, or lived in a rough neighborhood, or didn't properly signify being a respectable Negro, the stories were usually worse."

Just a few of countless examples of racism that Obama faced over the years include:

The birther debate: Obama was dogged throughout his presidency by rumors that he was not an American by birth. Indeed, Donald Trump boosted his own rise to power by fueling this discredited rumor. The “birthers”—as the people spreading this rumor are known—say that he was born in Kenya. Although Obama’s mother was a White American and his father was a Black Kenyan national, his parents met and married in the United States, which is why the birther conspiracy has been deemed equal parts silly and racist.

Political caricatures: Before and after his presidential election, Obama was depicted as subhuman in graphics, email, and posters. He was portrayed as a shoeshine man, an Islamic terrorist, and a chimp, to name a few. The image of his altered face has been shown on a product called Obama Waffles in the manner of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.

The “Obama is a Muslim” conspiracy: Much like the birther debate, the debate over whether Obama is a practicing Muslim appears to be racially tinged. While the president did spend some of his youth in the predominantly Muslim country of Indonesia, there’s no evidence that he has practiced Islam. In fact, Obama has said that neither his mother nor his father was particularly religious.

The racist tropes morphed into concerns over potential threats of physical violence and even assassination when Obama ran for president in 2008. "There were concerns about his security that were very real and very dark," David M. Axelrod, chief strategist for Obama's presidential campaigns said, referring to the increased racism and threats Obama faced after he won the Iowa Caucus in 2008 and become the frontrunner for the 2008 presidential nomination.

In the first installment of a television documentary series called "First Ladies," which covered the experiences of Michelle Obama, CNN noted that Obama and his family were "given a security detail earlier than any other presidential candidate in history." In that same segment, Van Jones, a CNN political commentator, stated:

"There was a resignation in the Black community, that you cannot rise up without being chopped down... Medgar Evers , Malcolm X, Dr. (Martin Luther) King (Jr.) , if you come from the Black community, almost every hero you read about was killed."

And, it wasn't only Barack who came under attack. After Michelle began to campaign for her husband, she had to withstand withering racist tropes—along with Barack. After the couple did a fist bump during one campaign stop, a number of people in the media, according to CNN, began to call the couple "jihadists," a derogatory term for a Muslim who advocates for or participates in a holy war waged on behalf of Islam. One television network began to refer to Michelle as Barack Obama's "baby mama," according to the CNN report. Marcia Chatelain, an associate professor at Georgetown University, noted:

"Michelle Obama was met with every single stereotype about African-American women magnified by a million."

According to the CNN report, and Michelle Obama, herself, in her autobiography, "Becoming," many people and those in the media began to use the "easy trope of the angry Black woman" to try to humiliate her. As Michelle Obama wrote about her experience on the campaign trail and after becoming first lady:

"I've been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an 'angry black woman.' I've wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it 'angry' or 'black' or 'woman?'"

And the family only suffered more racism and threats once Obama was president. As Obama told NPR in 2015 referring to the racism he faced once he held the nation's highest office:

"If you are referring to specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc., which unfortunately is pretty far out there and gets some traction in certain pockets of the Republican Party, and that have been articulated by some of their elected officials, what I’d say there is that that’s probably pretty specific to me and who I am and my background, and that in some ways I may represent change that worries them."

Michelle Obama was more direct in describing the intense, daily onslaught of racism and threats the family faced during Barack's presidency. Michelle, and Barack in his biography "A Promised Land," talked about the sometimes daily threats and racist insults the family experienced, but Michelle was a particular target, singled out for insults. The Guardian , a British newspaper, reported in 2017 on what Michelle Obama told a crowd of 8,500:

"Asked which of the falling glass shards cut the deepest, she said: 'The ones that intended to cut,' referencing an incident in which a West Virginia county employee called her an 'ape in heels,' as well as people not taking her seriously because of her colour. 'Knowing that after eight years of working really hard for this country, there are still people who won’t see me for what I am because of my skin colour.'”

Key Speeches

Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0

Obama gave a number of important speeches during his two terms as president, Mark Greenberg and David M. Tait reprinted some of the key speeches, in the book, "Obama: The Historic Presidency of Barack Obama: 2,920 Days":

Victory speech: Obama told a crowd in Grant Park In Chicago on November 4, 2008, during his election night victory speech: "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible...tonight is your answer."

Inaugural address: Obama told a record 1.8 million people gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2009: "(O)ur patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth."

On the death of Osama bin Laden: Obama announced bin Laden's death at the White House on May 3, 2011, stating: "On September 11, 2001, in our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood....On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family." Obama also announced: "Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against (a) compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (where bin Laden was living)....After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body."

On marriage equality: Obama spoke in the White House rose garden on July 26, 2015, stating: "This morning, the Supreme Court recognized that the Constitution guarantees marriage equality." On the POTUS Twitter account, Obama added; "Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like everyone else."

On the Affordable Care Act: Obama addressed a crowd at Miami Dade College on October 20, 2016, six years after the passage of the act, telling listeners, "...never in American history has the uninsured rate been lower than it is today....It's dropped among women, among Latinos and African Americans, (and in) every other demographic group. It's worked."

On climate change: In a speech Obama gave at Georgetown University in June 2013, the president declared: "I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing. And that’s why, today, I'm announcing a new national climate action plan, and I'm here to enlist your generation's help in keeping the United States of America a leader—a global leader—in the fight against climate change. This plan builds on the progress that we've already made. Last year, I took office—the year that I took office, my administration pledged to reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions by about 17 percent from their 2005 levels by the end of this decade. And we rolled up our sleeves and we got to work. We doubled the electricity we generated from wind and the sun. We doubled the mileage our cars will get on a gallon of gas by the middle of the next decade."

On the Shoulders of Others

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Obama is the first Black man to not only be nominated by a major political party but also to win the presidency of the United States. Though Obama was the first to win the office, there were many other notable Black men, and women, who sought the office. US News & World Report compiled this list of just a few of the contenders:

Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman ever elected to the  U.S. Congress and represented the 12th congressional District of New York for seven terms. She ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972, becoming the first Black person and the first Black woman to run for the office on a major party ticket, as well as the first woman to win delegates for a presidential nomination by a major party.

Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for president in the Democratic primary in 1984, becoming the second Black person to do so (after Chisholm), winning one-fourth of the votes and one-eighth of the convention delegates before losing the nomination to Walter Mondale. Jackson ran again in 1988 ran again, receiving 1,218 delegate votes but lost the nomination to Michael Dukakis. Though unsuccessful, Jackson's two presidential campaigns laid the groundwork for Obama to become president two decades later.

Lenora Fulani  "ran as an independent (in 1988) and was the first Black woman to appear on presidential ballots in all 50 states. She also ran in 1992," US News noted.

Alan Keyes "served in the (Ronald) Reagan administration (and) campaigned for the Republican nomination in 1996 and 2000," according to US News , adding that he "also lost to Barack Obama in their race for a Senate seat in 2004."

Carol Moseley Braun, a U.S. senator, "briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004," US News wrote.

Rev. Al Sharpton , a "New York-based activist campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination" in 2004, US News reported.

Additionally, Frederick Douglass , a North American 19th-century Black activist and advocate for women's rights, ran for president in 1872 on the Equal Rights Party ticket.

Obama, in his run, campaigned as an agent of change. It may be too early to fully discuss Obama's legacy as of January 2021—more than four years after he left office. Elaine C. Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank based in Washington, D.C., was not glowing in her review of Obama, published in 2018:

"It becomes clearer every day that Barack Obama, a historic president, presided over a somewhat less than historic presidency. With only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare)—and a fragile one at that—the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions."  

But historians note that the very fact that Obama was the first Black man to hold the office of president of the United States, was a huge door-opener for the country. H.W. Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, stated:

"The single undeniable aspect of Obama’s legacy is that he demonstrated that a Black man can become president of the United States. This accomplishment will inform the first line in his obituary and will earn him assured mention in every American history textbook written from now to eternity."  

However, there were negative, or unanticipated, consequences of Obama's election as the first Black U.S. president. Several studies have shown that as a result of Obama's election the public's perception of racism in the U.S. dropped, which, in turn, may have made it more difficult to approve funding or gain support for much-needed social programs. A study published in May 2009 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found:

"Americans may also use Obama’s victory as a justification for further legitimizing the current status hierarchy and for blaming Black Americans for their disadvantaged position in society....These justifications may result in the failure to examine structural aspects of society that lead to profound disadvantages for minorities (e.g., failing schools in predominately minority neighborhoods)."

A similar study, published in Public Opinion Quarterly , in May 2011, stated:

"A representative panel study of Americans interviewed immediately before and after the (2008) election reveals a roughly 10 percent decline in perceptions of racial discrimination. About one quarter of respondents revised their perceptions of discrimination downward."

Indeed, in the area of race in the United States, Obama has faced criticism that he did not do as much as he should, or could, have. Michelle Alexander in "The New Jim Crow, 10th Anniversary Edition," published in January 2020, said that Obama was:

"...a man who embraced the rhetoric (though not the politics) of the Civil Rights movement.... (and) it sometimes appeared that Obama was reluctant to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the structural changes required to address police violence and the prevailing systems of racial and social control."

Alexander noted that while Obama was the first sitting president to visit a federal prison and "oversee a drop in the federal prison population" (which she said is disproportionately represented by Black people, particularly Black men), he greatly increased deportations of undocumented immigrants and his administration oversaw a large expansion of facilities to detain these immigrants.

In response to these criticisms, Obama acknowledged the need for reforms in the criminal justice system and on racial equality in general. He told NPR's Steve Inskeep in 2016:

 "I—what I would say is that the Black Lives Matter movement has been hugely important in getting all of America to—to see the challenges in the criminal justice system differently. And I could not be prouder of the activism that has been involved. And it's making a difference."

But in terms of his own legacy on these issues, Obama argued the importance of understanding political realities when pushing for change:

"I'm constantly reminding young people, who are full of passion, that I want them to keep their passion, but they've got to gird for the fact that it takes a long time to get stuff done in this democracy."

Other historians note that Obama "brought stability to the economy, to the job market, to the housing market, to the auto industry and to the banks," as Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian and author of bestselling biographies, noted in an article in Time magazine.   Kearns also said that Obama brought "tremendous progress" to the LGBTQ+ community, and helped initiate an era of cultural change—which is a major legacy in and of itself.

Additional References

• Alexander, Michelle.  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition . The New Press, 2020.
• “ Barack Obama - Key Events .”  Miller Center , 8 July 2020.
• Butterfield, Fox. “ First Black Elected to Head Harvard's Law Review .”  The New York Times , The New York Times, 6 Feb. 1990.
• Gaby, Keith. “ Ready to Defend Obamas Environmental Legacy? Top 10 Accomplishments to Focus On .”  Environmental Defense Fund , 12 Jan. 2017.
• Kaiser, Cheryl R., et al. “ The Ironic Consequences of Obama's Election: Decreased Support for Social Justice .”  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , Academic Press, 1 Feb. 2009.
• Lavelle, Marianne. “ 2016: Obama's Climate Legacy Marked by Triumphs and Lost Opportunities .”  Inside Climate News , 26 Dec. 2016.
• "Michelle Obama." First Ladies, Robin Wright Narrator, Season 1, Episode 1, CNN, 4 October 2020.
• Montgomery, Alicia. “ President Obama Defends His Record On Race .”  NPR , NPR, 1 July 2016.
• Obama, Barack. A Promised Land . Penguin Books Ltd, 2020.
• Obama, Barack. "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." Canongate, 2016.
• Obama, Michelle. "Becoming." Crown Publishing Group, 2018.
• “ Remarks by the President on Climate Change .” National Archives and Records Administration.
• Remnick, David. "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama." Vintage Books, 2011.
• Samuel, Terence. “ The Racist Backlash Obama Has Faced during His Presidency .”  The Washington Post , 22 April 2016.
• Taylor, Jessica. “ WATCH: Obama Says Trump Exploiting Anger, Fear Among Blue-Collar Men .”  NPR , NPR, 21 Dec. 2015.
• Valentino, Nicholas A., and Ted Brader. “ Sword's Other Edge: Perceptions of Discrimination and Racial Policy Opinion after Obama .”  OUP Academic , Oxford University Press, 4 May 2011.

“ Voting America .”  Presidential Elections 1972 - 2008 , dsl.richmond.edu.

“ Osama Bin Laden Dead .”  National Archives and Records Administration.

Glass, Andrew. “ Obama Handily Wins a Second Term: Nov. 6, 2012 .”  POLITICO , 6 Nov. 2015.

“Remarks by the President on the Supreme Court Decision on Marriage Equality.”  National Archives and Records Administration , 26 June 2015.

Greenberg, Mark and Tait, David M.  Obama: the Historic Presidency of Barack Obama - 2,920 Days . Sterling Publishing Co., 2019

Kamarck, Elaine. “ The Fragile Legacy of Barack Obama .”  Brookings , Brookings, 6 Apr. 2018.

Staff, TIME. “ President Barack Obamas Legacy: 10 Historians Weigh In .”  Time , Time, 20 Jan. 201.

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U.S. Presidents / Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Campaign Speech

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States—becoming the first African American to serve in that office—on January 20, 2009.

The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met and married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in 1992. Their two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha), were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996 and served there for eight years. In 2004, he was elected by a record majority to the US Senate from Illinois and, in February 2007, announced his candidacy for president. After winning a closely fought contest against New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee for president, in the general election.

Life In Depth Essays

• Life in Brief
• Life Before the Presidency
• Campaigns and Elections
• Domestic Affairs
• Foreign Affairs
• Family Life
• Impact and Legacy

Chicago Style

Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. “Barack Obama.” Accessed April 09, 2024. https://millercenter.org/president/obama.

Professor of Political Science

Michael Nelson

Professor Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College, a senior fellow of the Miller Center, and the senior contributing editor and book editor of the Cook Political Report. He is the author of multiple books on American politics and government.

• Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Gov…
• The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014
• 42: Inside the Presidency of Bill Clinton
• How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovati…

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Barack Obama Biography

Barack Obama

After a historic and bruising 22-monthlong campaign, Sen. Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Nov. 4, 2008. He prevailed over Sen. John McCain in what was probably the most pivotal U.S. election since World War II. He took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, and became the first Black U.S. president.

Four years later, on Nov. 6, 2012, Obama was re-elected, narrowly defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney . Obama prevailed in both the electoral college (303 to 206) and the popular vote (50% to 48%), buoyed largely by taking several crucial battle states, including Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Obama's First Term

On his second day in office in January 2009, President Barack Obama signed executive orders to suspend military tribunals of terror suspects, close all secret prisons and detention camps run by the CIA—including the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison—and ban coercive interrogation methods. He, however, did not rule out the use of tribunals, saying he would review the Bush administration's policies on handling detainees. In March 2011, Obama reversed course on two fronts, allowing military tribunals to move forward at Guantanamo, thus admitting that the prison will remain open for the foreseeable future. His decision followed legislation passed in 2010 that prevents prisoners from being transferred from the prison to the U.S. for trial.

Obama's orders also said that the C.I.A. can only use the 19 interrogation methods mentioned in the Army Field Manual. The move ended Bush's policy of allowing the CIA to use methods that were not permitted by the military. "We believe we can abide by a rule that says we don't torture, but we can effectively obtain the intelligence we need," Obama said.

In October 2009, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Obama responded to the honor with surprise and humility, saying that the award was a "call to action" to engage other nations around the world to promote peace. In his acceptance speech in December, Obama acknowledged the apparent irony that he was given a prize for peace while leading a country fighting in two wars, but claimed that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are both necessary and just. He agreed, however, that he had a lot of work ahead of him to improve the lives of Americans and the others around the world.

2008 Campaign Battle

By taking advantage of the Internet and the power of text messaging on mobile phones, Obama ran an innovative campaign that appealed to young voters. Shunning public financing for his election, Obama raised an unprecedented amount of money, much of it from small donors. Prior to the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominated the campaign. Obama presented himself as the candidate for change and stressed that a McCain presidency would mirror the policies of the Bush administration.

As a political newcomer, Obama faced an uphill battle in convincing voters that he would be ready to lead the nation. Indeed, throughout the long and often bitter campaign for the Democratic nomination, he and Sen. Hillary Clinton ran neck-and-neck in the primaries and caucuses. Obama and Clinton competed fiercely for the support of working-class voters, and each candidate tried to paint the other as elitist. Obama met sharp criticism for his association with his former pastor, the combative and controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama denounced Wright after several of his divisive sermons popped up in the media. Wright's charged statements prompted Obama to address the race issue, and he earned wide praise for his speech on race relations, "A More Perfect Union."

Running as the candidate of change, Obama made hope the center of his campaign. His platform focused on advocating for working families and poor communities, education, caring for the environment, and ethics reform.

Formative Years

Obama was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and American mother. His father was raised in a small village in Kenya where he herded goats until he earned a scholarship to study in America. After his parents divorced, Obama's Harvard-educated father then returned to Kenya, where he worked in the economics ministry. Obama was raised by his mother in both Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia. He later moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where he earned his undergraduate degree.

Obama moved to Chicago after college and worked extensively in the inner city to improve living conditions and reduce the unemployment rate in high-crime neighborhoods. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduated magna cum laude, and served as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. After receiving his degree from Harvard Law School, he returned to Chicago and practiced as a civil rights lawyer.

Personal Life

Obama is married to Michelle Obama , a Chicago native who also graduated from Harvard Law School. Barack and Michelle met in Chicago, where they both worked for the law firm Sidley and Austin. Michelle worked in corporate law for three years before pursuing a career in public service. She has worked for the city of Chicago, and she co-founded Public Allies, which helps young adults acquire skills to work in the public sector. In 2005 she was appointed vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Barack and Michelle have two daughters, Malia Ann and Sasha.

Political Career

His advocacy work on the local level in Chicago led to a run for the Illinois State Senate. Obama served for four years as a state senator and used his position to create programs such as the state Earned Income Tax Credit that provided more than $100 million in tax cuts to families over three years. He also generated an expansion in early childhood education and worked to pass legislation that requires all interrogations and confessions in capital cases to be videotaped.

Obama's eloquent keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention earned him wide praise him and cemented his reputation as one of the party's freshest and most inspirational new faces. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, winning with 70% of the vote against the conservative Black Republican, Alan Keyes. Obama became the only African-American serving in the U.S. Senate (and the fifth in U.S. history). Obama's idealism, commitment to civil rights, and telegenic good looks generated enormous media attention for his Senate campaign. He worked with Republicans on issues such as weapons control and ethics reform, yet voted with other Democrats against President Bush's surge of 20,000 troops to Iraq and in favor of a resolution that required combat troops to be fully withdrawn by March 2008.

He served on the Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; the Foreign Relations Committee; the Veteran's Affairs Committee; and the Environment and Public Works Committee.

2008 Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech

Obama accepted the Democratic presidential nomination before some 83,000 people at Invesco Field rather than the convention hall in Denver. His acceptance coincided with the 45th anniversary of the March on Washington, during which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his pivotal "I Have a Dream" speech. In his speech, Obama attacked John McCain on several fronts, including national security and his support for many of the policies of the Bush administration, and outlined his plans for the economy, the environment, and health care. Calling McCain out of touch with the economic woes of working-class America, Obama said, "It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it."

Obama's Presidency

Obama took office in the midst of a severe recession. His first major piece of legislative was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion spending bill, or "stimulus package," designed to create jobs and reignite the economy. Soon to follow were executive orders that reversed Bush's policies on stem cell research and interrogation techniques for enemy detainees.

In 2009, Obama pushed Congress to pass legislation on health care reform in the United States. Health care reform was a chief legislative goal and a major campaign promise. On March 21, 2010, after months of debate, the House passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the Senate voted in favor of the legislation in December 2009). Obama signed the bill into law two days later. In June 2012, the Supreme Court upheld most of President Barack Obama's healthcare law, including the individual mandate, which requires that most Americans buy health insurance or pay a fee. The individual mandate was the centerpiece of the law. The court ruled, 5-4, that the individual mandate is constitutional under Congress's taxing authority. The Court also upheld the expansion of Medicaid, the government's health insurance program for low-income Americans, but limited the provision, saying states will not necessarily lose their funding if they choose not to expand the program. It was one of the most anticipated rulings in recent history and a major victory for Obama in an election year.

In the November 2010 midterm election, Democrats lost 63 seats, therefore, losing control of the House of Representatives. In a speech about the election outcome, Obama called the loss "humbling" and a "shellacking" and blamed it on the slow economic recovery. The following summer, Congress became gridlocked in a battle over whether to raise the debt ceiling, bringing the government to the brink of default. Because of the gridlock, Standard & Poor's downgraded the nation's credit rating for the first time in history. By the fall of 2012, there were signs that the recovery from the 2008 recession had stalled with job growth continuing to come up short, the unemployment rate hovering at 8%, and the stock market experiencing ups and downs.

On social issues, Obama won praise from the gay community and its supporters. In December 2010, he signed the repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell military policy, and in May 2012 he came out in support of gay marriage.

Bin Laden Killed

Perhaps the biggest triumph of Obama's presidency came on May 2, 2011, when Navy SEALS and and CIA operatives shot and killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The operation was a risky one for Obama; despite months of intelligence work leading up to the raid, there was no guarantee bin Laden would be in the compound. The risk paid off when the world's most wanted terrorist was finally killed nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A month after bin Laden was killed, Obama announced that the U.S. had largely achieved its goals in Afghanistan and that time had come to start withdrawing troops and begin "to focus on nation-building here at home." He said about 10,000 of the 30,000 troops deployed in 2009 as part of the surge would leave the country. In February 2012, the Obama administration announced that the military would end its combat role in Afghanistan by the middle of 2013 and shift toward an "advise and assist" capacity.

On December 15, 2011, Obama declared that the U.S.-led war in Iraq had officially ended. The war, launched in March 2003, lasted nearly nine years, killed more than 4,440 U.S. troops, and cost about $1 trillion.

Re-election Campaign

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney secured the Republican presidential nomination and has based his campaign on the economy, saying that Obama had failed to lift the economy out of turmoil and that the American people are no better off than they were four years ago. Obama is running on his accomplishments and is warning voters that Romney is weak on foreign policy and that a Romney administration would protect the rich at the expense of the middle and working classes. Social issues have also figured prominently in the campaign. In choosing Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has veered right on abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration, hoping to win the support of the party's conservative base.

The race has shaped up to be one of the closest in recent history, with the election being decided in just a few dozen districts.

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Barack Obama

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he became the first African American to hold the office. Obama faced major challenges during his two-term tenure in office. His primary policy achievements included health care reform, economic stimulus, banking reform and consumer protections, and a repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy preventing lesbian and gay Americans from serving openly in the military.

Obama’s father, Barack Sr., a Kenyan economist, met his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, when both were students in Hawaii, where Barack was born on August 4, 1961. They later divorced, and Barack’s mother married a man from Indonesia, where he spent his early childhood. Before fifth grade, he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents and attend a private prep school on scholarship. In his memoir Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama describes the complexities of discovering his identity in adolescence.

After two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he transferred to Columbia University, where he studied political science and international relations. Following graduation in 1983, Obama worked in New York City, then became a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, coordinating with churches to improve housing conditions and create job-training programs in a community hit hard by steel mill closures. In 1988, he went to Harvard Law School, where he attracted national attention as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review . Returning to Chicago, he joined a small law firm specializing in civil rights.

In 1992, Obama married Michelle Robinson, a lawyer who had also excelled at Harvard Law. Their daughters, Malia and Sasha, were born in 1998 and 2001. Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, and then to the U.S. Senate in 2004. At the Democratic National Convention that summer, he delivered an acclaimed keynote address. In 2008, after winning the Democratic nomination after a hard-fought primary race with Hillary Clinton, he defeated Arizona Senator John McCain by 365 to 173 electoral votes in the general election.

As an incoming president, Obama faced many challenges including the 2008 financial crisis, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the continuing global war on terrorism. Inaugurated before an estimated crowd of 1.8 million people, Obama proposed unprecedented federal spending to revive the economy and a renewal of America’s stature in the world.

During his first term he signed three signature bills: economic stimulus, health care reform, and legislation reforming the nation’s financial institutions. Obama also pressed for a fair pay act for women and new safeguards for consumer protection. In 2009, Obama became the fourth president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. However, in the 2010 mid-term elections, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, thus affecting Obama’s future domestic policy agenda.

In 2012, he was reelected over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney by 332 to 206 electoral votes. The Middle East remained a key foreign policy challenge. Obama directed the military and intelligence operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, the head of Al-Qaeda and the terrorist responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. However, a new self-proclaimed Islamic State arose during a civil war in Syria and began inciting terrorist attacks. Obama sought to manage a hostile Iran with a treaty that hindered its development of nuclear weapons. The Obama administration also adopted the Paris Climate Agreement signed by 174 states and the European Union in 2015 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming.

In the last year of his second term, Obama spoke at two events that clearly moved him—the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery and the dedication of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Our union is not yet perfect, but we are getting closer,” he said in Selma. “And that’s why we celebrate,” he told those attending the museum opening in Washington, “mindful that our work is not yet done.”

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Barack obama.

44th president of the United States

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii , where he was raised by his mother and her parents. He was the first president born there and the first to be born after the country had 50 states. 

Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, California , before transferring to New York ’s Columbia University. He took a break from school to volunteer in Chicago, Illinois, before earning a law degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts . After winning election to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, Obama won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004 and then the presidency in 2008.

MAKING HISTORY

A Democrat, Obama became the first African American to run for president on a major political party’s ticket. He then went on to become the first African American to be elected president of the United States. (His white mother was from Kansas ; his black father from Kenya , a country in Africa.) He took office during the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression during the 1930s, when one-fourth of all workers were unemployed and people traveled the country looking for food and work. Many called the new crisis the Great Recession.

With help from the Democrat-controlled Congress, Obama worked to improve the economy and ultimately added jobs for 75 straight months, the longest streak in American history. But some parts of the country still struggled with poverty, and the number of people who didn’t make enough money to live comfortably reached an all-time high in 2010. Anger spread when people felt left behind. The Democrats soon lost control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and Obama struggled to pass legislation.

PRIORITIZING HEALTH CARE

Obama’s biggest goal as president was to help all citizens afford health care. At the time, almost 50 million Americans didn’t have health insurance, which meant that some families didn’t have the money to go to the doctor. Obama wanted to change that.

Obama called his health care plan the Affordable Care Act (ACA); it later became nicknamed Obamacare. Although Republicans opposed the plan, saying it was too expensive for the government to fund, it was signed into law in 2010. But within seven minutes of the act’s passage, 13 states sued the federal government for forcing individuals to buy insurance. (Under the   ACA, most people were required to have health insurance or they’d have to pay a penalty.) The states claimed the new act was unconstitutional, meaning Obama couldn’t make the states put it into action.

The ACA took effect in 2014 after the Supreme Court had eventually declared it constitutional. The act guaranteed access to health care options for all Americans who didn’t get it through their jobs. But Republicans, who wanted less government involvement in people’s lives, still didn’t agree with the act. And some people who had the insurance said it was just as expensive, or more expensive, than their previous plans which were no longer available to them. The Affordable Care Act remains controversial today, with many people fighting against it.

FIGHTING TERRORISM

Although the economy continued to improve in the United States, Obama faced challenges in other countries. The United States was fighting two wars in the Middle Eastern countries of Afghanistan and Iraq . President George W. Bush had sent troops to Afghanistan after the terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. , on September 11, 2001. Bush hoped to capture those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, including al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Bush also sent troops to Iraq in 2003, after rumors that the country was hiding dangerous weapons that the president wanted to find and destroy.

Bush's decision to attack these countries was met with general support at first, but by the time Obama became president, public opinion had changed. Some 7,000 American soldiers had died at this point, with an additional 50,000 more wounded. Many Americans wanted these wars to be over. Obama’s administration experienced a victory on May 1, 2011, when a group of Navy SEALs (a special military group) acted on Obama’s command to strike at a house where bin Laden was hiding. His death during the raid was a blow to al Qaeda and gave some U.S. citizens hope that progress was being made in the fight against terrorism.

By the end of 2011, Obama had withdrawn all combat troops from Iraq. But U.S. troops were still fighting in Afghanistan by the end of his two terms, something many people disagreed with. The rise of another terrorist group in the region, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), continued the war against terrorism throughout Obama’s presidency.

OPENING DOORS

Despite wars overseas, Obama reached out to other nations in hopes of maintaining peace. In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cut ties with the island nation of Cuba because of its support for the communist Soviet Union (now Russia ). Obama tried to ease those tensions by re-opening an embassy there in 2015. He also went to Hiroshima, Japan , where the United States dropped a nuclear bomb in 1945 during World War II. He was the first sitting president to visit the city since that event. For his peace efforts, in 2009 he became the fourth president to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

SUPREME COURT SHAKE-UP

During the first two years of Obama’s presidency, he appointed two new justices to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States. Obama replaced the retiring male justices with women: Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the first person of Latino heritage on the high court. For the first time, the court had three female justices. Obama’s new additions to the Court were part of several historic decisions, including its marriage equality ruling on June 26, 2015. The decision legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, Obama’s final year of office, gave him another opportunity to add a new justice. But his Republican opponents worried that he would appoint someone who would change how the court made decisions. They declined to consider Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, saying that it was an election year. (No Supreme Court nominee had been denied a hearing during an election year before this.) The seat remained empty through the end of Obama’s presidency, the longest in Supreme Court history. The remaining eight justices continued to work, but important matters were left unresolved when they deadlocked with 4–4 votes.

LASTING LEGACY

Obama left office after two terms in January 2017 with a 60 percent approval rating, higher than most presidents at the end of their presidency. He remained in Washington, D.C., where he and his wife, Michelle, started the Obama Foundation to provide mentoring and education to kids, and to award scholarships to college students.

Obama made history by being the first African American to win the presidency. As a recent president, however, his legacy is still being determined. What future presidents do with Obama's policies and how involved Obama gets in world politics will help shape how his presidency is perceived in the future.

• Obama was sworn into office with the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used 148 years earlier. No other president had used it since Lincoln.

• Obama doesn’t like ice cream. He blames it on a job he had at an ice-cream shop as a teenager.

• A comic book collector, Obama's favorite comic character is Spider-Man.

From the Nat Geo Kids books  Our Country's Presidents  by Ann Bausum and  Weird But True Know-It-All: U.S. Presidents by Brianna Dumont, revised for digital by Avery Hurt

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History & grounds, barack obama.

Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story -- values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African—American president of the  Harvard Law Review . Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia, 14, and Sasha, 11.

Learn more about Barack Obama's spouse, Michelle Obama .

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Presidents assemble: Obama can reach parts of Democratic base Biden can’t

Biden’s charismatic former boss and rival appeared in a show of unity alongside Bill Clinton, who despite a problematic legacy still has a campaign role to play too

F or once, showbusiness royalty – Queen Latifah, Lizzo, Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo, Lea Michele and Mindy Kaling – was not the main attraction. Instead it was a trio of US presidents that enticed people to pay up to half a million dollars for New York’s hottest ticket.

Last month Joe Biden was joined onstage by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at a sold-out Radio City Music Hall. At more than $26m, it was the most successful political fundraising event in history . It was also an “Avengers assemble” moment for Democrats seeking to bury their differences ahead of November’s presidential election.

“Last night showed our sceptics, as well as our supporters – it showed the press; it showed everyone – that we are united. We’re a united party,” the US president said later , hinting at the contrast with his opponent, Donald Trump, who is shunned by his only living Republican predecessor, George W Bush, and even his own vice-president, Mike Pence.

But the spectacle of three living Democratic presidents (the fourth, Jimmy Carter, is 99 and in hospice care) joining forces masked some complex personal dynamics in a White House race where 81-year-old Biden is likely to need all the help that he can get.

Obama, 62, remains the Democratic party’s biggest star with books, media appearances, civil society work, plans for a presidential library and campaign speeches each electoral cycle. Clinton, 77, by contrast, saw his stock plummet when Democrats moved left on policy and embraced the #MeToo movement’s reckoning over sexual misconduct .

But analysts believe that both men could prove powerful surrogates for Biden as he seeks to emulate them by winning a second term. Tara Setmayer , a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “We’re going to see a lot more of President Obama during this election. He’s the best surrogate for President Biden for the constituencies that he needs to shore up: Black voters, young voters, the Democratic coalition.

“Bill Clinton still has an appeal in a certain constituency within the Democratic establishment, so they will use him where they think he’s best suited. If they didn’t think he had value, he would not have been on that stage.”

It is a team of former rivals. The three men were on a collision course during the Democratic presidential primary election in 2008. Biden and Obama sought the nomination, as did Clinton’s wife, Hillary. Obama came out on top then chose Biden as vice-president and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

As Obama’s two terms were ending and the 2016 election was approaching, he nudged Hillary Clinton to the forefront as his preferred successor and dissuaded Biden from running after Biden’s elder son died of cancer. Clinton lost to Trump, who lost to Biden in 2020. Obama privately helped clear a path for Biden to the Democratic nomination that year.

There have been notable splits between the presidents on key issues. Biden was unsuccessful in persuading Obama not to send more troops to Afghanistan in 2009. US forces remained in the country until 2021, when Biden withdrew them during his first year in office.

But at last month’s fundraiser , moderated by the late-night TV host Stephen Colbert, the pair were in lockstep. After Biden had painted a dire picture of the threat posed by Trump, it was Obama who highlighted the current president’s achievements, from record-breaking job growth to lower healthcare costs, from expanding college access to a historic investment in clean energy.

“It’s not just the negative case against the presumptive nominee on the other side,” Obama said. “It’s the positive case for somebody who’s done an outstanding job in the presidency.”

Pro-Palestinian protesters heckled the presidents’ conversation, underlining how the war in Gaza has become one of Biden’s biggest electoral vulnerabilities. When Obama was interrupted, he pushed back in a way that might have been awkward for the current president: “Here’s the thing: you can’t just talk and not listen because that’s part of democracy. Part of democracy is not just talking; it’s listening. That’s what the other side does.”

Obama’s exalted status among Democrats could give him a central role in get-out-the-vote efforts in the final weeks of the campaign. David Litt , one of his speechwriters at the White House, said: “President Obama has kind of become a cultural figure in a way that most presidents are not and so he has an ability to reach audiences and a credibility with audiences that might be sceptical of Biden right now, especially younger groups of people.”

He added: “To be able to have Barack Obama say Joe Biden has done a great job is just inherently more credible than Joe Biden saying Joe Biden’s done a great job. In the same way that if I tell you that I’m really good-looking, that’s not very convincing.”

Obama’s presence on the campaign trail will be a useful reminder of his signature healthcare law, known as Obamacare, which Trump narrowly failed to repeal and has vowed to attack again. His charisma and eloquence could have a downside, however, if he consistently overshadows Biden and throws his age into sharp relief.

Henry Olsen , a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “I don’t think they should share a stage. You want to have Obama as a surrogate; as a former president, he can draw attention on his own. You do not want to have the contrast of a young, fluidly moving, fluidly speaking Obama with the rather rigid-in-all-respects president of the United States.”

Like Carter before him, Clinton has spent years in a political wilderness of sorts. A crime bill he signed as president is widely blamed for fuelling a mass incarceration crisis, while his “third way” economic centrism and welfare reform are out of step with today’s progressive movement. A New York Times newspaper report on the 2018 midterm elections was headlined : No One Wants to Campaign With Bill Clinton Anymore.

His 1998 affair with Monica Lewinsky, then a 22-year-old White House intern, and other allegations of sexual misconduct have come under renewed scrutiny. Comments last month by Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville – blaming “too many preachy females” in the Democratic party – reinforced the view that the Clinton era belongs firmly in the 20th century.

But the 42nd president, who once styled himself as “the comeback kid”, has no intention of leaving the arena. On Sunday Clinton will lead the US presidential delegation to Rwanda to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the genocide. In November, just after the election, Clinton will publish a memoir about his post-presidential life.

And at last month’s fundraiser in New York, he relished the opportunity to praise Biden – “That’s the kind of president I want. Stay with what works” – and take a swipe at Trump’s economic record. “President Trump – let’s be honest – had a pretty good couple of years because he stole them from Barack Obama.”

Joshua Kendall , a presidential historian, was surprised by Clinton’s presence there. “The #MeToo allegations are pretty serious because it’s not just Monica Lewinsky but Juanita Broaddrick,” he said, referring to a woman who accused of Clinton of rape (Clinton has consistently denied all accusations of harassment and assault).

“There are also a couple of other allegations that are serious but it seems that people are a little bit sick of #MeToo and so Clinton has been recycled. The Democrats are just so focused on Trump that they feel like they can’t afford any sort of internal squabbles. That’s why Clinton is there. They just feel like they have to do everything they can to work together because polls are frightening.”

Biden, Clinton and Obama closed out the New York fundraiser by donning Biden’s trademark sunglasses as the president quipped: “Dark Brandon is real,” a nod to a meme featuring Biden with lasers for eyes. They are likely to mount another show of unity at the Democratic national convention in Chicago this summer.

John Zogby , an author and pollster, said: “Obama can fire up a crowd and Clinton does have a charisma factor, so it’s not bad having him on your team – as long as Hillary is not there and as long as Bill Clinton is the third man as opposed to the lead.”

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Michelle and Barack Obama's daughter Malia changes her name as she steps out of her parents' shadow

The former white house occupants share two daughters.

Michelle  and Barack Obama have one of the most famous surnames in the world – but their daughter, Malia , appears to want to distance herself from it as she forges her career. 

The 25-year-old is a budding filmmaker and showcased her short film, The Heart  – about the relationship between a mother and her son – at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah on January 18. Watch it below.

In what appears to be an attempt to distance herself from the nepo-baby stigma – her parents launched a production company, Higher Ground, in 2018 – the Harvard graduate has dropped 'Obama' from her last name in favor of a different stage moniker. 

During the Sundance Institute's Meet the Artist spotlight video, it was revealed that Malia is using her middle name as she was referred to as Malia Ann. 

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Malia is proving herself in the entertainment industry after interning on HBO's Girls  and at Harvey Weinstein's production company. 

She also worked as a staff writer on Donald Glover's Amazon Prime series Swarm , and he had nothing but good things to say about her work ethic. 

"Her writing style is great," he told Vanity Fair in 2022: "She's just like, an amazingly talented person. She's really focused, and she's working really hard." 

He added: "I feel like she’s just somebody who's gonna have really good things coming soon." 

Donald wasn't the only one who saw her talent either. His brother,  Steven Glover , who often collaborates with his sibling, had plenty of praise for Malia too. 

"Donald always says perspective is important," he revealed during the same interview. "And people with different perspectives are important for a writer's room. 

"And for sure, she definitely has a unique perspective on everything. So, we wanted to hear her stories and have her work with us. Listening to her stories and having her involved really gave us a lot of good ideas." 

Steven also joked that "we can't be easy on her just because she's the [former] president's daughter." 

Malia and Donald have maintained a close working relationship as The Heart  was one of the first projects produced by his company, Gilga. 

Speaking to GQ  about her film debut, he said: "The first thing we did was talk about the fact that she will only get to do this once. You're Obama's daughter. So, if you make a bad film, it will follow you around." 

The Heart  is Malia's first film to appear at Sundance after it was chosen to premiere in the acclaimed festival, which sees over 14,000 filmmakers submit their work but only around 100 are selected. 

Speaking about the project, Malia described it as "an odd little story, somewhat a fable, about a man grieving the death of his mother after she leaves him an unusual request". 

She continued: "The film is about lost objects and lonely people and forgiveness and regret, but I also think it works hard to uncover where tenderness and closeness can exist in those things." 

Malia added: "We hope it makes you feel a bit less lonely or at least reminds you not to forget about the people who are. 

"The folks who came together to make this film have my heart, pun intended!"

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Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations Retells the Obama Era

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Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, Great Expectations , follows a staffer working for a magnetic young black senator making a bid for the US presidency. It’s a book about the emptiness of political symbols and the comforts and dangers of blind faith.

Barack Obama speaks at a rally after winning primaries in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 12, 2008. (Bruce Bernstein / NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)

In 2007, the New Yorker staff writer Vinson Cunningham was in his early twenties, working as a tutor in Manhattan. These were exciting times for the liberal public sphere: the iPhone, Tumblr, and Nancy Pelosi had just made debuts, the latter as the first woman speaker of the House of Representatives. Through luck, or fate, or divine intervention, Cunningham’s tutoring connections drew him into the orbit of a charismatic black senator from Illinois making a bid for the presidency. Working on Barack Obama’s campaign, he called potential donors, collected checks, clutched a clipboard at the entrance to the apartments of the rich and famous — the kind of work that inspires and requires jaded cynicism. Cunningham has lent his own potted biography to the protagonist of his debut novel, Great Expectations . Like its namesake, this is a story about searching for identity, but race, religion, and political disillusionment in early 2000s America take the place of Charles Dickens’s class-inflected Victorian romance.

Great Expectations follows David Hammond, a black man, also in his early twenties, over the eighteen months he spends working for the senator’s campaign. One character jokes about the similarity between his and the name of the artist David Hammons, whose work has dealt ironically with symbols of race and power in the United States (“magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol,” he told the critic Kellie Jones in 1986). Cunningham’s novel, much like Hammons’s art, explores the hollowness and malleability of symbols. At its center is the unnamed senator, referred to throughout as simply “the candidate” but clearly more than inspired by Barack Obama.

When the novel opens, David is a twenty-two-year-old college dropout with a child he didn’t plan for and a whole lot of promise he’s afraid he has squandered. The campaign takes him into a world of BlackBerry phones and sensible heels, cocktail parties thrown by liberals with good tailoring and Park Avenue mansions. He has affairs, takes some drugs, has a brush with financial scandal. This is a bildungsroman for the West Wing generation.

Political machinations provide the skeleton of the novel, but the candidate barely figures. David moves from New York to New Hampshire, Los Angeles to Chicago, making recognizable stops in the months leading up to Obama/the candidate’s 2008 victory. The political world into which he has been thrust acts as the backdrop for a series of diaristic digressions on art, fatherhood, religion, and race. Pair this with the first-glance similarity to the author’s own life, the basis in real world events, and Cunningham’s novel might sound like yet another work of autofiction. But in interviews he has made clear that he rejects the collapse between author, narrator, and protagonist that occurs in the works of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, etc. Diversions from reality seem surface level at first — while Cornel West appears as himself, Ed Koch’s park commissioner Gordon Davis is renamed “Wilson Taylor” — but they are emblematic of the novel’s preoccupation with digging into a symbol to see what, if anything, lies beneath. David observes, “in the end they did treat [the candidate] like a sign, like something whose outward image was intrinsic to its identity.”

Like Cunningham at his age, David wants to be a writer. The people he meets through the campaign, and the spaces they occupy, provide fodder for his various ruminations. At one party in a publisher’s Brooklyn brownstone, he finds himself fixated on a Jenny Holzer artwork, words scrolling over an LED screen. “My interest in the visual arts,” David admits, “often came down to meaning, which, for me, mostly came down to words.” A Renoir painting, a schoolgirl’s drawing, a set of vintage photos from a secondhand market are each subjected to visual analysis, but David doesn’t look for meaning in the artworks themselves. Instead, his thoughts flow from image to his own experience. Renoir was Catholic, David is reminded of his Jesuit middle school; the drawing shows a lonely figure, David feels guilty about his relationship with his daughter; a man in a photo looks like Jean Toomer, David recounts a conversation about the effect the candidate might have on American politics of race.

It’s Beverly, the woman who got him the job in the first place, who points out that when everybody talks about how the candidate would “change race in America” what they mean is “he’ll change white people.” She’s one of several high-powered black professionals with whom David comes into contact in his new world, people who summer in Oak Bluffs or live in Hollywood mansions. Although he is never quite at ease among the big-money types, he watches them closely, “searching for a way to be.” Through David’s detailed observations — of the candidate’s “incredibly erect posture,” for example — we see him creating himself, assembling a collage of people to whom he relates.

The sketches of other characters are sparing, but precise enough that you would recognize them on a crowded subway platform. David’s tutee is “sweet and gangly, with an indecisive almost-Afro, ashy elbows, and a mouth crowded with braces and spit,” while Regina, a campaign-trail fling, is “tall and substantial, with dark, enthusiastic eyes, a negligible forehead, and a low hairline that sprouted handfuls of thick, near-black hair.” Elsewhere, Cunningham’s overreliance on rough-hewn adverbs — an abusive teacher whispers “hotly”; the handle of a steel toast rack gleams “lithely”; light comes “yellowly” from a lamp and “bluely” from open laptops — begins to grate. When a sidewalk is disrupted by “huge lividly fertile tree roots bursting sexually through the concrete,” the prose threatens to buckle under their weight.

But generally, Cunningham’s writing is elegant and evocative. In one passage, he produces the literary equivalent of high-definition television capturing a close-up of a politician’s sweaty pores. Here’s a moment from a sex scene between David and Regina:

She had thin, dry, protrusive lips, which she often pursed in the manner of the Buddha in certain sculptures. Each of my lips was as large as both of hers, and so she suctioned one at a time, drawing cool, inscrutable patterns with her tongue.

Cunningham’s intention is clearly to make us squirm, and he succeeds. But there is also something tender about the detail. When David arrives at her apartment, he observes a landscape of hair-clogged drains, dull razors, and a graveyard of discarded toothbrushes on the lip of the sink that he describes with a reverence usually reserved for religious relics. “I have always felt happy in spaces like these,” he muses, because their inhabitants “constitute a kind of priesthood.”

Religion, sprinkled over nearly every scene of Great Expectations , becomes so familiar that it almost feels inevitable that Regina happens to be getting baptized the day after their tryst. A building on the Upper East Side reminds David of a church, a bookfair talk of Sunday service. The campaign fieldworkers are, “together, John the Baptist, eating their locusts and honey, twigs caught in their dreadlocking hair,” spreading the gospel about Christ the candidate.

One of David’s memories of the church sermons of his youth is of a “constant stream of references, all pointing back to a languid, strolling exposition of the text via current events.” Cunningham — who, like his protagonist, was raised by a Bible study teacher and a church musician — has said he was taught to read in an exegetical way by finding correspondences between the Old and New Testaments. But when it comes to the candidate himself, connections seem to lead everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Looking back at the way Obama used his own faith to connect with Americans, at the way he treated his supporters, as David notices, “as congregants,” it’s no surprise he draws comparisons with a pastor. In a 2006 keynote speech at the Call to Renewal’s Building a Covenant for a New America conference, Obama warned, “if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.” This is faith as a rhetorical tool, as a kind of code through which personal experience takes on the appearance of something more universal. Cunningham’s repeated return to religion throughout the novel creates a parallel between a young man questioning his faith in god and growing sceptical of the promised land of the future politicians tend to preach.

By the end of the book, David has learned — from the candidate, from donors he’s become close to — “a language of signs.” He has lost the reverence he once held for the world of politics, seen behind the curtain and witnessed scurrying assistants, frantic fundraisers, and not much else. By the novel’s close, he has no capacity for admiration “now that I could interpret the symbols [the candidate] offered in such profusion.” When he arrives in Chicago for election day, David finds himself attracted to the “veiled God of my youth, if only because He still spoke words I couldn’t comprehend.”

Great Expectations asks what happens when what was once clouded in smoke comes clearly into view, and we discover that the symbols we had treated as synecdoche for something larger are in fact empty. Belief in hope and change alone can only get you so far.

Barack Obama’s net worth in 2024

Barack Obama is a politician and author who once served as the 44th president of the United States of America. He is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and was the brains behind several acts including Obamacare, Project Vote, etc. Let’s look at Barack Obama’s net worth in 2024.

What is Barack Obama’s net worth in 2024?: $70 million (estimate)

Barack Obama’s net worth in 2024 is $70 million. This is according to reputable outlets such as Celebrity Net Worth.

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. At a young age, Obama and his family lived in Jakarta. Here, he attended St. Francis of Assisi Elementary School before transferring to State Elementary School Menteng 01 and Calvert School. Afterward, Obama migrated back to Hawaii, where he continued his education at Punahou School.

In 1979, Obama completed and graduated from his high school education. For his efforts, Obama earned a scholarship to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles. During his third year, he transferred to Columbia University, where Obama eventually earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science, majoring in international relations.

Post university life

After graduating from university, Obama worked several jobs. He served as a financial researcher for Business International Corporation. In addition to this, Obama also had a stint as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Since then, Obama started to work for various foundations. He served as the director of the Developing Communities Project. According to sources , Obama received a starting salary of $12,000. Months later, the pay bumped up to $20,000. Three years later, he was raking in at least $35,000 in annual salary. Aside from working for the Developing Communities Project, Obama also worked as a consultant for the Gamaliel Foundation.

After working for various organizations, Obama decided to attend law school. Although he received a scholarship offer from Northwestern University, Obama opted to study at Harvard Law School. Here, Obama completed his law school education with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude .

Teaching at the University of Chicago Law School

Now a legitimate attorney after completing Harvard Law School, Obama decided to become a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School in 1992. Based on reports , Obama earned an annual salary of $32,144. In his first four years, Obama worked as a lecturer before being promoted to senior lecturer in his final years during his stint as a lecturer in the law school.

Working as a Civil Rights Attorney

While serving as a lecturer for the University of Chicago Law School, Obama plied his time by also serving as an associate for the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill, & Garland. According to Wall Street Journal , Obama was paid $165 per hour. Additional reports say Obama registered a total of 3,723 hours. This could mean that Obama earned at least $614K in his stint with the firm.

Illinois Senate

In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate, before becoming re-elected two years later and in 2002. Some of his notable works include becoming the chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee.  The Illinois Senate reportedly paid Obama an annual salary of $80,287. He worked in the Illinois Senate from 1996 to 2004.

U.S. Senate

Obama eventually resigned from his position in the Illinois Senate, which paved the way for his election to the U.S. Senate. This increased his annual salary to $165,000, based on sources . Some of his works as a senator include sponsoring the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, introducing the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act, introducing the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, etc.

U.S. Presidency

In 2009, Obama was successfully inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America, after a successful presidential campaign in 2008. He eventually got re-elected in 2012. In fact, Obama served as president of the country from 2009 to 2017. As president of the United States, Obama bagged an annual paycheck of $400,000. Some of his notable contributions include signing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Repeal Act, lifting the travel ban on individuals infected with HIV, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, etc. His main highlight is signing the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, which provides healthcare coverage to uninsured American citizens.

Nobel Peace Prize

During the same year he was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States, Obama was also awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.  Obama was only the fourth U.S. president to win the prestigious award. As a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Obama received $1.4 million in prize money. However, he used most of the prize money for 10 different charities, according to a report by Reuters .

Lucrative book deals

In 1995, Obama released his first book Dreams From My Father. Although the initial release didn’t see the book do particularly well, his election as president ultimately boosted its sales. Random House eventually re-released the book years later. For the re-release, Obama enjoyed a $500,000 book advance just before he was sworn into office. The audio version of Dreams From My Father also earned Obama his first Grammy Award win for Best Spoken Word Album.

In 2006, Obama released his second book called The Audacity of Hope. For the book, Obama received a $1.9 million book advance. The Audacity of Hope and Dreams From My Father would combine for 7.5 million unit sales in domestic revenues, as per reports . Furthermore, Obama would earn another Grammy Award win for The Audacity of Hope’s audio version.

Obama’s other books include Of Thee I Sing and A Promised Land. A Promised Land would garner 3.3 million unit sales across the US and Canada, according to sources . Furthermore, it’s worth noting that Obama scored a $65 million book deal with Penguin Random House for a presidential memoir.

Nevertheless, were you at all stunned by Barack Obama’s net worth in 2024?

The post Barack Obama’s net worth in 2024 appeared first on ClutchPoints .