barack obama full biography

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 24, 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

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 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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Book Reviews

Former president obama tells his story his way — and makes his case for history.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama Crown hide caption

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

In the spring of 2004, a young state legislator was driving home from a campaign event in rural Illinois when he got a phone call from Washington. A voice asked if he would be interested in giving the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that summer in Boston.

"That I felt neither giddy nor nervous said something about the sheer improbability of the year I'd just had," that legislator now recalls in his new memoir, A Promised Land.

Back in 2004, Barack Obama took that opportunity to speak to the convention. "Let's face it," he began. "My presence on this stage tonight is pretty unlikely."

An improbable year? An unlikely presence? Obama was only beginning his high-speed elevator ride to the world stage. That night in Boston his voice, then still unfamiliar, was soon rising and ringing through the arena:

"There are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America."

Thereafter, Obama was "the guy who gave that speech." He got elected to the U.S. Senate that fall and people in Washington were asking when he would run for president.

He tells us in this memoir that he has only watched the video of that night in Boston once, and he points out flaws in his performance. That will impress some as stunning humility and strike others as "humble bragging" or downright disingenuousness.

The 44th president of the United States has always prompted extremes of reaction. Though his nature may be to seek consensus, he has tended to inspire partisan aspiration for some and equally intense resentment for others. His ascent thrilled millions but also stirred a countermovement that is still on the march.

One wellspring of that movement, of course, was electing Obama's successor. The publishers of A Promised Land surely knew they were launching this sure-to-be blockbuster in the month when President Trump would either be reelected or rejected by the voters. They knew the mountain of memories compiled in these 700 pages would appear in a certain light, or shadow, depending on the voters' verdict.

But this is more than Obama's answer to four years of Trump's rhetorical assaults and policy reversals. It is a continuation of the story that the "skinny kid with a funny name" had begun to tell well before the world was listening.

The man and the memoirist

Obama began his literary career a quarter century ago, recalling the struggles of his youth while still in his early 30s in Dreams From My Father . A second volume discussed his rising political ambitions a dozen years later when The Audacity of Hope presaged his first run for the White House .

Now, in A Promised Land, the man is approaching 60, recalling how his audacious dreams came true in 2008 and detailing the first 30 momentous months thereafter.

To a remarkable degree, the style of this latest retelling reflects the man we have seen over these years: Orderly, cautious, self-examining — yet eloquent in flashes so vivid that the world was immediately able to share something of his vision.

Or at least much of the world was able to. Reliving this history through Obama's eyes reminds us how differently others reacted to his rise — how offended they were when he drew vast crowds in Europe while still a candidate for president — collecting the Nobel Peace Prize just for getting elected .

Whatever one's feelings about this man, they are likely to be brought to the surface by this book. We hear his voice in every sentence, almost as if he were physically present and reading the book aloud.

For those who did not leap aboard the Obama bandwagon, much of his memoir will put them in mind of what put them off. To be sure, there were countless issues of policy on which to differ with the 44th president and many elements of his personality to judge for oneself. There were also, as he puts it, plenty of people who never got past being "spooked by a Black man in the White House."

But for those who felt the magnetism and power of the first African American president, at any point in his career, this book should rekindle some of that feeling of discovery. For the truly faithful, some of these pages may have to be read through tears.

Reviewing the history

Obama begins this account by briefly revisiting his rather aimless adolescence, but he moves swiftly on from college identity crises to community organizing in Chicago to Harvard Law School. Soon he is back in Chicago, meeting Michelle Robinson at a law firm, working and making a life in the boom years of the 1990s.

Embedded throughout this dense text are frequent valentines addressed to Michelle. We see her as a smart young lawyer, assessing the trainee who will become her husband. They are soon involved, friends as well as co-workers, then lovers as well as spouses. They marry and have two careers and two daughters but also work at remaining a romantic couple.

He runs for office, aiming too high the first time and losing. He meets David Axelrod (who will be "Axe" the rest of the way), a former newspaper reporter who has become a political consultant and understands Chicago's complex racial politics. Obama wins a seat in Springfield, then an improbable promotion to Washington.

Much of the first 200 pages suggests a Hollywood biopic, with a lot of soft focus and camaraderie and heart-warming music. We meet the campaign's inner circle — Axe, campaign manager David Plouffe, "Memo Master" Pete Rouse, spokesman Robert Gibbs and aide de camp Reggie Love — and all the other buddies who keep the candidate loose and focused, like the crew Shakespeare sketched around Prince Hal.

At one point, Obama retells how his innermost circle thrashed out the decision to run for president in 2008. Michelle makes no secret of her reluctance. She finally asks him why he has to run when Hillary Clinton and so many other Democrats are running who are better known and more experienced.

"I know," her husband replies, "that the day I raise my right hand and take the oath to be the president of the United States, the world will start looking at America differently. I know that kids all around this country — Black kids, Hispanic kids, kids who don't fit in — they'll see themselves differently too. ... And that alone ... that would be worth it."

Michelle relents with: "Well honey, that was a pretty good answer." It is only one of many times in the book that her devotion to her husband overcomes her deep aversion to politics. She appears often, not just to take a bow but to add her perspective and reveal what keeps her husband centered.

He also takes frequent opportunity to mention and share credit with the man he made his running mate back in the summer of 2008. From first reference forward, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is just "Joe."

Obama writes: "If I was seen as temperamentally cool and collected, measured in how I used my words, Joe was all warmth, a man without inhibitions, happy to share whatever popped into his head."

Biden reappears at crucial moments in the narrative, helping to sell the Senate on the Recovery Act and also on what swiftly came to be called Obamacare. He is there in foreign policy debates as well, often as a contrarian.

Governing as grinding

The campaign story has a happy ending. The rest of the book does not really have an ending at all. The author relives the first part of his presidency, recounting not so much a rise and fall as a battle against the unexpected and a struggle for equilibrium.

After the uplift of the throngs on Inauguration Day, we settle into the rhythm that will govern the bulk of the book — the relentless beat of governing. Much has to be done, many people must be met and accommodated. Meetings segue into more meetings. Nothing is ever easy, or really finished or quite what it seems.

As a writer, Obama manages to convey the grinding work of his first years in office without losing forward momentum. First, we see endless negotiations pull the economy back from the brink of a crash in early 2009, but it's a slog for the reader as it was for the policymakers. Then it's on to the Herculean efforts needed to haul the Affordable Care Act across the finish line in March 2010.

Along the way, Obama encounters united resistance from Republicans and dissatisfaction among Democrats. The economy survives the mortgage security and credit crisis, but big Wall Street banks and bankers are seen getting off easy. Health insurance is expanded, but without a "single payer" government system or a "public option" to choose one.

Obama gets to know the players in Congress, starting with the gruff and rough-edged Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader who urges his young star to run for president in 2008.

The cast of Obama intimates keeps expanding, including chiefs of staff Rahm Emanuel (later mayor of Chicago) and then William Daley (brother and son of Chicago mayors). There are Republican leaders in Congress such as John Boehner in the House and Mitch McConnell in the Senate, the latter looming up again and again for his strategies and tactics against nearly all Obama's initiatives and appointments.

But the principal irritants who get perhaps more attention than necessary are the stars of the conservative media subculture, such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the prime-time stars of Fox News. Obama also contemplates the swelling power of populist sentiment on the right, from Sarah Palin as the vice presidential nominee in 2008 (Obama says that "she had no idea what the hell she was talking about") to the nascent Tea Party the following year and the surge of its acolytes in Congress after the midterms of 2010. Of Palin, Obama says: "Hers was a biography tailor made for working-class white voters who hated Washington and harbored the not entirely unjustified suspicion that big-city elites — whether in business, politics, or the media — looked down on their way of life."

The bulk of the book is a crisis-by-crisis recounting of Obama's first two years in office. He does not spare us, or himself, the controversies that studded those years. Some involve longstanding issues such as immigration, gay rights and abortion. Some involve Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United , which pared back a century of campaign finance laws. We see Obama delight in appointing two Supreme Court justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

We also visit the valleys between the peaks, spending somewhat less time there, as one might expect. Some seem relatively minor now, such as the firestorm over bringing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other conspirators from the Sept. 11 attacks to New York for trial. We may have forgotten the fracas over the building of "an Islamic community center" and mosque near what was known as ground zero, the former site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in those attacks. But these incidents still rankle Obama, who tells Emanuel: "If we can't speak out on something this basic, then I don't know what the point is of us being here."

To which Emanuel replies: "At the rate we're going, we may not be."

Which segues to the harsh dose of political reality Obama received in the midterm elections. The Democrats lost 63 seats in the House — their worst drubbing in 72 years. Obama devotes the ensuing chapter ("In the Barrel") to the travails of the lowest days of his first term.

They are all part of the catalog Obama seems to be keeping, like a scrapbook in his head.

Ending in suspense

Obama ends this volume (a second is in the works) with what might be called his greatest hit. The last chapter is about the hunt for Osama bin Laden that culminated in the raid that killed him in May 2011. We sit in on the tense hours as Obama and his national security team await word of the mission's fate. Here, as elsewhere, Obama shares credit with his people, in particular Adm. William McRaven, a former Navy SEAL who planned and conducted the strike.

We watch with the president and his national security team as live video shows the raid in real time. We hear McRaven and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta speaking in code: "Geronimo EKIA." Enemy killed in action.

Even as the final hours tick away before the mission launches, we see Obama put on his tux and attend the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, which he could not duck without raising suspicions.

At this late moment in the memoir, a character previously glimpsed in the shadows offstage is suddenly in the spotlight. It is Trump, the real estate man and reality TV star. Obama has mentioned him before, holding him responsible for stoking years of assault on his native-born American citizenship, the imaginary conspiracy of the "birthers."

On this night in 2011, with Trump a highly visible guest, Obama mocked the birther conspiracies and skewered a recent plotline from The Celebrity Apprentice. Cameras caught Trump barely cracking a smile amid the roars of laughter. It has been suggested since that Trump has not forgotten that night.

In truth, Obama was often lacerating in his humor at such dinners, ribbing his rivals at times but often finding the jugular as well. In this case, the target found a way to fire back.

The voice lingers

If you remember enjoying just listening to Obama talk, the cadences and content of what he said, you are likely to keep this volume handy for a long time. If you tend to tire of his lecturing style (he calls it his "droning on"), or his tendency to share what he knows with an air of knowing it's a lot, then you will find it easier to put down.

In his early months as president, there were certainly admirers who hung on his every word. But not a few White House correspondents squinted and squirmed through his early news conferences as his answers to questions became lectures.

Yet all presidential memoirs have value, even if they are far less candid than this one. They offer a unique view from the presidential mind and suggest at least some of the conflicts and contradictions that contend within that mind.

Even if what is revealed is only what the author wishes to reveal, it is an invaluable piece of the puzzle historians will struggle to put together from here forward. If it takes time and effort to take it all in, it's worth it.

NPR's Michel Martin will interview former President Barack Obama to air on Monday.

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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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A virtual museum of his presidency

Through a collection of deeply reported stories, videos, photographs, documents and graphics, experience Barack Obama’s historic time in office: as the first black president , as commander in chief , as a domestic and foreign policymaker, and as a husband and father .

Continue to the gallery of stories or read an essay by David Maraniss , author of “Barack Obama: The Story.”

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His journey to become a leader of consequence

When Barack Obama worked as a community organizer amid the bleak industrial decay of Chicago’s far South Side during the 1980s, he tried to follow a mantra of that profession: Dream of the world as you wish it to be, but deal with the world as it is.

The notion of an Obama presidency was beyond imagining in the world as it was then. But, three decades later, it has happened, and a variation of that saying seems appropriate to the moment: Stop comparing Obama with the president you thought he might be, and deal with the one he has been.

Seven-plus years into his White House tenure, Obama is working through the final months before his presidency slips from present to past, from daily headlines to history books. That will happen at noontime on the 20th of January next year, but the talk of his legacy began much earlier and has intensified as he rounds the final corner of his improbable political career.

Of the many ways of looking at Obama’s presidency, the first is to place it in the continuum of his life. The past is prologue for all presidents to one degree or another, even as the job tests them in ways that nothing before could. For Obama, the line connecting his life’s story with the reality of what he has been as the 44th president is consistently evident.

The first connection involves Obama’s particular form of ambition. His political design arrived relatively late. He was no grade school or high school or college leader. Unlike Bill Clinton, he did not have a mother telling everyone that her first-grader would grow up to be president. When Obama was a toddler in Honolulu, his white grandfather boasted that his grandson was a Hawaiian prince, but that was more to explain his skin color than to promote family aspirations.

But once ambition took hold of Obama, it was with an intense sense of mission, sometimes tempered by self-doubt but more often self-assured and sometimes bordering messianic. At the end of his sophomore year at Occidental College, he started to talk about wanting to change the world. At the end of his time as a community organizer in Chicago, he started to talk about how the only way to change the world was through electoral power. When he was defeated for the one and only time in his career in a race for Congress in 2000, he questioned whether he indeed had been chosen for greatness, as he had thought he was, but soon concluded that he needed another test and began preparing to run for the Senate seat from Illinois that he won in 2004.

That is the sensibility he took into the White House. It was not a careless slip when he said during the 2008 campaign that he wanted to emulate Ronald Reagan and change “the trajectory of America” in ways that recent presidents, including Clinton, had been unable to do. Obama did not just want to be president. His mission was to leave a legacy as a president of consequence, the liberal counter to Reagan. To gauge himself against the highest-ranked presidents, and to learn from their legacies, Obama held private White House sessions with an elite group of American historians.

It is now becoming increasingly possible to argue that he has neared his goal. His decisions were ineffective in stemming the human wave of disaster in Syria, and he has thus far failed to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to make anything more than marginal changes on two domestic issues of importance to him, immigration and gun control. But from the Affordable Care Act to the legalization of same-sex marriage and the nuclear deal with Iran, from the stimulus package that started the slow recovery from the 2008 recession to the Detroit auto industry bailout, from global warming and renewable energy initiatives to the veto of the Keystone pipeline, from the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and the killing of Osama bin Laden to the opening of relations with Cuba, the liberal achievements have added up, however one judges the policies.

This was done at the same time that he faced criticism from various quarters for seeming aloof, if not arrogant, for not being more effective in his dealings with members of Congress of either party, for not being angry enough when some thought he should be, or for not being an alpha male leader.

His accomplishments were bracketed by two acts of negation by opponents seeking to minimize his authority: first a vow by Republican leaders to do what it took to render him a one-term president; and then, with 11 months left in his second term, a pledge to deny him the appointment of a nominee for the crucial Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon. Obama’s White House years also saw an effort to delegitimize him personally by shrouding his story in fallacious myth — questioning whether he was a foreigner in our midst, secretly born in Kenya, despite records to the contrary, and insinuating that he was a closet Muslim, again defying established fact. Add to that a raucous new techno-political world of unending instant judgments and a decades-long erosion of economic stability for the working class and middle class that was making an increasingly large segment of the population, of various ideologies, feel left behind, uncertain, angry and divided, and the totality was a national condition that was anything but conducive to the promise of unity that brought Obama into the White House.

To the extent that his campaign rhetoric raised expectations that he could bridge the nation’s growing political divide, Obama owns responsibility for the way his presidency was perceived. His political rise, starting in 2004, when his keynote convention speech propelled him into the national consciousness, was based on his singular ability to tie his personal story as the son of a father from Kenya and mother from small-town Kansas to some transcendent common national purpose. Unity out of diversity, the ideal of the American mosaic that was constantly being tested, generation after generation, part reality, part myth. Even though Obama romanticized his parents’ relationship, which was brief and dysfunctional, his story of commonality was more than a campaign construct; it was deeply rooted in his sense of self.

As a young man, Obama at times felt apart from his high school and college friends of various races and perspectives as he watched them settle into defined niches in culture, outlook and occupation. He told one friend that he felt “large dollops of envy for them” but believed that because of his own life’s story, his mixed-race heritage, his experiences in multicultural Hawaii and exotic Indonesia, his childhood without “a structure or tradition to support me,” he had no choice but to seek the largest possible embrace of the world. “The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes, make them mine, me theirs,” he wrote. He carried that notion with him through his political career in Illinois and all the way to the White House, where it was challenged in ways he had never confronted before.

With most politicians, their strengths are their weaknesses, and their weaknesses are their strengths.

With Obama, one way that was apparent was in his coolness. At various times in his presidency, there were calls from all sides for him to be hotter. He was criticized by liberals for not expressing more anger at Republicans who were stifling his agenda, or at Wall Street financiers and mortgage lenders whose wheeler-dealing helped drag the country into recession. He was criticized by conservatives for not being more vociferous in denouncing Islamic terrorists, or belligerent in standing up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

His coolness as president can best be understood by the sociological forces that shaped him before he reached the White House. There is a saying among native Hawaiians that goes: Cool head, main thing. This was the culture in which Obama reached adolescence on the island of Oahu, and before that during the four years he lived with his mother in Jakarta. Never show too much. Never rush into things. Maintain a personal reserve and live by your own sense of time. This sensibility was heightened when he developed an affection for jazz, the coolest mode of music, as part of his self-tutorial on black society that he undertook while living with white grandparents in a place where there were very few African Americans. As he entered the political world, the predominantly white society made it clear to him the dangers of coming across as an angry black man. As a community organizer, he refined the skill of leading without being overt about it, making the dispossessed citizens he was organizing feel their own sense of empowerment. As a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, he developed an affinity for rational thought.

All of this created a president who was comfortable coolly working in his own way at his own speed, waiting for events to turn his way.

Was he too cool in his dealings with other politicians? One way to consider that question is by comparing him with Clinton. Both came out of geographic isolation, Hawaii and southwest Arkansas, far from the center of power, in states that had never before offered up presidents. Both came out of troubled families defined by fatherlessness and alcoholism. Both at various times felt a sense of abandonment. Obama had the additional quandary of trying to figure out his racial identity. And the two dealt with their largely similar situations in diametrically different ways.

Rather than deal with the problems and contradictions of his life head-on, Clinton became skilled at moving around and past them. He had an insatiable need to be around people for affirmation. As a teenager, he would ask a friend to come over to the house just to watch him do a crossword puzzle. His life became all about survival and reading the room. He kept shoeboxes full of file cards of the names and phone numbers of people who might help him someday. His nature was to always move forward. He would wake up each day and forgive himself and keep going. His motto became “What’s next?” He refined these skills to become a political force of nature, a master of transactional politics. This got him to the White House, and into trouble in the White House, and out of trouble again, in acycle of loss and recovery.

Obama spent much of his young adulthood, from when he left Hawaii for the mainland and college in 1979 to the time he left Chicago for Harvard Law School nearly a decade later, trying to figure himself out, examining the racial, cultural, personal, sociological and political contradictions that life threw at him. He internalized everything, first withdrawing from the world during a period in New York City and then slowly reentering it as he was finding his identity as a community organizer in Chicago.

Rather than plow forward relentlessly, like Clinton, Obama slowed down. He woke up each day and wrote in his journal, analyzing the world and his place in it. He emerged from that process with a sense of self that helped him rise in politics all the way to the White House, then led him into difficulties in the White House, or at least criticism for the way he operated. His sensibility was that if he could resolve the contradictions of his own life, why couldn’t the rest of the country resolve the larger contradictions of American life? Why couldn’t Congress? The answer from Republicans was that his actions were different from his words, and that while he talked the language of compromise, he did not often act on it. He had built an impressive organization to get elected, but it relied more on the idea of Obama than on a long history of personal contacts. He did not have a figurative equivalent of Clinton’s shoebox full of allies, and he did not share his Democratic predecessor’s profound need to be around people. He was not as interested in the personal side of politics that was so second nature to presidents such as Clinton and Lyndon Johnson.

Politicians of both parties complained that Obama seemed distant. He was not calling them often enough. When he could be schmoozing with members of Congress, cajoling them and making them feel important, he was often back in the residence having dinner with his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters, or out golfing with the same tight group of high school chums and White House subordinates.

Here again, some history provided context. Much of Obama’s early life had been a long search for home, which he finally found with Michelle and their girls, Malia and Sasha. There were times when Obama was an Illinois state senator and living for a few months at a time in a hotel room in Springfield, when Michelle made clear her unhappiness with his political obsession, and the sense of home that he had strived so hard to find was jeopardized. Once he reached the White House, with all the demands on his time, if there was a choice, he was more inclined to be with his family than hang out with politicians. A weakness in one sense, a strength in another, enriching the image of the first-ever black first family.

The fact that Obama was the first black president, and that his family was the first African American first family, provides him with an uncontested hold on history. Not long into his presidency, even to mention that seemed beside the point, if not tedious, but it was a prejudice-shattering event when he was elected in 2008, and its magnitude is not likely to diminish. Even as some of the political rhetoric this year longs for a past America, the odds are greater that as the century progresses, no matter what happens in the 2016 election, Obama will be seen as the pioneer who broke an archaic and distant 220-year period of white male dominance.

But what kind of black president has he been?

His life illuminates the complexity of that question. His white mother, who conscientiously taught him black history at an early age but died nearly a decade before her son reached the White House, would have been proud that he broke the racial barrier. But she also inculcated him in the humanist idea of the universality of humankind, a philosophy that her life exemplified as she married a Kenyan and later an Indonesian and worked to help empower women in many of the poorest countries in the world. Obama eventually found his own comfort as a black man with a black family, but his public persona, and his political persona, was more like his mother’s.

At various times during his career, Obama faced criticism from some African Americans that, because Obama did not grow up in a minority community and received an Ivy League education, he was not “black enough.” That argument was one of the reasons he lost that 2000 congressional race to Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther, but fortunes shift and attitudes along with them; there was no more poignant and revealing scene at Obama’s final State of the Union address to Congress than Rep. Rush waiting anxiously at the edge of the aisle and reaching out in the hope of recognition from the passing president.

As president, Obama rarely broke character to show what was inside. He was reluctant to bring race into the political discussion, and never publicly stated what many of his supporters believed: that some of the antagonism toward his presidency was rooted in racism. He wished to be judged by the content of his presidency rather than the color of his skin. One exception came after February 2012, when Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed in Florida by a gun-toting neighborhood zealot. In July 2013, commenting on the verdict in the case, Obama talked about the common experience of African American men being followed when shopping in a department store, or being passed up by a taxi on the street, or a car door lock clicking as they walked by — all of which he said had happened to him. He said Trayvon Martin could have been his son, and then added, “another way of saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

Nearly two years later, in June 2015, Obama hit what might be considered the most powerful emotional note of his presidency, a legacy moment, by finding a universal message in black spiritual expression. Time after time during his two terms, he had performed the difficult task of trying to console the country after another mass shooting, choking up with tears whenever he talked about little children being the victims, as they had been in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Now he was delivering the heart-rending message one more time, nearing the end of a eulogy in Charleston, S.C., for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine African Americans killed by a young white gunman during a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is unlikely that any other president could have done what Barack Obama did that day, when all the separate parts of his life story came together with a national longing for reconciliation as he started to sing, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. . . .”

• A hopeful moment on race
• A soliloquy in Philadelphia
• The beer summit
• The other trailblazers
• On a bridge in Selma
• In his own words
• The backlash
• A new aesthetic
• Kids on Obama
• Crime, justice and race
• Obama in Africa
• The Obama electorate
• Your Obama presidency

Barack Obama’s watershed 2008 election and the presidency that followed profoundly altered the aesthetics of American democracy, transforming the Founding Fathers’ narrow vision of politics and citizenship into something more expansive and more elegant. The American presidency suddenly looked very different, and for a moment America felt different, too.

The Obama victory helped fulfill one of the great ambitions of the civil rights struggle by showcasing the ability of extraordinarily talented black Americans to lead and excel in all facets of American life. First lady Michelle Obama, and daughters Sasha and Malia, extended this reimagining of black American life by providing a conspicuous vision of a healthy, loving and thriving African American family that defies still-prevalent racist stereotypes.

But some interpreted Obama’s triumph as much more.

The victory was heralded as the arrival of a “post-racial” America, one in which the nation’s original sin of racial slavery and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow discrimination had finally been absolved by the election of a black man as commander in chief. For a while, the nation basked in a racially harmonious afterglow.

A black president would influence generations of young children to embrace a new vision of American citizenship. The “Obama Coalition” of African American, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American voters had helped usher in an era in which institutional racism and pervasive inequality would fade as Americans embraced the nation’s multicultural promise.

Seven years later, such profound optimism seems misplaced. Almost immediately, the Obama presidency unleashed racial furies that have only multiplied over time. From the tea party’s racially tinged attacks on the president’s policy agenda to the “birther” movement’s more overtly racist fantasies asserting that Obama was not even an American citizen, the national racial climate grew more, and not less, fraught.

If racial conflict, in the form of birthers, tea partyers and gnawing resentments, implicitly shadowed Obama’s first term, it erupted into open warfare during much of his second. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby v. Holder case gutted Voting Rights Act enforcement, throwing into question the signal achievement of the civil rights movement’s heroic period.

Beginning with the 2012 shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, the nation reopened an intense debate on the continued horror of institutional racism evidenced by a string of high-profile deaths of black men, women, boys and girls at the hands of law enforcement.

The organized demonstrations, protests and outrage of a new generation of civil rights activists turned the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter into the clarion call for a new social justice movement. Black Lives Matter activists have forcefully argued that the U.S. criminal justice system represents a gateway to racial oppression, one marked by a drug war that disproportionately targets, punishes and warehouses young men and women of color. In her bestselling book “ The New Jim Crow ,” legal scholar Michelle Alexander argued that mass incarceration represents a racial caste system that echoes the pervasive, structural inequality of a system of racial apartheid that persists.

Obama’s first-term caution on race matters was punctured by his controversial remarks that police “acted stupidly” in the mistaken identity arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University’s prominent African American studies professor, in 2009. Four years later he entered the breach once more by proclaiming that if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

In the aftermath of racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, and a racially motivated massacre in Charleston, S.C., Obama went further. In 2015, Obama found his voice in a series of stirring speeches in Selma, Ala., and Charleston, where he acknowledged America’s long and continuous history of racial injustice.

Policy-wise Obama has launched a private philanthropic effort, My Brother’s Keeper, designed to assist low-income black boys, and became the first president to visit a federal prison in a call for prison reform that foreshadowed the administration’s efforts to release federal inmates facing long sentences on relatively minor drug charges.

Despite these efforts, many of Obama’s African American supporters have expressed profound disappointment over the president’s refusal to forcefully pursue racial and economic justice policies for his most loyal political constituency.

From this perspective, the Obama presidency has played out as a cruel joke on members of the African American community who, despite providing indispensable votes, critical support and unstinting loyalty, find themselves largely shut out from the nation’s post-Great Recession economic recovery. Blacks have, critics suggested, traded away substantive policy demands for the largely symbolic psychological and emotional victory of having a black president and first family in the White House for eight years.

Others find that assessment harsh, noting that Obama’s most impressive policy achievements have received scant promotion from the White House or acknowledgment in the mainstream media.

History will decide the full measure of the importance, success, failures and shortcomings of the Obama presidency. With regard to race, Obama’s historical significance is ensured; only his impact and legacy are up for debate. In retrospect, the burden of transforming America’s tortured racial history in two four-year presidential terms proved impossible, even as its promise helped to catapult Obama to the nation’s highest office.

Obama’s presidency elides important aspects of the civil rights struggle, especially the teachings of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King, for a time, served as the racial justice consciousness for two presidents — John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Many who hoped Obama might be able to serve both roles — as president and racial justice advocate — have been disappointed. Yet there is a revelatory clarity in that disappointment, proving that Obama is not King or Frederick Douglass, but Abraham Lincoln, Kennedy and Johnson. Even a black president, perhaps especially a black president, could not untangle racism’s Gordian knot on the body politic. Yet in acknowledging the limitations of Obama’s presidency on healing racial divisions and the shortcomings of his policies in uplifting black America, we may reach a newfound political maturity that recognizes that no one person — no matter how powerful — can single-handedly rectify structures of inequality constructed over centuries.

Peniel Joseph is professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Being number one means nothing until there’s a number two.

If i had a son, he would look like trayvon., some young americans have known only one president in their lifetime..

• On war and leadership
• The parade of generals
• A tour of duty
• One enemy after another
• Words of war and peace
• The last convoy
• The rise of ISIS
• Weighing intervention
• An army of drones
• Struggle after service
• Fear at home
• Your fight, your stories

Has he failed to understand the nature of war or shown the virtues of patience to win the long game?

We won some good fights and we lost the war., no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy..

• Eight turbulent years
• Economic brinksmanship
• The price of Obamacare
• A new state of unions
• Shots fired
• A cultural shift
• ‘Healing the planet’
• Making presidential comedy
• A mark in the wilderness
• American reactions
• Your America

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.

What is it like to be the last black president.

• Determined restraint
• For Muslims, unanswered prayers
• Open hand, clenched fist
• Talking to Tehran
• Closer now – and cigars!
• Standing in the world
• Friends, adversaries
• A pivot to Asia
• Air Force One miles
• Your worldview
• The new modern family
• White House, black women
• The first lady’s last stand
• It’s an Obama thing
• In the cultural mix
• White House parents
• The most popular of them all?
• The O’Bidens
• The first dogs

The Obama family has really uplifted the image of the black family from the moment we saw them.

He does not walk. he strolls with a black man’s head-up posture..

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What President Obama’s executive actions mean for President Trump

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A Friend of Obama Who Could Soon Share the World Stage With Trump

After Britain’s next election, David Lammy is likely to be foreign secretary. He’s setting out a “progressive realist” policy — and forging ties on the U.S. right, just in case.

By Mark Landler

Reporting from London

Few British politicians have American ties as deep as those of David Lammy, who is set to become Britain’s foreign secretary if the opposition Labour Party wins the coming election, as the polls suggest it will.

A son of Guyanese immigrants who grew up poor in working-class London , he spent summers with relatives in Brooklyn and Queens, working at Con Edison, before earning a master's degree at Harvard Law School and befriending Barack Obama, for whom he canvassed in Chicago during his first presidential campaign.

Yet now, on the cusp of becoming Britain’s chief diplomat, Mr. Lammy finds himself facing an uncertain, even potentially hostile, American political landscape. President Biden and the Democrats, with whom Mr. Lammy has cultivated a deep network of contacts, are fighting to hold off a resurgent Donald J. Trump.

Having been chosen by the Labour leader, Keir Starmer , partly because of his trans-Atlantic credentials, Mr. Lammy, 51, is scrambling to build ties with Republicans and, more challengingly, with those around Mr. Trump. It’s a very different American establishment from the Democratic one he knows so well.

Would Mr. Lammy pay a visit to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach estate, as David Cameron, Britain’s current foreign secretary, did two weeks ago to lobby the former president on military aid to Ukraine?

“Of course,” he said in an interview this past week in Portcullis House, the parliamentary office building across the street from Big Ben. Noting that he was headed soon to New York and Washington, he said, “I’m happy to talk to whomever the American people decide they want to run the country.”

That’s a time-tested answer for any foreign politician during an American election year, especially one from a party that has held a double-digit polling lead over the governing Conservatives for 18 months. But unlike many Europeans, who regard Mr. Trump with a mix of fear and bemusement, Mr. Lammy genuinely seems to believe he can find common ground with those in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

He has held meetings with former Trump officials like Mike Pompeo , who served as secretary of state and C.I.A. director, and Robert C. O’Brien , who was Mr. Trump’s last national security adviser. And he has struck up a relationship with Senator J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican and enthusiastic Trump convert .

Mr. Vance’s best-selling memoir, “ Hillbilly Elegy ,” he said, bore parallels to his own story, growing up with a single mother and an absent, alcoholic father, in Tottenham, where race riots convulsed the streets. Mr. Lammy, whose memoir is titled “Out of the Ashes,” said Mr. Vance’s book “reduced me to tears.”

“I said to J.D., ‘Look, we’ve got different politics, but we’re both quite strong Christians and we both share quite a tough upbringing,’” said Mr. Lammy, who would be Britain’s second Black foreign secretary after James Cleverly, a Conservative.

The challenge for Mr. Lammy is that he shares more with Mr. Obama, who was a few years ahead of him at Harvard. The two men, who met 20 years ago at a gathering for Black alumni, had dinner when Mr. Obama visited London last month. In Mr. Obama’s Washington office hangs a portrait of the former president made by Mr. Lammy’s wife, Nicola Green, an artist who chronicled his 2008 campaign.

One of Mr. Obama’s former advisers, Benjamin J. Rhodes, introduced Mr. Lammy to other Democratic lawmakers and has also become a friend. In the event of a Labour government and a second Biden administration, he predicted, “You would see a much more aligned U.S. and U.K. relationship.”

But Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Lammy’s gregarious manner and pragmatic politics would give him at least a fighting chance with a Trump administration. “I think he believes that through force of personality, he could develop relationships in that circle,” Mr. Rhodes said.

For now, Mr. Lammy is determined not to offend. Asked about Mr. Trump’s recent statement that he would tell the Russians to do “ whatever the hell they want ” to any NATO member that did not pay its fair share of the alliance’s costs, Mr. Lammy seized on the reference to burden sharing.

“Is Donald Trump right?” he said. “100 percent.”

Too many NATO countries, Mr. Lammy said, still failed to meet the alliance’s target of military spending equal to 2 percent of gross domestic product (Britain spends roughly 2.2 percent). The Labour Party has vowed to raise that to 2.5 percent, and Mr. Lammy accused the Conservatives of bleeding Britain’s armed forces down to a size they had not seen since the Napoleonic era.

“I recognize in Donald Trump an ability to use language to concentrate minds,” he said.

Other Labour veterans bear no illusions about the chemistry between a Labour government and Mr. Trump. The former president clashed with Theresa May , a Conservative prime minister, though he had better relations with Boris Johnson and praised the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for seeking to water down Britain’s climate goals . Mr. Cameron, years before he visited Mar-a-Lago, called Mr. Trump’s threat to ban Muslims from entering the United States “ divisive, stupid and wrong .”

“A Trump government would be very difficult for a Labour government, but it would also be difficult for a Rishi Sunak government,” said Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair.

With the risk of a turbulent stretch in trans-Atlantic relations, Mr. Lammy is emphasizing Britain’s own neighborhood. In a new essay in Foreign Affairs magazine that lays out a foreign policy based on what he calls “progressive realism,” he said Britain needed to focus on rebuilding its security ties with the European Union, which have withered in the aftermath of Brexit.

Mending fences with Europe, Mr. Lammy said, is necessary regardless of whether Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump wins in November because the United States is increasingly preoccupied by its rivalry with China.

“For that reason, the U.K. must play its part here in Europe,” Mr. Lammy said, adding that Labour was better placed than the Conservatives to rebuild trust because of European suspicion of Brexiteers like Mr. Johnson. “Europe is keen to turn the page. The United States is keen for the U.K. to turn the page.”

Even as their strategic priorities diverge, the United States and Britain remain lashed together in conflict zones like the Middle East. British and American warplanes jointly helped repel Iran’s aerial assault on Israel.

Britain’s position on the Israel-Gaza war mirrors that of the United States, and Labour has stayed largely in sync with the Conservatives, despite pressure from its left wing to take a harder line on Israel. Mr. Lammy described the conditions in Gaza as “hell on earth,” but he has not called for Britain to suspend arms sales to Israel, as have legal experts and some members of Parliament.

While Mr. Lammy said he was “very concerned” that Israel might be violating international law, which would trigger a suspension of arms exports, he did not want to get ahead of a judgment by the government’s lawyers.

“I’m also very conscious that I and Keir Starmer might be officeholders” within the coming weeks, Mr. Lammy said, pointing to speculation that if the Conservatives suffer dire losses in local elections in early May, Mr. Sunak might call a general election .

As he contemplated that possibility, Mr. Lammy’s thoughts came back to the United States, where he said the struggles of civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Mr. Obama symbolized a bend in the moral arc toward racial justice that has transformed Britain as well.

“If I have the privilege of becoming foreign minister,” he said, “I’m very conscious that I’ll be the first — it almost makes me emotional as I say it — the first foreign secretary who is the descendant of enslaved people.”

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler

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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