Barack Obama Facts | 44th US PRESIDENT
US President: 2009 – Current
US Vice President: Joe Biden
Political Party: Democractic
Birth: August 4, 1961 at Honolulu, Hawaii
Death: Living
Education: Columbia University and Harvard Law School
Offices held:
44th President of the United States (2009 – present)
United States Senator from Illinois (2005 – 2008)
Member of the Illinois Senate from the 13th district (1997 – 2004)
First Family
First Ladies: Michelle Robinson Obama (m. 1992 – Present)
Children: Malia, Sasha
Biographies
Biography from Biography.com
Biography from barackobama.com
Congressional Biography
Photos
2009 Inaugural Photographs from TIME
2013 Inaugural Photographs from the Washington Post
Genealogy
Ancestors of Barack Obama
Relation of George W. Bush and Barack Obama
Facts about Barrack Obama
Obama served three terms in the 13th District of the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004. He ran for the United States House of Representatives in 2000, but was defeated.
- He was known as “”O’Bomber”” at high school for his skill at basketball.
- Through Executive Order 13505, Obama removed an eight-year President George W. Bush-era ban on federally funded stem cell research.
- His name means “”one who is blessed”” in Swahili.
- During his time in Indonesia as a child, Obama had a pet ape named Tata. This experience was revealed in his memoir “Dreams from My Father”.
- Inflation under the Obama administration has increased an average of 1.5 percent per year.
- Obama won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father.
Obama was 27 years old when he first met Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama. Michelle was assigned as a mentor to Obama, who was a summer associate at the same corporate law firm.
- He moved to Chicago and worked as a director of the Developing Communities Project after college.
- His grandfather was affiliated with the Kenyan revolutionary Mau Mau movement.
- Obama majored in Political Science at Columbia University.
- He was in the Black Students Union at both Occidental and Columbia.
- Obama began his presidency with an order to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
Obama inherited an economy reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. The unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in 2009 and has declined, on average, at a monthly rate of .05 percent since the beginning of his term.
Barrack Obama Childhood
Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Ann Dunham, was born on an Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham’s father, Stanley, enlisted in the military and marched across Europe in General George Patton’s army. Dunham’s mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program and, after several moves, ended up in Hawaii.
Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa and, eventually earned a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams of going to college in Hawaii. While studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham, and they married on February 2, 1961. Barack was born six months later.
As a child, Obama did not have a relationship with his father. When his son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University and pursue a Ph.D. Obama’s parents officially separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964, when their son was two. Soon after, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya.
In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a University of Hawaii student from Indonesia. A year later, the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in 1970.
While living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou Academy, He excelled in basketball and graduated with academic honors in 1979. As one of only three black students at the school, Obama became conscious of racism and what it meant to be African-American. He later described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage with his own sense of self: “”I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog. . .and that Santa was a white man,”” he wrote. “”I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me.””
Obama also struggled with the absence of his father, who he saw only once more after his parents divorced, when Obama Sr. visited Hawaii for a short time in 1971. “”[My father] had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact,”” he later reflected. “”They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed.””
Ten years later, in 1981, tragedy struck Obama Sr. when he lost both of his legs in a serious car accident. Confined to a wheelchair, he also lost his job. This time, however, the crash was fatal. Obama Sr. died on November 24, 1982, when Obama was 21 years old. “”At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me,”” Obama later wrote, “”both more and less than a man.””
Finally, after high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science. After working in the business sector for two years, Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. There, he worked on the impoverished South Side as a community organizer for low-income residents in the Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens communities.
Barack OBAMA Biography
OBAMA, Barack, a Senator from Illinois and 44th President of the United States; born in Honolulu, Hawaii, August 4, 1961; obtained early education in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Hawaii; continued education at Occidental College, Los Angeles, Calif.; received a B.A. in 1983 from Columbia University, New York City; worked as a community organizer in Chicago, Ill.; studied law at Harvard University, where he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, and received J.D. in 1991; lecturer on constitutional law, University of Chicago; member, Illinois State senate 1997-2004; elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 2004, and served from January 3, 2005, to November 16, 2008, when he resigned from office, having been elected president; elected as the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009; reelected in 2012 and served until January 20, 2017.
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