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Barack Obama

President of the United States from 2009 to 2017

For other uses, see Barack Obama (disambiguation).

"Barack" and "Obama" redirect here. For other uses, see Barack (disambiguation) and Obama (disambiguation).

Barack Obama
Official portrait, 2012
In office January 20, 2009 – January 20, 2017
Vice President	Joe Biden
Preceded by	George W. Bush
Succeeded by	Donald Trump
In office January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008
Preceded by	Peter Fitzgerald
Succeeded by	Roland Burris
In office January 8, 1997 – November 4, 2004
Preceded by	Alice Palmer
Succeeded by	Kwame Raoul
Born	Barack Hussein Obama II (1961-08-04) August 4, 1961 (age 63) Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse
Children
Parents
Relatives	Obama family
Education
Occupation
Awards	Full list
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Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president in U.S. history. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and later worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. In 1996, Obama was elected to represent the 13th district in the Illinois Senate, a position he held until 2004, when he successfully ran for the U.S. Senate. In the 2008 presidential election, after a close primary campai

Barack obama full name

The life of Barack Obama

Barack Obama

The path of the president-elect, from childhood to party leader

/ 25 PHOTOS

Mother and child

** TO GO WITH STORY SLUGGED OBAMA SEMBLANZA ** **FILE* This 1960's photo provided by the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows Obama with his mother Ann Dunham. Dunham met Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. from Kenya, when both were students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; they married in 1960. (AP Photo/Obama Presidential Campaign) ** FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY,NO SALES **

— Anonymous / Obama presidential Campaign

Family portrait

** TO GO WITH STORY SLUGGED OBAMA SEMBLANZA ** ** FILE ** This 1970's photo provided by the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows the presidential hopeful, Obama, 9, right, with his mother Ann Dunham, center, his Indonesian step-father Lolo Soetoro, and his less than one-year-old sister Maya Soetoro in Jakarta, Indonesia. (AP Photo/Obama Presidential Campaign)

— Anonymous / Obama presidential Campaign

Father and son

** TO GO WITH STORY SLUGGED OBAMA SEMBLANZA ** FILE ** This undated photo released by Obama for America shows Barack Obama, 10, and his father, also named Barack Obama. Obama's father left the family to study at Harvard when Barack was just two, returning only once. Obama wrote poignantly about this visit in his memoir, remembering the basketball his father gave him, the African records they danced to, the Dave Brubeck concert they attended. Obama, then 10, never saw his father again. (AP Photo/Obama for America)

— Anonymous / OBAMA FOR AMERICA

'Barry O'Bomber'

** TO GO WITH STORY SLUGGED OBAMA SEMBLANZA ** ** FILE ** In this 1977 file photo provided by the The Oahuan, yearbook of Punahou School, Barack Obama, second row center, is seen with is junior varsity basketball team in this 1977 yearbook class photo in Honolulu. Obama loved basketball and as a forward dubbed \"Barry O'Bomber,\" he favored a left-handed double

In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn’t fully understand. But, while he knew little about this new vocation--community organizer--it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24- year-old ears. With his old classmates from Columbia, he had talked frequently about political change.Now, he was moving to Chicago to put that talk into action. His 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts his idealistic effusions: “Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.”

His excitement wasn’t rooted merely in youthful enthusiasm but also in the psychology of a vagabond. By 1985, Obama had already lived in Hawaii, where he was born and raised by his white mother and grandparents; Indonesia, where he lived briefly as a child; Los Angeles, where he started college; and New York, where he finished it. After these itinerant years, he would finally be able to insinuate himself into a community--and not just any community, but,as he later put it, “the capital of the African American community in the country.” Every strain of black political thought seemed to converge in Chicago in the 1980s. It was the intellectual center of black nationalism, the base both for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and for Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Moreover, on the eve of Obama’s arrival, Harold Washington had overthrown Richard J. Daley’s white ethnic machine to become the city’s first black mayor. It was, in short, an ideal place for an identity-starved Kenyan Kansan to immerse himself in a more typical black American experience.

Not long after Obama arrived, he sat down for a cup of coffee in Hyde Park with a fellow organizer named Mike Kruglik. Obama’s work focused on helping poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side fight thecity for things like job banks and asbestos removal. His teachers were schooled in a sty

EDITOR'S NOTE: At last week's Republican convention in St. Paul, vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, under fire from Democrats who belittled her experience as a small-town mayor, struck back at Barack Obama, questioning whether his experience as a community organizer is a qualification for the presidency. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer," Palin said, "except that you have actual responsibilities." Palin's remarks set off a controversy over Obama and community organizing, forcing Obama himself to defend his experience. But it also raised a more basic question: Just what did Obama do as an organizer in Chicago in the 1980s? A few months ago, NR's Byron York traveled to Chicago to explore Obama's experience there. He wrote this report for the June 30 issue of National Review:

Barack Obama often cites his time as a community organizer here in Chicago as one of the experiences that qualify him to hold the nation's highest office. "I can bring this country together," he said in a debate last February. "I have a track record, starting from the days I moved to Chicago as a community organizer."

When Obama says such things, the reaction among many observers is: Huh?

Audiences understand when he mentions his years as an Illinois state legislator, or his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate. But a community organizer? What's that?

Even Obama didn't know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly," Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."

If you substitute "Bush" for "Reagan," yo

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