Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II, the 44th President of the United States of America, was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. After graduating from Columbia University, Obama spent the next 5 years working with community service organizations in various roles. In 1989, he attended Harvard Law School, where he became the first African American to become president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating magna cum laude, Obama settled in Chicago and worked until 2004 with a firm that specialized in civil rights law and neighborhood economic development. During this time, he also served as a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.
Obama entered politics in 1997 as an Illinois State Senator, where he was noted for gaining bipartisan support for legislation on reforming ethics and health care laws and sponsored laws benefiting low income workers and for welfare reform. In 2004 he ran for, and won, the seat of junior US Senator from Illinois in a landslide election and drew national attention for his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
During his time in the Senate, Barack Obama sponsored legislation on immigration, weapons reduction, governmental transparency, consumer protection, and foreign policy. He was known as one of the more liberal voices in the Senate and one of its more powerful members. From its beginning, Obama was one of the few public and vocal dissenters to the Iraq War in Congress.
In February 2007, Obama entered a crowded field of Democratic nominees for President, promoting a platform of ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health coverage. By the spring of 2008, the field had narrowed down to Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton, a Senator from New York and wife of former President Bill Clinton, highlighted her experience and moderate agenda, while Obama concentrated on creating hope with a message of change, employing the mantra ‘Yes, we can.’
Barack Obama s campaign ignited the popular imagination in a dramatic way, garnering support and record breaking donations through the revolutionary use of modern media. His campaign s usage of the internet created grassroots fervor and produced an unprecedented flood of small donations. This populist tide allowed him to secure the Democratic nomination for President. It also gave him the momentum to defeat, along with running mate Senator Joe Biden, the Republican ticket of Arizona Senator John McCain and Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin. The American public chose the optimism and change of the Obama/Biden ticket over the experience and fiscally conservative platform of their Republican counterparts, sending Democratic majority into Congress along with them.
Obama responded decisively to America s growing fiscal crisis. Within the first 100 days of becoming the United States first African American President, he initiated and signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, an ambitious $787 billion program designed to stimulate the economy. With mounting opposition from the Republican Congressional minority that began with the stimulus plan, Obama also launched a sweeping new budget and oversaw the reorganization of GM and sale of Chrysler, 2 of the Big 3 automakers and backbones of American industry. During the summer of 2009, President Obama turned his focus to universal health coverage, proposing the passing of a plan by the middle of August.
