Barack Hussein Obama II (i/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, running unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000. Several events earned Obama national attention during his campaign to represent the State of Illinois in the United States Senate in 2004, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary and his keynote address at! the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 . He won the Senate election in November 2004, serving until his resignation following his 2008 presidential election victory. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close race in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012. As president, Obama signed economic stimulus legislation in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 in response to the 2007–2009 recession in the United States. Other major domestic policy initiatives include the Pa! tient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wal! l Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, and the Budget Control Act of 2011. In foreign policy, Obama ended US military involvement in the Iraq War, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. military involvement in Libya, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. In May 2012, he became the first sitting U.S. president to publicly support legalizing same-sex marriage. Contents 1 Early life and career 1.1 Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School 1.2 University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney 2 Legislative career: 1997–2008 2.1 State Senator: 1997–2004 2.2 U.S. Senate campaign 2.3 U.S. Senator: 2005–2008 2.3.1 Legislation 2.3.2 Committees 3 Presidential campaigns 3.1 2008 presidential campaign 3.2 2012 presidential campaign 4 Presidency 4.1 First days 4.2 Domestic policy 4.2.1 Economic policy 4! .2.2 Health care reform 4.2.3 Gulf of Mexico oil spill 4.3 2010 midterm election 4.4 Foreign policy 4.4.1 Iraq War 4.4.2 War in Afghanistan 4.4.3 Israel 4.4.4 War in Libya 4.4.5 Osama bin Laden 5 Cultural and political image 6 Family and personal life 6.1 Religious views 7 Notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links Early life and career Main article: Early life and career of Barack Obama Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,[2][4][5] and is the first President to have been born in Hawaii.[6] His mother, Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry.[7] His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang'oma Kogelo, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.[8][9] The couple married in Wailuku on Maui ! on February 2, 1961,[10][11] and separated when Obama's mother moved wi! th her newborn son to Seattle, Washington, in late August 1961, to attend the University of Washington for one year. In the meantime, Obama, Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at Harvard University on a scholarship. His parents divorced in March 1964.[12] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971.[13] He died in an automobile accident in 1982.[14] In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.[15] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet subdistrict of south Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng sub! district of central Jakarta.[16] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School from one and half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School home schooling by his mother.[17] Obama with his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, in Honolulu, Hawaii In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.[18] Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.[19] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother and sister returned to Indonesia in 1975 to begin! anthropology field work.[20] His mother spent most of the next two dec! ades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a Ph.D. in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for ovarian cancer and uterine cancer.[21] Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[9] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[22] Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."[23] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".[24] Obama was also member of the "choom gang", a self named group of friends that spent time together and occasion! ally smoked marijuana.[25][26] At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama expressed regret for his high-school drug use.[27] Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to divest from South Africa in response to its policy of apartheid.[28] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan and India for three weeks.[28] Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations[29] and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation,[30] then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.[31][32] Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the ! Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organiza! tion originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.[32][33] He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[34] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[35] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.[36][37] He returned to Kenya in 1992 with his fiancée Michelle and his sister Auma.[36][38] He returned to Kenya in August 2006 for a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near Kisumu in rural western Kenya.[39] In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,[40] and president ! of the journal in his second year.[34][41] During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.[42] After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude[43] from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.[40] Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention[34][41] and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,[44] which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.[44] University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book.[44][45] He then taught at t
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