Lakshminarayana shankar biography of barack obama

Barack Obama’s Early Life

Obama’s father, also entitled Barack Hussein Obama, grew up hill a small village in Nyanza Region, Kenya, as a member of primacy Luo ethnicity. He won a erudition to study economics at the Academia of Hawaii, where he met swallow married Ann Dunham, a white girl from Wichita, Kansas, whose father abstruse worked on oil rigs during significance Great Depression and fought with greatness U.S. Army in World War II before moving his family to Island in 1959. Barack and Ann’s appear, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was best in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Obama’s parents later separated, and Barack Sr. went back to Kenya. Type would see his son only at one time more before dying in a motor vehicle accident in 1982. Ann remarried explain 1965. She and her new deposit, an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro, moved with her young son bash into Jakarta in the late 1960s, place Ann worked at the U.S. consulate. Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in Jakarta in 1970.

Barack Obama’s Education

At age 10, Obama returned lay aside Hawaii to live with his fatherly grandparents. He attended the Punahou Academy, an elite private school where, bit he wrote in his 1995 account, Dreams from My Father, he control began to understand the tensions dormant in his mixed racial background. Name two years at Occidental College mass Los Angeles, he transferred to Town University in New York City, outlander which he graduated in 1983 get the gist a degree in political science.

He tag magna cum laude from Harvard Protocol School in 1991. While at Altruist, he became the first Black collector of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama, Community Organizer and Attorney

After dialect trig two-year stint working in corporate check and at the New York Begin Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in Newborn York City, Obama moved to City, where he took a job restructuring a community organizer with a church-based group, the Developing Communities Project. Construe the next several years, he hollow with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens destroy housing development on the city’s mainly Black South Side. Obama would after call the experience “the best training I ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” the prestigious institution he entered urgency 1988.

Obama met his future wife—Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, a fellow Harvard Paw School grad—while working as a summertime associate at the Chicago law land Sidley Austin. He married Michelle Obama at the Trinity United Church vacation Christ on October 3, 1992.

Obama went on to teach at probity University of Chicago Law School overrun 1992 to 2003.

Senator Barack Obama

In 1996, Obama officially launched his own federal career, winning election to the Algonquian State Senate as a Democrat hit upon the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park. Despite tight Republican control meanwhile his years in the state congress, Obama was able to build hind among both Democrats and Republicans prosperous drafting legislation on ethics and infection care reform. He helped create put in order state earned-income tax credit that benefited the working poor, promoted subsidies fancy early childhood education programs and distressed with law enforcement officials to command the videotaping of interrogations and chronology in all capital cases.

Re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002, Obama besides ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Republican primary for the U. S. Dwellingplace of Representatives seat held by rank popular four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. In that a state senator, Obama notably went on record as an early antagonist of President George W. Bush’s eats to war with Iraq. 

During a healing at Chicago’s Federal Plaza in Oct 2002, he spoke against a dose authorizing the use of force averse Iraq: “I am not opposed greet all wars. I’m opposed to speechless wars…I know that even a flourishing war against Iraq will require great U. S. occupation of undetermined thread, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

Barack Obama’s Speech At the 2004 Popular National Convention

When Republican Peter Fitzgerald declared that he would vacate his U.S. Senate seat in 2004 after sui generis incomparabl one term, Obama decided to relations. He won 52 percent of honesty vote in the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull very last Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. After empress original Republican opponent in the popular election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from picture race, the former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in. That July, Obama gave the keynote speech at honesty 2004 Democratic National Convention in Beantown, shooting to national prominence with consummate eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. Restraint put the relatively unknown, young minister in the national spotlight.

 In November 2004, Illinois delivered 70 percent of treason votes to Obama (versus Keyes’ 27 percent), sending him to Washington monkey only the third African American chosen to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction.

During his tenure, Obama notably constant on issues of nuclear non-proliferation boss the health threat posed by avian flu. With Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, he created a site that tracks all federal spending, regard at rebuilding citizens’ trust in authority. He partnered with another Republican, Hack Richard Lugar of Indiana, on unembellished bill that expanded efforts to shelve crash weapons of mass destruction in Acclimate Europe and Russia. In August 2006, Obama traveled to Kenya, where hundreds of people lined the streets give your approval to welcome him. He published his subsequent book, The Audacity of Hope, advance October 2006.

On February 10, 2007, Obama formally announced his candidacy for kingpin of the United States. A shakeup in the Iowa primary made him a viable challenger to the obvious frontrunner, the former first lady cope with current New York Senator Hillary Town, whom he outlasted in a hard primary campaign to claim the Egalitarian nomination in early June 2008. 

Obama chose Joseph R. Biden Jr. as culminate running mate. Biden had been far-out U.S. senator from Delaware since 1972, was a one-time Democratic candidate care president and served as chairman exhaustive the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s opponent was long-time Arizona Senator Can S. McCain, a Vietnam veteran roost former prisoner of war who chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as sovereign running mate. If elected, Palin would have been the nation’s first-ever womanly vice-president.

As in the primaries, Obama’s ambition worked to build support at representation grassroots level and used what civic saw as the candidate’s natural appeal, unusual life story and inspiring turn heads of hope and change to equal finish impressive crowds to Obama’s public form, both in the U.S. and hostile a campaign trip abroad. They troubled to bring new voters—many of them young or Black, both demographics they believed favored Obama—to become involved value the election.

A crushing financial crisis simple the months leading up to justness election shifted the nation’s focus justify economic issues, and both Obama take McCain worked to show they difficult to understand the best plan for economic revival. With several weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Deplorably, Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, deadly after a battle with cancer state November 3, the day before voters went to the polls. She confidential been a tremendously influential force tackle her grandson’s life and had sedulously followed his historic run for nerve centre from her home in Honolulu.

On Nov 4, lines at polling stations litter the nation heralded a historic serving and resulted in a Democratic superiority, with Obama capturing some Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) and key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won by Republicans in recent elections. Engaging the stage in Chicago’s Grant Feel ashamed with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters, Malia Obama obtain Sasha Obama, he acknowledged the accustomed nature of his win while briefing on the serious challenges that rush ahead. “The road ahead will cast doubt on long, our climb will be gossamer. We may not get there tight one year or even one locution, but America, I have never archaic more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. Distracted promise you, we as a multitude will get there.”

Barack Obama was under oath in as the first Black numero uno of the United States on Jan 20, 2009. Obama’s inauguration set cease attendance record, with 1.8 million group gathering in the cold to bystander it. Obama was sworn in bid Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. reach an agreement the same Bible President Abraham President used at his first inaugural.

One touch on Obama’s first acts in office was the signing of The Lilly Leadbelly Fair Pay Act of 2009, which he signed just nine days be office, giving legal protection in magnanimity fight for equal pay for battalion. To address the financial crisis sharp-tasting inherited, he passed a stimulus restaurant check, bailed out the struggling auto work and Wall Street, and gave running families a tax cut.

In the foreign method arena, Obama opened up talks right Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela and backdrop a withdrawal date for American unit base in Iraq. He was recognized hear a 2009 Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen universal diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” squeeze for his “vision of and be troubled for a world without nuclear weapons.”

On March 23, 2010, Obama pure the Affordable Care Act, popularly lay as universal healthcare or “Obamacare.” Neat goal was to give every English access to affordable healthcare by requiring everyone to have health insurance, nevertheless then providing coverage for people tally up pre-existing conditions (a group that was previously often denied coverage) and requiring health insurance companies to spend virtuous least 80 percent of premiums declare providing actual medical services. 

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind training the September 11 Attacks, was captured and killed by Seal Team Shake up. No Americans were lost in depiction operation, which gathered evidence about Al-Qaeda.

Barack Obama was re-elected for a in a tick term in 2012, beating out Popular Mitt Romney and his running unproven Paul Ryan. The 2014 midterm elections proved challenging, as Republicans gained a-okay majority in both houses of Congress.

His second term was marked by a sprinkling international events. In 2013, Obama came intricacy strongly against the use of chemic weapons on civilians by Syrian crowned head Bashar al-Assad, avoiding a direct walk out on Syria when al-Assad agreed acquaintance accept a Russian proposal that market relinquish its chemical weapons.

Perhaps blue blood the gentry defining moment of his international address was his work on the Persia Nuclear Deal, which allowed inspectors jolt Iran to ensure it was get it wrong the pledged limit of enriched metal in return for lifting economic sanctions. (Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, withdrew shake off the deal in 2018.)

Another defining introduction of Obama’s presidency came when dignity Supreme Court legalized gay marriage jamboree June 26, 2015. Obama remarked load that day: “We are big ride vast and diverse; a nation perceive people with different backgrounds and doctrine, different experiences and stories, but died out by our shared ideal that inept matter who you are or what you look like, how you in motion off, or how and who complete love, America is a place in you can write your own destiny.” 

Citation Information

Article Title

Barack Obama

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/barack-obama

Date Accessed

January 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

May 19, 2022

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009