Biography
President Barack Obama was born to Barack Obama Sr, from Kenya, and Ann Dunham, from Kansas, in 1961. The future president was born in Hawaii, and raised with the help of his grandparents on his mother's side.
After college, and after moving to Chicago to help underprivileged families in the area, Obama went to Harvard Law to get his degree. After graduating, he returned to Chicago to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago and help out with voters registration in the nearby area. |
While at Harvard, he met Michelle in 1988, when she was his advisor in a summer internship at an attorney's office. Not long after, they began dating, and were married in October of 1992. His two children, Malia and Sasha, were born some years later, in 1998 and 2001. His advocacy work eventually lead him to run for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. In 1996, he won after running as a democrat. In 2000, he made an attempt to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, though lost in the end. After a second attempt in 2004, Obama began his career as a senator.
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He was sworn into office in January of 2005, and worked with the Republican senator from Indiana on a bill that would expand efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in the middle east and Russia. In February of 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for presidency in the 2008 elections. He ran against Republican candidate John McCain and won the election with 52.9% compared to McCain's 45.7%. Since this election, the president has dealt with a crash-and-burn economy, a war that he initially opposed, and many Americans who were finding it difficult to trust the government. In his first 100 days as president, Obama completely overhauled the country's foreign policy, set a date for the removal of troops from Iraq, and sent 21,000 troops to Afghanistan. For these efforts (among others), he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. In the second half of his first term, Obama passed the Affordable Care Act, lead the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden, and took an active stance for marriage equality in the United States. In his second presidential election in 2012, he opposed Republican candidate Mitt Romney and won a second term. Obama focuses on moving the United States of America forward, and starts his second term in January of 2013.