Barack Obama
Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. His parents, who met as students at the University of Hawaii, were Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a black Kenyan studying in the United States. Obama’s father left the family when Obama was two and, after further studies at Harvard University, returned to Kenya, where he died in an automobile accident 19 years later. After his parents divorced, Obama’s mother married another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From ages 6-10, Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he intended Catholic and Muslim schools. Concerned for his education, Obama’s mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. While Obama was in school, his mother divorced Soetoro, returned to Hawaii to study cultural anthropology at the university, and then went back to Indonesia to do field research. Living with his grandparents, Obama was a good but not outstanding student at Punahou. He played varsity basketball and, as he later admitted, “dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” including marijuana and cocaine. Obama’s main assignment as an organizer was to launch the church-funded Developing Communities Project and, in particular, to organize residents of Altgeld Gardens to pressure Chicago’s city hall to improve conditions in the poorly maintained public housing project. His efforts met with some success, but he concluded that, faced with a complex city bureaucracy, “I just can’t get things done here without a law degree.”Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where in 1983 he received a bachelor’s degree in political science. Influenced by professors who pushed him to take his studies more seriously, Obama experienced great intellectual growth during college and for a couple of years thereafter. He led a rather ascetic life and read works of literature and philosophy by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Toni Morrison, and others. After serving for a couple of years as a writer and editor for Business International Corp., a research, publishing, and consulting firm in Manhattan, he took a position in 1985 as a community organizer on Chicago’s largely impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard University’s law school, where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer associate in 1989 at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, Obama had met Chicago native Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer at the firm. The two married in 1992.After receiving his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago and became active in the Democratic Party. He organized Project Vote, a drive that registered tens of thousands of African Americans on voting rolls and that is credited with helping Democrat Bill Clinton win Illinois and capture the presidency in 1992. The effort also helped make Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois state legislator, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. During this period, Obama wrote his first book and saw it published. The memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), is the story of Obama’s search for his biracial identity by tracing the lives of his now-deceased father and his extended family in Kenya. Obama lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago and worked as an attorney on civil rights issues. Barack Obama was the 44th president and the first African American to become a president. He became president in 2008 and was reelected in 2012. His term of office was from 2008-2012 and 2012-2016. His vice president was Joe Biden. Barack Obama did a lot of things in office including, Rescuing the country from the Great Recession, cutting the unemployment rate from 10% to 4.7% over six years. He signed the Affordable Care Act which provided health insurance to over 20 million uninsured Americans. He Ended the war in Iraq. He Ordered for the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden Passed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to spur economic growth during the Great Recession. He Supported the LGBT community’s fight for marriage equality. He Commuted the sentences of nearly 1200 drug offenders to reverse “unjust and outdated prison sentences”. He Saved the U.S. auto industry. He Helped put the U.S. ontrack for energy independence by 2020. Began the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan. He Signed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals allowing as many as 5 million people living in the U.S. illegally to avoid deportation and receive work permits. He also Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to re-regulate the financial sector. His parents, Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. divorced when the Obama was two. His father returned to Kenya. Obama only saw his father once again, when he came to Hawaii in 1971. He was killed in a car accident in 1982.
References
https://www.good.is/articles/obamas-achievements-in-office
https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/barack-obama/
https://millercenter.org/president/obama/life-before-the-presidency
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Barack-Obama
www.nytimes.com/topic/person/barack-obama
https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/barack-obama
https://barackobama.com/
https://www.cnn.com/2012/12/26/us/barack-obama—fast-facts/index.html
https://biography.yourdictionary.com/…/what-are-some-facts-about-barack-obama.ht…