barack obama

Finally based in America, Obama transferred to New York to study political science at Columbia University. In 1982, he received news of his fathers death in a car accident in Africa. After over a year in the corporate sector, in 1985, Obama moved to Chicago and did three years as a community organiser. In a place devastated by steel plant closures, he represented the unemployed and homeless. And every year there, he saw how gun violence cost the lives of scores of children and hundreds of others.It was there that he attended a sermon by the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It caused him to weep. (Entitled The Audacity to Hope, he adapted it for his breakthrough speech at the Democratic Convention and for his second book.) At the time, Obama seriously considered becoming a preacher.

Instead, he went to Harvard Law School. He hoped it would enable him to achieve the things that grass roots activism couldnt. Before beginning his studies, he went to Kenya to meet his fathers family and better understand his African heritage. Back in America, in 1988 he met his future wife Michelle Robinson, at that time an attorney. A descendent of slaves, she was immersed in the issue of race. And as her best friend was the daughter of the civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, she could introduce Barack to the Democratic political classes.

In 1990, Obama became President. Albeit the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. For the first time, Obama made the news nationally. In 1992, he ran a voter registration campaign which secured 100,000 new voters, mostly from the African American community. It helped elect the first female African American Senator. That same year he married Michelle. They would later have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.In 1994, his mother Ann was diagnosed with cancer. Ann moved back to Hawaii to live near Obamas now widowed grandmother. His grandmother buried her daughter in 1995. Anns difficulty in paying for her medical bills as she died directly informed her sons later attempts to reform the American health care system. That year, on the back of his rising profile, Obama published his first book, Dreams from My Father.

In 1996, Obama was elected as State Senator for Illinois from the 13th district, which encompassed mostly impoverished areas of Chicagos south side. To secure the position, he had to defeat a former ally. Such actions showed he had the political muscle to take power. In 1999, unlike his father had done, Obama put his family first when his daughter became ill. In staying with her, he missed a crucial vote on gun control. Partly as a result of his absence, the gun control measure failed. It would cost him, and others, dearly.

In 2000, Obama took on former Black Panther, Bobby Rush, a well known fourth term incumbent, in the Democratic primaries for the US House of Representatives. Rush destroyed him. Obama later said his earlier gun vote absence had eliminated any slim chance he had of victory. Rushs son had been shot the year before by a drug dealer. Some, however, believed Obamas absence was career motivated. Back then, few professional American politicians progressed very far with a hard line on gun ownership. Rush would be the last politician to beat Obama in an election.

In 2003, Obama launched his campaign to be elected to the US Senate. An early opponent of the Iraq war, he impressed potential President John Kerry enough to be invited to give the keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004. In it, the 42 year old Obama explicitly rejected the division of America into blue liberal and red conservative states. Instead of an America divided into Democrat and Republican states, he said he believed only that there is the United States of America. Obama went on to win his Senate seat by a landslide of 70 per cent against his Republican rival. Obama was sworn in as senator in 2005.As a senator, Obama served on the Health, Education, Labour and Pensions Committee. One of the first laws he helps pass allows voters to go online and see where their taxes are spent.

As a candidate in the Democratic Primaries in 2007, Obama went head to head with Hillary Clinton. In 2008, he won. The Republican he then had to beat was the elderly war vet John McCain. McCain countered the novelty appeal of Obama by for the first time ever, making the Republican Vice President nominee a woman. But Sarah Palin was even more inexperienced than Obama. And Obamas mere two years in the Senate wasnt an issue for a young electorate weary of two terms of George W Bush.As McCain withered, and Palin imploded, Obama gained ground. Significant victories included Ohio, a virtually all white state. The day before the Presidency was announced, Obamas grandmother, the woman who had raised him during his difficult teenage years, died from cancer.

On 4 November 2008, Obama made history. He secured 52.9 per cent of the popular vote. The new President assembled his team making his old adversary, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state.Within days he ordered the military to start preparing to withdraw from Iraq, a war started by Bush. He also reversed Bushs ban on federal funding to foreign establishments allowing abortion. He would also later reverse Bushs limitations on funding stem cell research and repeal a two decade old law of Dont Ask Dont Tell that banned openly gay people from the military. And in a country where many deny climate change, Obama championed alternative energy. But ever the politician, he saved the troubled car industry, securing jobs: And future votes.

Is an extract from the poem engraved in the Statue of Liberty. But in the worlds wealthiest nation 49 million live below the poverty line. Nearly 1.5 million children are homeless. And almost one in seven Americans are without health insurance. Health reform, including the reduction in ballooning costs, was one of Obamas key election promises.In 2009, despite huge opposition, he covered an additional four million uninsured children with healthcare provisions. But in 2010 the Republicans retook the House of Representatives where federal legislation is passed ensuring other reforms could either be blocked or neutered.

In his first Presidential year, Obama had been named as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. And he did indeed end the American mission in Iraq. This, however, was no pacifist President.In 2011, he ordered the revenge killing of the architect of 9 11, Osama Bin Laden. And partly through the controversial use of drone attacks, Obama would come close to strategically defeating al Qaeda. His intervention in Libya, unlike Bushs, had international support, and again unlike Bush, relied on air power rather than boots on the ground. It directly led to the fall of Gaddafi.But American elections are largely decided on domestic issues, not foreign. His support of gay marriage won over many of his supporters but further alienated many Republicans. And despite inheriting the worst economic crisis since the 1929 Depression, many thought it would be the stagnating economy that would lose him the 2012 election.

Obamas Republican rival was the business millionaire, and ex Mormon missionary, Mitt Romney. It was expected to be close. It wasnt.Romneys business past proved to be a liability rather than an asset. Obamas team painted him as part of the elite that had put the country into decline and then profited from the recession. Then there were further questions over Romneys tax returns. And Romney was further damaged when it was alleged that hed been connected to the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries. And whereas Obama sought to unite, Romney was revealed to believe in divisions with his comments that he believed nearly half the country were dependent on state aid. In November 2012, Obama again won.

you pry it from my cold, dead hands was a saying popularised by the hugely influential National Rifle Association. The NRA lobbies for the Second Amendments right to bear arms. In December 2012, the saying again became a grim reality after Adam Lanza shot dead 20 children, six staff, and then himself, at the suburban Sandy Hook Elementary School. The atrocity joined a long list of school spree killings.When Obama called for gun reform the NRA responded with a call to arm teachers. Then in January 2013, Hadiya Pendleton, a 15 year old girl was shot dead near Obamas home. The week before shed performed at his second inauguration. Her killing highlighted the huge urban death toll from guns even in a state with some of Americas strictest gun laws. His reforms called for a ban on assault weapons and universal background checks on gun license applications.

Obama is the first President in well over a century to come from an urban background and to see gun reform through the prism of the city, rather than the countryside. But the hugely popular gun lobby argues that America protected its first families, established its independence and helped free the Western world from Nazism and totalitarian Communism, all at the point of a gun.Obama took on healthcare reform in his first term in one of the worlds worst recessions and gun control in his second when Republicans had rarely felt so defensive. Few believed he could achieve his goals.But it wouldnt be the first time that Americas first African American President achieves the seemingly impossible.

Barack Obama married the former Michelle Robinson in 1992. They have two daughters: Malia (b. 1998) and Sasha (b. 2001) Barack Obamas father, also named Barack Obama, was black; his mother, Ann Dunham, was white. Obamas grandmother, Madelyn Dunham (nicknamed Toot), died the day before Obama was elected in 2008 Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles before completing his undergraduate degree at Columbia Obamas Senate website described him as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review and the third African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate. The previous African American senators elected by popular vote were Edward Brooke (1967 79, from Massachusetts) and Carol Moseley Braun (1993 99, from Illinois). Two other African Americans were chosen by state senates to become U.S. Senators: Hiram Revels (1870 71, from Mississippi) and Blanche Bruce (1875 81, also from Mississippi) His 2008 Grammy for The Audacity of Hope beat books by two former presidents: Bill Clintons Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World and Jimmy Carters Sunday Mornings in Plains: Bringing Peace to a Changing World.