Obama biography republicans

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States—becoming the first African American to serve in that office—on January 20, 2009.

The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met and married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in 1992. Their two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha), were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996 and served there for eight years. In 2004, he was elected by a record majority to the US Senate from Illinois and, in February 2007, announced his candidacy for president. After winning a closely fought contest against New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee for president, in the general election.

When President Obama took office, he faced very significant challenges. The economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W. Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help struggling financial institutions. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops deployed in difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the first two years of his first term, President Obama was able to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to improve the economy, pass health-care reform legislation, and withdraw most US troops from Iraq. After the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, the president spent significant time and political effort negotiating, for the most part unsuccessfully, with congressional Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit. After winning reelection in 2012, Obama began his second term focused on s

Debunked conspiracy theories

"Birtherism" redirects here. For similar challenges against other people, see Natural-born-citizen clause (United States) § Eligibility challenges.

During Barack Obama's campaign for president in 2008, throughout his presidency and afterwards, there was extensive news coverage of Obama's religious preference, birthplace, and of the individuals questioning his religious belief and citizenship – efforts eventually known as the "birther movement", or birtherism, names by which it is widely referred to across media. The movement falsely asserted Obama was ineligible to be President of the United States because he was not a natural-born citizen of the United States as required by Article Two of the Constitution. Studies have found these birther conspiracy theories to be most firmly held by Republicans strong in both political knowledge and racial resentment.

Theories alleged that Obama's published birth certificate was a forgery – that his actual birthplace was not Hawaii but Kenya. Other theories alleged that Obama became a citizen of Indonesia in childhood, thereby losing his U.S. citizenship. Still others claimed that Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen because he was born a dual citizen (British and American). A number of political commentators have characterized these various claims as a racist reaction to Obama's status as the first African-American president of the United States.

These claims were promoted by fringe theorists (pejoratively referred to as "birthers"), including businessman and television personality Donald Trump, who would later succeed Obama as president. Some theorists sought court rulings to declare Obama ineligible to take office, or to grant access to various documents which they claimed would support such ineligibility; none of these eff

Early in his presidency he escalated the US-led war in Afghanistan. But Mr Obama has since brought home the 33,000 extra troops he sent to that theatre of conflict.

He also committed the US to turn the security mission over to Afghan troops by the end of 2014, in an attempt to end a war that began more than a decade ago.

Mr Obama was born in 1961 and named after his father, a Kenyan intellectual who met the future president's mother, Ann, a white teenager from Kansas, while studying at the University of Hawaii.

When Mr Obama was a toddler, his father abandoned the family and the couple divorced. Father and son were to meet only once more, during a brief visit to Hawaii in 1971 by the elder Barack Obama. He died in a car crash in 1982 in Nairobi.

When Mr Obama was six, his mother married an Indonesian man and the family moved to Jakarta. Then known as "Barry", Mr Obama later moved back to Hawaii, where he was raised mainly by his grandparents.

Mr Obama's upbringing in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country by population, and his Kenyan-Muslim heritage fuelled right-wing conspiracy theories that he was not born in the US, or that he was a secret Muslim.

In 2008 and 2011, Mr Obama produced two separate copies of his birth certificate to prove that he had been born in the US state of Hawaii.

After graduating from Columbia University in New York, Mr Obama worked for three years as a community organiser in poor neighbourhoods in Chicago.

He then attended Harvard Law School, becoming the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

While working at a Chicago law firm, he met Michelle Robinson. The couple married in 1992 and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha; the Obamas became the first couple since Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter to live in the White House with young children.

After Harvard, Mr Obama returned to Chicago to practise civil rights law, representing victims of housing and employme

President of the United States from 2009 to 2017

For other uses, see Barack Obama (disambiguation).

"Barack" and "Obama" redirect here. For other uses, see Barack (disambiguation) and Obama (disambiguation).

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president in U.S. history. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and later worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. In 1996, Obama was elected to represent the 13th district in the Illinois Senate, a position he held until 2004, when he successfully ran for the U.S. Senate. In the 2008 presidential election, after a close primary campai