Barack Obama
A community organiser and constitutional-law lecturer, president of the Harvard Law Review, and the first Black president of the United States.
Biography
Obama was born in Honolulu to an American mother and a Kenyan father, spent four childhood years in Indonesia, and returned to Hawaii to be raised largely by his grandparents. After college he spent three years organising on the South Side of Chicago among laid-off steelworkers, then went to Harvard Law School, where he was elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.
He practised civil-rights law, taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for twelve years, served eight years in the Illinois Senate, and was elected to the United States Senate in 2004, the year a convention speech made him nationally known. He won the presidency in 2008 and re-election in 2012.
His two terms began in the deepest recession since the 1930s and covered the 2009 stimulus, the rescue of the car makers, the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial law, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the withdrawal from Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan, the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the reopening of relations with Cuba, and eleven years of uninterrupted job growth beginning in 2010.
Education
- Punahou School, Honolulu, Graduated (1979)
- Occidental College, Los Angeles (1979–1981)
- Columbia University, B.A. in political science (1983)
- Harvard Law School, J.D., magna cum laude (1991)
Offices held before the presidency
- Lecturer, then senior lecturer, in constitutional law, University of Chicago Law School, 1992–2004
- Illinois State Senator, 1997–2004
- United States Senator from Illinois, 2005–2008