Barack Obama (original) (raw)
- Born
- Birth name
- Nicknames
- Barry
- Bama
- Rock
- The One
- No Drama Obama
- Mr. President
- President Barack Obama
- President Obama
- Obama
- Barack H. Obama
- B.H. Obama
- BO
- Height
- U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a white American from Wichita, Kansas. His father, Barack Obama Sr., who was black, was from Alego, Kenya. They were both young college students at the University of Hawaii. When his father left for Harvard, his mother and Barack stayed behind, and his father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist. Barack's mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager and moved to Jakarta when Barack was six. He later recounted Indonesia as simultaneously lush and a harrowing exposure to tropical poverty. He returned to Hawaii, where he was brought up largely by his grandparents. The family lived in a small apartment - his grandfather was a furniture salesman and an unsuccessful insurance agent and his grandmother worked in a bank - but Barack managed to get into Punahou School, Hawaii's top prep academy. His father wrote to him regularly but, though he traveled around the world on official business for Kenya, he visited only once, when Barack was ten. Obama attended Columbia University, but found New York's racial tension inescapable. He became a community organizer for a small Chicago church-based group for three years, helping poor South Side residents cope with a wave of plant closings. He then attended Harvard Law School, and in 1990 became the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He turned down a prestigious judicial clerkship, choosing instead to practice civil-rights law back in Chicago, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation. He also began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, and married Michelle Robinson (now Michelle Obama, a fellow attorney; their daughters are Sasha Obama and Malia Obama. Eventually, he was elected to the Illinois state senate, where his district included both Hyde Park and some of the poorest ghettos on the South Side. In 2004, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, representing Illinois, and he gained national attention by giving a rousing and well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. In 2008 he ran for President, and despite having only four years of national political experience, he won. In January 2009, he was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, and the first African-American ever elected to that position. Obama was re-elected to a second term in November 2012 - and was sworn in in January 2013. His presidential term ended in January 2017
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
- Spouse
- Children
- Parents
- Relatives
- Loud, strong voice when delivering speeches.
- Mole just to the left of his nose
- At his wife's suggestion, he quit smoking before his campaign to win the Democratic nomination began.
- Can speak Indonesian to a certain degree, having lived in Indonesia for a number of years during his childhood.
- Is a big fan of the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man and collected the comics as a youth.
- The first US President to be born after the Vietnam War started.
[from keynote speech given at the 2004 Democratic party national convention] There's not a liberal America and a conservative America. There's the United States of America. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war, and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
And it lives on in those Americans -- young and old, rich and poor, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American, gay and straight -- who are tired of a politics that divides us and want to recapture the sense of common purpose that we had when John Kennedy was President of the United States of America.
[regarding former President Bill Clinton's support for his wife--and Obama's opponent for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination--Hillary Clinton] Sometimes I don't know who I'm running against.
[when asked whether he would call on Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to release their tax returns, after Hilary loaned $5 million of her own money to her campaign] I'll just say that I've released my tax returns. That's been a policy I've maintained consistently. I think the American people deserve to know where you get your income from. But I'll leave it up to you guys to chase it down . . . I think we set the bar in terms of transparency and disclosure that has been a consistent theme of my campaign and my career in politics.
In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.