BARACK OBAMA

Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Introduction

Barack Obama is the first of person of the African-American community to be elected as the President of the United States. He achieved his victory in 2008 running as a self described post-partisan candidate with a left-of-center message emphasizing “change” and “hope.” In that election, coinciding with the worst economic crisis after the Great Depression and two protracted wars, the Democrats not only won the White House but significantly expanded their majority in both houses of Congress. Some commentators immediately predicted that the election would go down in history as on par with the political realignments of 1932 and 1980. “Emphatically, comprehensively,” the New Yorker editorialized, “the public has turned against conservatism at home and neo-conservatism abroad.”

Obama became the forty-fourth president by defeating Senator John McCain (R-AZ), garnering nearly 53 percent of the popular vote and carrying the swing states of Ohio and Florida as well as such traditional red states as Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. In the end, Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden (the long-time senator from Delaware), won the Electoral College by 365-173 votes. This had been preceded by Obama's surprising defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in a hotly contested Democratic primary.

Early Life and Career

Barack Obama is the son of a biracial marriage: his father an African from Kenya, his mother a European American from Kansas. Raised by his maternal grandparents, as well as his mother, Barack attended Occidental College (1979-1981), graduated from Columbia University (1983), and earned his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School (1991). Meanwhile, Barack Obama met Michelle LaVaughn Robinson while he was working as a summer associate at a Chicago law firm (1989), where she was his adviser. Despite initial resistance, she eventually accepted his requests for dates, and they were married in 1992. Six years later, Malia was born (1998), followed by Sasha (2001).

After attending Harvard Law School in 1991 where he served as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he returned to Illinois and directed Project Vote (1992). He also joined a private law firm, published an autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), lectured at the University of Chicago, and served in the Illinois Senate (1997-2005). As a state senator, he sponsored legislation for tax credits to the working poor and a measure that mandated videotaping of all interrogations conducted by state and local police forces. In 2000, he lost a primary race for Congress against Democratic incumbent Bobby Rush, a prominent civil rights leader (Hart, 2010). In 2004, Obama won an open U.S. Senate seat, defeating the conservative Republican Alan Keyes.

Before Barack met Michelle, he had worked as a writer and financial analyst (1984-1985), then as a community organizer (1985-1988). While at Harvard, he had become the first president of African American community of the Harvard Law Review (1990). After earning his J.D., he chaired a Chicago voter-registration drive (1992) and started teaching for a specific period (1993-2004) at the University of Chicago Law ...