Barack Hussein Obama II (pronounced /bəˈrɑːk hʊˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the forty-fourth and current President of theUnited States. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 3, 2005, until his resignation on November 16, 2008, following his election to the presidency. The first African American elected President, he was sworn in on January 20, 2009, in an inaugural ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.
Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer, and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in theIllinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama was elected to the Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.
As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, Obama helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, andAfrica. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for U.S. military personnel returning from combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Family and personal life
In June 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson, who later became his wife, when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm ofSidley Austin.[166] Assigned for three months as Obama's adviser at the firm, Robinson joined him at group social functions, but declined his initial requests to date.[167] They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992.[168] The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998,[169] followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), in 2001.[170] In Chicago, the Obamas sent their daughters to the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. When they moved to Washington, D.C., in January 2009, the girls started at the private Sidwell Friends School.[171]
Obama was known as "Barry" in his youth, but asked to be addressed with his given name during his college years.[172]
Applying the proceeds of a book deal, in 2005 the family moved from a Hyde Park, Chicago condominium to their current $1.6 million house in neighboring Kenwood.[173] The purchase of an adjacent lot and sale of part of it to Obama by the wife of developer and friend Tony Rezko attracted media attention because of Rezko's indictment and subsequent conviction on political corruption charges that were unrelated to Obama.[174][175]
In December 2007, Money magazine estimated the Obama family's net worth at $1.3 million.[176] Their 2007 tax return showed a household income of $4.2 million—up from about $1 million in 2006 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books.[177]
In a 2006 interview, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family. "Michelle will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations." he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher."[179] Obama has seven half-siblings from his Kenyan father's family, six of them living, and a half-sister with whom he was raised, Maya Soetoro-Ng, the daughter of his mother and her Indonesian second husband.[180] Obama's mother was survived by her Kansas-born mother, Madelyn Dunham[181] until her death on November 2, 2008, just before the presidential election.[182] In Dreams from My Father, Obama ties his mother's family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, president of the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War.[183]
Obama plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team.[184] While he has never been a heavy smoker, Obama has tried to quit smoking several times, including a well-publicized and ongoing effort which he began before launching his presidential campaign.[185] Obama has said he will not smoke in the White House.[186]
Obama is a Protestant Christian whose religious views have evolved in his adult life. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that he "was not raised in a religious household." He describes his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as "non-practicing Methodists and Baptists") to be detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known." He describes his father as "raised aMuslim," but a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful." In the book, Obama explains how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change."[187][188] He was baptized at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988 and was an active member there for two decades.[189][190]
Besides his native English, Obama speaks Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), at least on a colloquial level, which he learned during his four childhood years in Jakarta.[191] After the APEC summit in November 2008, Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono related a telephone conversation with Obama in Indonesian to Indonesian media. Obama had told Yudhoyona that he missed Indonesian food like Nasi Goreng, Bakso or Rambutan
