Barack Obama

> *44th President of the United States*
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## U.S. President

Barack Obama

**Barack Hussein Obama II** (b. August 4, 1961), simply known as **Obama**, was the 44th President of the United States from January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017. Obama was a history-making U.S. President for being the first African American in both U.S. and Black American history to have served as President of the United States. Obama won two mind-blowing Electoral College landslides with comfortable popular vote victories against Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012, respectively, to become a two-term President. President Obama became a pop culture icon in both America and worldwide, especially in Canada, the UK, and Obama's ancestral country of Kenya. President Obama is widely known for his crowning jewel achievement, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which gave healthcare coverage protection to Americans with a preexisting condition from corporate discrimination. Despite Obama's popularity, he was also a polarizing figure, attracting stark hostility from Republicans and conservatives, as well as some of the left-wing, resulting in his skinning midterm defeats in 2010 and 2014, as well as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 to replace the term-limited Obama.

## Biography

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. was born in Honolulu, in the still-new U.S. state of Hawaii, on August 4, 1961, Obama was born into the interracial marriage of Barack Obama Sr (1934-1982) and Ann Dunham (1942-1995). His parents divorced however in 1964, and he and his mother had lived with his maternal grandparents, then his mother remarried to an Indonesian man, Lolo Soetoro, and the couple had a daughter together, giving Obama a younger sister. As a result of his mother's second marriage, he lived in Indonesia. Obama moved back to the United States when he became an adult, he had news that his father died of a car accident, devastating him. Obama's mother and stepfather divorced as well. Obama found home in Chicago, Illinois, where he entered law school to become a lawyer and it is also where he met his future wife, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. After a time, Barack and Michelle wedded in 1992, and had two daughters together, Malia (b. 1998) and Natasha (a.k.a. Sasha; b. 2001). In 1995, Obama's mother had passed away, devastating him dearly, and his daughters were never born yet when this happened. Obama was a community organizer and graduated from Harvard. Obama was a civil rights attorney as well.

Obama entered politics in 1996, he was elected as a Democrat to the Illinois Senate during the 1996 U.S. elections, which saw the cruising reelection of U.S. President Bill Clinton but a still-new Republican Congress also reelected alongside the Democrat Clinton. In the 2000 U.S. elections, Obama ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, he lost. In 2004, Obama ran for Congress again, this time for the U.S. Senate, he ultimately demolished his Republican rival and known individual, Alan Keyes, in a landslide, but during his campaign for such office, Obama made a name for himself at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he spoke of unity of Americans regardless of party.

After the Republican Party of President George W. Bush got crushed in the 2006 midterm elections, Obama decided to exploit a weakened and vulnerable Republican Party by going bold and run for President of the United States in the 2008 presidential election.