Barack Hussein Obama II

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was eighteen, from Wichita. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was twenty-five, a Kenyan graduate student on a Tom Mboya airlift scholarship. The marriage ended before Obama was three. The father returned to Kenya. Obama saw him once more, at age ten, for a month in Honolulu. The father died in a car accident in Nairobi in 1982.

He was raised by his mother, an anthropologist who spent years in Indonesia doing field research, and by his grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, a furniture salesman and a bank vice president, in Honolulu. He attended Punahou School on scholarship beginning in fifth grade. He graduated in 1979. He was one of three Black students in his class. He wrote later that he had spent his adolescence working out, in his own head, what it meant to be a Black man in a family and a city where almost no one else was.

Occidental College for two years. Columbia College, the next two, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science. Three years of work in New York, then Chicago in 1985, as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project on the South Side. His salary was twelve thousand dollars. He worked out of a basement office at Holy Rosary Church in Roseland. He organized tenants in Altgeld Gardens to demand asbestos removal. That job, more than any class, is what he later identified as his education.

Harvard Law School, 1988 to 1991. In his second year, he was elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review in its one hundred and four year history. The election was national news. Publishers approached him. He signed a book contract that became Dreams from My Father, his memoir, released in 1995 to modest sales that would compound into the millions once he entered national politics. He graduated magna cum laude. He turned down clerkships and corporate offers. He went back to Chicago.

He married Michelle Robinson, a fellow lawyer at Sidley Austin, on October 3, 1992, at Trinity United Church of Christ. He joined the civil rights firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland, where he worked on voting rights and housing discrimination cases. He began teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, a position he held for twelve years. He ran Project Vote in 1992, registering 150,000 new Black voters in Illinois, which helped carry Carol Moseley Braun into the U.S. Senate.

Illinois State Senate, 1997 to 2004, representing Hyde Park and parts of the South Side. He passed death-penalty reform after a series of exonerations in the state, requiring the videotaping of interrogations in capital cases. He passed the Illinois Earned Income Tax Credit. He lost a 2000 Democratic primary challenge to U.S. Representative Bobby Rush by thirty-one points. He told Michelle, and he told himself, that this would be the last election he would lose.

The 2004 U.S. Senate race opened when incumbent Peter Fitzgerald retired. Obama won the Democratic primary with fifty-three percent of the vote in a seven-candidate field. In July 2004, John Kerry invited him to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. He was a state senator. He was not yet in the U.S. Senate. He took the stage and delivered the speech that introduced him to the country. He won the general election that November with seventy percent of the vote, the largest margin in Illinois Senate history.

He announced his presidential campaign on February 10, 2007, on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln had given the House Divided speech in 1858. He was forty-five years old. He had been a U.S. senator for two years. He ran against Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee, with a stronger organizational presence than any Democratic primary opponent had built in decades. The Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, tipped the race. The primary went until June.

On November 4, 2008, he won the presidency with 365 electoral votes and 69.5 million popular votes, the most any presidential candidate had ever received to that point. He carried Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia, states no Democrat had won since 1976, 1976, and 1964 respectively. Roughly 240,000 people gathered in Grant Park in Chicago to hear him accept the result. On January 20, 2009, at the U.S. Capitol, Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath. Michelle Obama held the Lincoln Bible. Sasha was seven. Malia was ten.

The first bill he signed, on January 29, 2009, was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which extended the statute of limitations for equal-pay claims. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $787 billion stimulus, passed three weeks later. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed on March 23, 2010, after fourteen months of congressional combat. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed that July. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in December 2010. Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. Same-sex marriage became a constitutional right under Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015.

He won reelection on November 6, 2012, over Mitt Romney, with 332 electoral votes. His second term included the Iran nuclear agreement, normalization of relations with Cuba, the Paris climate accord, the appointment of Merrick Garland to a Supreme Court seat the Senate refused to fill, and the 2014 launch of My Brother's Keeper Alliance in response to the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. He left office on January 20, 2017, with a Gallup approval rating of fifty-nine percent.

He retired to Kalorama in Washington, D.C., long enough to see Sasha finish high school. He and Michelle Obama signed a joint book deal with Penguin Random House reported at sixty-five million dollars. They founded Higher Ground Productions, which signed a multiyear development deal with Netflix in 2018 and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for American Factory in 2020. He published A Promised Land, the first volume of his presidential memoir, in November 2020. It sold 1.7 million copies in its first week in the United States and Canada alone.