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This article is about the 44th president of the United States. For his father, see Barack Obama, Sr.

Barack Hussein Obama II (i/ /; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, running unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000.

In 2004, Obama received national attention during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United States Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary, his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July, and his election to the Senate in November. He began his presidential campaign in 2007 and, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his election, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

During his first two years in office, Obama signed into law economic stimulus legislation in response to the Great Recession in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. Other major domestic initiatives in his first term included the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often referred to as "Obamacare"; the DoddFrank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. In foreign policy, Obama ended U.S. military involvement in the Iraq War, increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. military involvement in Libya, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. In November 2010, the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives as the Democratic Party lost a total of 63 seats; and, after a lengthy debate over federal spending and whether or not to raise the nation's debt limit, Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.

Obama was re-elected president in November 2012, defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2013. During his second term, Obama has promoted domestic policies related to gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and has called for full equality for LGBT Americans, while his administration has filed briefs which urge the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 and California's Proposition 8 as unconstitutional. In foreign policy, Obama has continued the process of ending U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan.

Obama was born on August 4, 1961,[2] at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,[3][4][5] and would become the first President to have been born in Hawaii.[6] His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry.[7] His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyangoma Kogelo, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.[8][9] The couple married in Wailuku on Maui on February 2, 1961,[10][11] and separated when, in late August 1961, Obama's mother moved with their newborn son to attend the University of Washington in Seattle for one year. In the meantime, Obama, Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at Harvard University on a scholarship. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.[12] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971.[13] He died in an automobile accident in 1982 when his son was 21 years old.[14]

In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian EastWest Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.[15] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet subdistrict of south Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng subdistrict of central Jakarta.[16] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.[17]

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.[18] Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.[19] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother and sister returned to Indonesia in 1975 to begin anthropology field work.[20] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a PhD in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for ovarian cancer and uterine cancer.[21]

Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around methat he was black as pitch, my mother white as milkbarely registered in my mind."[9] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[22] Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offeredto experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respectbecame an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."[23] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".[24] Obama was also a member of the "choom gang", a self-named group of friends that spent time together and occasionally smoked marijuana.[25][26]

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to participate in the disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of apartheid.[27] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and half-sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan and India for three weeks.[27] Later in 1981, he transferred as a junior to Columbia College, Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations[28] and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation,[29] then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.[30][31]

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