Forty-fourth President - 2009-Present
Born: August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii
Barack Obama made history as the United States’ first African-American president when he was elected on November 4, 2008, defeating Republican Arizona Senator John McCain. The match-up was widely seen as generational, with the forty-six-year-old Obama facing the seventy-one-year-old McCain, who, if elected, would have been the oldest U.S. president. In an atmosphere of economic crisis and war, there was the highest voter turnout in forty years, with Senator Obama winning 68 percent of the electoral votes. Mr. Obama, the one-term, junior Democratic Senator from Illinois, ran under a slogan of “change” and used multimedia campaigning, particularly aimed at younger voters, to an extent that had not been possible in the past.
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father, Barack Obama, Sr., and an American mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, though his parents separated when he was two and later divorced. His mother remarried, and in 1967, the family moved to Indonesia with his stepfather. The young Obama, known then as Barry, remained there until at age ten he returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his maternal grandparents. He finished his education through high school at Punahou School, a private college preparatory school. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York, where he was awarded a degree in political science in 1983.
In 1985, he moved to Chicago, where he was a community organizer on the city’s south side, working to improve living conditions for the city’s poor. He attended Harvard Law School and was named the president of the Harvard Law Review. During this time, he met his future wife, Michelle, when he served as a summer associate at the law firm where she worked. They married in 1992 and now have two daughters: Sasha and Malia.
After law school, Mr. Obama returned to Chicago to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago and work as a civil rights lawyer. It was during this time he ran for the Illinois state senate, where he served for eight years representing Chicago’s south side. Barack Obama ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000; four years later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. During that campaign Barack Obama was introduced to the nation when he was selected to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Barack Obama authored two bestselling books, Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). In February 2007, he launched his presidential bid in a crowded democratic field that included former first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
President Obama’s private home in the Kenwood section of Chicago, Illinois. (Jeff Haynes/Polaris)
As it is still early in President Obama’s term, no public plans have been revealed for his presidential library. He does have a variety of locations to choose from, though, that have played a part in his past. With his close connections to Chicago, some are predicting that he will choose the University of Chicago, where he taught.