Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States of America
Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
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The early years
By [1] — credited there as “Courtesy of Obama for America”, Fair use, Link
Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is the only president born outside the contiguous 48 states. He was born to an 18-year-old American mother and a 27-year-old Kenyan father. His mother, Ann Dunham (1942–1995), was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of English, Welsh, German, Swiss, and Irish descent. In 2007 it was discovered her great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney emigrated from the village of Moneygall, Ireland to the U.S. in 1850. In July 2012, Ancestry.com found a strong likelihood that Dunham was descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man who lived in the Colony of Virginia during the seventeenth century. Obama has described the ancestors of his grandparents as Scotch-Irish mostly. Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr. (1934–1982), was a married Luo Kenyan from Nyang’oma Kogelo. His last name, Obama, was derived from his Luo descent. Obama’s parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship. The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.
In late August 1961, a few weeks after he was born, Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, Barack’s father completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962. He left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned a Master of Arts in economics. Obama’s parents divorced in March 1964. Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the senior economic analyst in the Ministry of Finance. He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas 1971, before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old. Recalling his early childhood, Obama said: “That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind.” He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.
In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro at the University of Hawaiʻi; he was an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography. The couple married on Molokai on March 15, 1965. After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966. His wife and stepson followed sixteen months later in 1967. The family initially lived in the Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet district of South Jakarta. From 1970, they lived in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng district of Central Jakarta.
Chuck Kennedy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and later worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. In 1996, Obama was elected to represent the 13th district in the Illinois Senate, a position he held until 2004, when he successfully ran for the U.S. Senate. In the 2008 presidential election, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, he was nominated by the Democratic Party for president. Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate and defeated Republican nominee John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin.
Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts in international diplomacy, a decision which drew both criticism and praise. During his first term, his administration responded to the 2008 financial crisis with measures including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to address the Great Recession; a partial extension of the Bush tax cuts; legislation to reform health care; and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a major financial regulation reform bill. Obama also appointed Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the former being the first Hispanic American on the Supreme Court. Obama also oversaw the end of the Iraq War and ordered Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the September 11 attacks. He downplayed Bush’s counterinsurgency model by expanding air strikes and making extensive use of special forces, while encouraging greater reliance on host-government militaries. Obama also ordered the 2011 military intervention in Libya to implement United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which contributed to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
Obama defeated Republican opponent Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan in the 2012 presidential election. In his second term, Obama advocated for gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, took steps to combat climate change by signing the Paris Agreement on climate change and an executive order to limit carbon emissions, and presided over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and other legislation passed during his first term. Obama also initiated sanctions against Russia following its invasion in Ukraine and again after Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. He ordered military intervention in Iraq after gains made by ISIL following the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (a nuclear agreement with Iran), and normalized relations with Cuba. The number of American soldiers in Afghanistan decreased during Obama’s second term, though U.S. soldiers remained in the country throughout his presidency. He also promoted inclusion for LGBT Americans, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to publicly support same-sex marriage.
Pete Souza, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Obama left office in 2017 with high approval ratings both within the United States and among foreign advisories. He continues to reside in Washington, D.C., and remains politically active, campaigning for candidates in various American elections, including in Biden’s successful presidential bid in the 2020 presidential election. Outside politics, Obama has published three books: Dreams from My Father (1995), The Audacity of Hope (2006), and A Promised Land (2020). His presidential library began construction in the South Side of Chicago in 2021. Historians and political scientists rank Obama highly in historical rankings of U.S. presidents.
Legacy and recognition
Obama has been described as one of the most effective campaigners in American history (his 2008 campaign being particularly highlighted) as well as one of the most talented political orators of the 21st century. Historian Julian Zelizer credits Obama with “a keen sense of how the institutions of government work and the ways that his team could design policy proposals.” Zeitzer notes Obama’s policy successes included the economic stimulus package which ended the Great Recession and the Dodd-Frank financial and consumer protection reforms, as well as the Affordable Care Act. Zeitzer also notes the Democratic Party lost power and numbers of elected officials during Obama’s term, saying that the consensus among historians is that Obama “turned out to be a very effective policymaker but not a tremendously successful party builder.” Zeitzer calls this the “defining paradox of Obama’s presidency”
Legacy and recognition (cont.)
The Brookings Institution noted that Obama passed “only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare)—and a fragile one at that—the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions.” David W. Wise noted that Obama fell short “in areas many Progressives hold dear”, including the continuation of drone strikes, not going after big banks during the Great Recession, and failing to strengthen his coalition before pushing for Obamacare. Wise called Obama’s legacy that of “a disappointingly conventional president”.
Obama’s most significant accomplishment is generally considered to be the Affordable Care Act (ACA), provisions of which went into effect from 2010 to 2020. Many attempts by Senate Republicans to repeal the ACA, including a “skinny repeal”, have thus far failed. However, in 2017, the penalty for violating the individual mandate was repealed effective 2019. Together with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act amendment, it represents the U.S. healthcare system’s most significant regulatory overhaul and expansion of coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
Many commentators credit Obama with averting a threatened depression and pulling the economy back from the Great Recession. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Obama administration created 11.3 million jobs from the month after his first inauguration to the end of his second term. In 2010, Obama signed into effect the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Passed as a response to the 2008 financial crisis, it brought the most significant changes to financial regulation in the United States since the regulatory reform that followed the Great Depression under Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 2009, Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, which contained in it the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the first addition to existing federal hate crime law in the United States since Democratic President Bill Clinton signed into law the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996. The act expanded existing federal hate crime laws in the United States, and made it a federal crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.
As president, Obama advanced LGBT rights. In 2010, he signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act, which brought an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the U.S. armed forces that banned open service from LGBT people; the law went into effect the following year. In 2016, his administration brought an end to the ban on transgender people serving openly in the U.S. armed forces. A Gallup poll, taken in the final days of Obama’s term, showed that 68 percent of Americans believed the U.S. had made progress on LGBT rights during Obama’s eight years in office.
By Pete Souza – White House Flickr Feed, Public Domain, Link
Obama substantially escalated the use of drone strikes against suspected militants and terrorists associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2016, the last year of his presidency, the U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs on seven different countries. Obama left about 8,400 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, 5,262 in Iraq, 503 in Syria, 133 in Pakistan, 106 in Somalia, seven in Yemen, and two in Libya at the end of his presidency.
According to Pew Research Center and United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, from December 31, 2009, to December 31, 2015, inmates sentenced in U.S. federal custody declined by five percent. This is the largest decline in sentenced inmates in U.S. federal custody of any president since Jimmy Carter. By contrast, the federal prison population increased significantly under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) called Obama’s human rights record “mixed”, adding that “he has often treated human rights as a secondary interest—nice to support when the cost was not too high, but nothing like a top priority he championed.”
Obama left office in January 2017 with a 60 percent approval rating. He gained 10 spots from the same survey in 2015 from the Brookings Institution that ranked him the 18th-greatest American president. In Gallup’s 2018 job approval poll for the past 10 U.S. presidents, he received a 63 percent approval rating.
All content Wikipedia contributors, except where otherwise noted. (2026, February 2). Barack Obama. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:25, February 6, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barack_Obama&oldid=1336157067