Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the Junior United States Senator from Illinois, and the President-electof the United States of America. He is expected to take office as the forty-fourth President of the United States on January 20, 2009. Obama is the first African American to be elected President of the United States, and was the first to be nominated for President by a major U.S. political party. Obama is also the first candidate born in Hawaii to have been nominated and subsequently elected president.A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he became the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote.
Early Life and Career:
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., , and Ann Dunham, His parents met in 1960 while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student. The couple married February 2, 1961, they separated when Obama was two years old and subsequently divorced in 1964. Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.
After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools, until he was ten years old. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.
Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia College in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then at the start of the following year worked for a year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland on Chicago's far South Side, and worked there for three years from June 1985 to May 1988. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. At the end of his first year, he was selected, based on his grades and a writing competition, as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In February 1990, in his second year, he was elected president of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the Law Review's staff of eighty editors. Obama's election as the first black president of the Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles. During his summers, he returned to Chicago where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms till 1990. After graduating with a from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.
Beginning in 1992, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, being first classified as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004.
He in 1993, joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a twelve-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004.
In mid-2002, Obama began considering a run for the U.S. Senate; he enlisted political strategist David Axelrod that fall and formally announced his candidacy in January 2003. He received over 52% of the vote in the March 2004 primary, emerging 29% ahead of his nearest Democratic rival.Obama's expected opponent in the general election, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race in June 2004.
In August 2004, two months after Ryan's withdrawal and less than three months before Election Day, Alan Keyes accepted the Illinois Republican Party's nomination to replace Ryan. A long-time resident of Maryland, Keyes established legal residency in Illinois with the nomination. In the November 2004 general election, Obama received 70% of the vote to Keyes's 27%, the largest victory margin for a statewide race in Illinois history. Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 4, 2005. Obama was the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history, and the third to have been popularly elected. He is the only Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus. In 2005 he was ranked sixteenth, and in 2006 he was ranked tenth. In 2008, he was ranked by Congress.org as the eleventh most powerful Senator.
On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois. The choice of the announcement site was symbolic because it was also where Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic "House Divided" speech in 1858. Throughout the campaign, Obama has emphasized the issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care, at one point identifying these as his top three priorities.
Obama's campaign raised $58 million during the first half of 2007, of which donations of less than $200, classified as "small donations" by campaign laws, accounted for $16.4 million. The $58 million set the record for fundraising by a presidential campaign in the first six months of the calendar year before the election. The magnitude of the small donation portion was outstanding from both the absolute and relative perspectives. In January 2008, his campaign set another fundraising record with $36.8 million, the most ever raised in one month by a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries.
Among the January 2008 DNC-sanctioned state contests, Obama tied with Hillary Clinton for delegates in the New Hampshire primary and won more delegates than Clinton in the Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina elections and caucuses. On Super Tuesday, he emerged with 20 more delegates than Clinton. He again broke fundraising records in the first two months of 2008, raising over $90 million for his primary to Clinton's $45 million. After Super Tuesday, Obama won the eleven remaining February primaries and caucuses. Obama and Clinton split delegates and states nearly equally in the March 4 contests of Vermont, Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island; Obama closed the month by winning Wyoming and Mississippi. 
In March 2008, a controversy broke out concerning Obama's former pastor of twenty years, Jeremiah Wright, after ABC News broadcast clips of his racially and politically charged sermons. Initially, Obama responded by defending Wright's wider role in Chicago's African American community, but condemned his remarks and ended Wright's relationship with the campaign. During the controversy, Obama delivered a speech entitled "A More Perfect Union"that addressed issues of race. Obama subsequently resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ "to avoid the impression that he endorsed the entire range of opinions expressed at that church."
During April, May, and June, Obama won the North Carolina, Oregon, and Montana primaries and remained ahead in the count of pledged delegates, while Clinton won the Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and South Dakota primaries. During the period, Obama received endorsements from more superdelegates than did Clinton. On May 31, the Democratic National Committee agreed to seat all of the Michigan and Florida delegates at the national convention, each with a half-vote, narrowing Obama's delegate lead while increasing the delegate count needed to win. On June 3, with all states counted, Obama passed the threshold to become the presumptive nominee. On that day, he gave a victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. Clinton suspended her campaign and endorsed him on June 7. From that point on, he campaigned for the general election race against Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee.
On June 19, Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate to turn down public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1976, reversing his earlier intention to accept it.
On August 23, 2008, Obama selected Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate. At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Obama's former rival Hillary Clinton gave a speech strongly supporting Obama's candidacy and later called for Obama to be nominated by acclamation as the Democratic presidential candidate. Then, on August 28, Obama delivered a speech to the 84,000 supporters in Denver. During the speech, he accepted his party's nomination and presented his policy goals.
After McCain was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, polls indicated that he had closed the gap with Obama. There were three presidential debates between Obama and McCain in September and October 2008. After the debates, Obama pulled ahead in national polls. On November 2, 2008, Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died from cancer at the age of 86. Obama learned of his grandmother's death on November 3, one day before his election as the 44th President of the United States.
On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain and became the first African American to be elected President of the United States.
In his victory speech, delivered before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Chicago:-
“Obama proclaimed that "Change has come to America.”
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment