Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii, to Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a Black Kenyan student; his father left when he was two. From age six to ten he lived in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, attending Catholic and Muslim schools. “I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child,” he later said. Sent back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, he attended the Punahou School — a good but not outstanding student who played varsity basketball and, he admitted, “dabbled in drugs and alcohol.” In Hawaii, where few African Americans lived, he recalled, he was “trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

After Occidental College and Columbia University, he became a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, pressing city hall to repair the Altgeld Gardens public housing project — and concluded he could not get things done without a law degree. At Harvard Law School he graduated magna cum laude and was elected the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, winning over its conservative minority by promising to treat their views fairly. The attention led to a memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995). At a Chicago law firm he met Michelle Robinson, who supervised his summer work; they married in 1992.

Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School, practiced civil rights law, and in 1996 won a seat in the Illinois Senate, where he passed campaign finance reform and crime legislation. After losing a 2000 congressional primary badly — “a drubbing,” he called it — he spoke out in 2002 against the coming invasion of Iraq: “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” In 2004 he won a U.S. Senate seat by the largest margin in Illinois history and electrified the Democratic National Convention: “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s a United States of America.” In 2008 he defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and John McCain for the presidency.

Inaugurated on January 20, 2009, in the depths of a recession, Obama signed an $800 billion stimulus and continued the rescue of the banks. In March 2010 he signed the Affordable Care Act — his most substantive legislative achievement — which barred insurers from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, created insurance exchanges, and expanded Medicaid; that year he also signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform. Abroad, he withdrew most troops from Iraq, sent more to Afghanistan, and in May 2011 ordered the raid that killed bin Laden. Re-elected in 2012, he increasingly turned to executive action, including DACA protections for some undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, and he focused his second-term diplomacy on the Middle East and climate change.

Obama described himself as shaped by “a multiplicity of cultures,” and his politics stressed unity across lines of race and party — the “audacity of hope,” a phrase he borrowed from his pastor and used as the title of his second book. He became a Christian in 1988. In office he favored pragmatic, often market-based solutions, such as a health system built on subsidized private insurance.

The Affordable Care Act passed narrowly amid fierce opposition and faced years of legal and political attacks. The Tea Party movement mobilized against his administration, and after Republicans won the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, most of his legislative agenda stalled; efforts at immigration reform and gun control failed. His early political career also included hardball tactics: in his first state senate race he successfully challenged the petitions of the incumbent, Alice Palmer, who had originally backed him, and kept her name off the ballot.

Obama left office on January 20, 2017, at fifty-five, and stayed in Washington while his younger daughter finished high school, planning the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. A C-SPAN survey of historians and presidential scholars ranked him twelfth among all presidents. Whatever the verdict on his policies, he will always be the first African American president in U.S. history.