Barack Obama

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Barack Obama
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Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is
the 44th and current President of the United
States. He is the first African American to hold
the office. Obama previously served as the junior
United States Senator from Illinois, from January
2005 until he resigned after his election to the
presidency in November 2008.
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A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate
of Columbia University and Harvard Law School,
where he was the 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 in Chicago and taught
constitutional law at the University of Chicago
Law School from 1992 to 2004.Reflecting later on
his formative 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. 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. At the 2008 Civil
Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his
high-school drug use as his "greatest moral
failure."
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Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in
November 2004 following his election to the U.S.
Senate.

• 1997-2004
• Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996,
  succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator
  from Illinois's 13th District.
• Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for
  legislation reforming ethics and health care
  laws. He sponsored a law increasing tax credits
  for low-income workers, negotiated welfare
  reform, and promoted increased subsidies for
  childcare.
• In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the
  Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services
  Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the
  minority, regained a majority. He sponsored and
  led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation
  to monitor racial profiling by requiring police
  to record the race of drivers they detained, and
  legislation making Illinois the first state to
  mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations.

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U.S. Senator 20052008

• Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 4,
  2005.
• Obama cosponsored the Secure America and Orderly
  Immigration Act. He introduced two initiatives
  bearing his name LugarObama, which expanded the
  NunnLugar cooperative threat reduction concept
  to conventional weapons, and the CoburnObama
  Transparency Act, which authorized the
  establishment of USAspending.gov, a web search
  engine on federal spending.
• Later in 2007, Obama sponsored an amendment to
  the Defense Authorization Act adding safeguards
  for personality disorder military discharges.
• Obama also sponsored a Senate amendment to the
  State Children's Health Insurance Program
  providing one year of job protection for family
  members caring for soldiers with combat-related
  injuries.

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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 viewed as symbolic because
it was also where Abraham Lincoln delivered his
historic "House Divided" speech in 1858.
Throughout the campaign, Obama emphasized the
issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing
energy independence and providing universal
health care.On November 4, Obama won the
presidency by winning 365 electoral votes to 173
that McCain received, in the process capturing
52.9 of the popular vote to McCain's 45.7, to
become the first African American to be elected
president. Obama delivered his victory speech
before hundreds of thousands of supporters in
Chicago's Grant Park.
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Political PositionsIn April 2005, Obama defended
the New Deal social welfare policies of Franklin
D. Roosevelt and opposed Republican proposals to
establish private accounts for Social
Security.Obama has supported eliminating taxes
for senior citizens with incomes of under
50,000, and raising taxes on income over
250,000, on capital gains, and on dividends.
As an environmental initiative, Obama proposed
a cap and trade auction system with no
grandfathering to restrict carbon emissions and a
ten year program of investments in new energy
sources to reduce U.S. dependence on imported
oil.Obama addressed the first high-profile
Chicago anti-Iraq War rally (??????) ,and spoke
out against the war. He addressed another
anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd
that "it's not too late" to stop the war.Obama
stated in 2007 that he would enact budget cuts in
the range of tens of billions of dollars, stop
investing in "unproven" missile (????????)
defense systems, not weaponize space, "slow
development of Future Combat Systems", and work
towards eliminating all nuclear weapons.