Biography: Barack Obama
A first-term senator from Illinois, Barack Obama describes himself as a 'skinny kid with a funny name' and an unlikely biography. He rose to political prominence as the result of early opposition to the war in Iraq and an attention-grabbing speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, when he was only a state legislator.
Sen. Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961 to a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, who met while both were students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His father eventually returned to Kenya and his mother later married an Indonesian man, which prompted the family to relocate to Jakarta, Indonesia in 1967. At age 10, Sen. Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his maternal grandparents and attended the Punahou School, one of the state's top prepatory schools.
After high school, Sen. Obama moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College for two years before transferring to Columbia University, where he majored in political science. He moved to Chicago in 1985 and became a community organizer with the Developing Communities Project, a church-based organization on Chicago's impoverished South Side.
Sen. Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988 and became the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. After receiving his law degree, he returned to Chicago to practice civil rights law and to teach at the University of Chicago Law School. He met his wife, Michele Robinson, when both were lawyers at a Chicago firm. The couple married in 1992.
Sen. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996, representing the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago. He won re-election twice, in 1998 and 2002. The only electoral defeat in his political career came in 2000, when he lost a Democratic primary race for the U.S. House of Representatives against incumbent Bobby Rush.
Sen. Obama served as a state senator until 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate. After winning his party's primary, he was invited to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His speech, which chronicled his unlikely biography, called for an end to divisive politics and lauded Democratic candidate John Kerry, helped transform the little-known legislator into a national figure in the Democratic Party. Sen. Obama later won the statewide election in Illinois with 70% of the vote.
In February 2007, Sen. Obama announced his candidacy for president and entered the Democratic primary race. After a long and intense primary season in which he broke numerous fundraising records and exchanged political jabs with Hillary Clinton, he clinched the nomination on June 3, 2008.
On June 19, Sen. Obama, the first African-American candidate of a major party, became the first major party candidate to reject public financing. |
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