Barack Obama US President, Lawyer, U.S. Senator

Barack Obama is the 44th and current president of the United States America (USA).He is the first African American to serve as US president. He is first elected to the presidency in November 4, 2008, and won re-election in 2012. Obama’s story is the American story values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead.
Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961 from father Kenya and a mother Kansas. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.
After working Obama’s way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, he moved to Chicago, where worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.
Obama went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.
His years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a US Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.
2008 Presidential Election
In February 2007, Barack made headlines when he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was locked in a tight battle with former first lady and US senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton. On June 3, 2008, He became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee after winning a sufficient number of pledged delegates during the primaries, and Clinton delivered her full support to Barack for the duration of his campaign. On November 4, 2008, Barack defeated Republican presidential nominee John McCain, 52.9 percent to 45.7 percent, to win election as the 44th president of the US and the first African-American to hold this office.
Challenges and Successes
In the second part of his first term as president, Barack faced a number of obstacles and scored some victories as well. In spite of opposition from Congressional Republicans and the populist Tea Party movement, he signed his health care reform plan, known as the Affordable Care Act, into law in March 2010. The new law prohibited the denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, allowed citizens under 26 years old to be insured under parental plans, provided for free health screenings for certain citizens and expanded insurance coverage and access to medical care to millions of Americans. Opponents of the Affordable Care Act, which foes dubbed "Obamacare," asserted that it added new costs to the country's overblown budget, violated the Constitution with its requirement for individuals to obtain insurance and amounted to a “government takeover” of health care.
2012 Election
As he did in 2008, during his campaign for a second presidential term, he focused on grassroots initiatives. Celebrities such as Anna Wintour and Sarah Jessica Parker aided the president's campaign by hosting fund-raising events.
"I guarantee you, we will move this country forward," Obama stated in June 2012, at a campaign event in Maryland. "We will finish what we started. And we'll remind the world just why it is that the United States of America is the greatest nation on Earth."
He faced Republican opponent Mitt Romney and Romney's vice-presidential running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, in the 2012 election. On November 6, 2012, he won a second four-year term as president by receiving nearly five million more votes than Romney and capturing more than 60 percent of the Electoral College.