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The couple married in Wailuku on Maui on February 2, 1961, and separated when, in late August 1961, Obama's mother moved with their newborn son to attend the University of Washington in Seattle for a year
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He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a mother from Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham, and a father from Kenya, Barack Obama Sr. He was also raised by his grandfather, who served in Patton’s army.
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Obama's parents divorced
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In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on Molokai.
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From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: Santo Fransiskus Assisi (St. Francis of Assisi) Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother. Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk." He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.
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Obama returned to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.
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After high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, Obama made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to participate in the disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of apartheid.
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Later in 1981, he transferred as a junior to Columbia College, Columbia University, in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations and lived off-campus on West 109th Street.
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He graduated with a BA degree in 1983 and worked for a year at the Business International Corporation, then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
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Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side.
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Obama entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 1988, living in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, president of the journal in his second year, and research assistant to the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe while at Harvard for two years.
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Obama met Michelle Robinson when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin and They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991.
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In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book.
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He then taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, first as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004.
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From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration campaign with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, leading Crain's Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.
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Michelle and Barack married
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He joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-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.
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From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the boards of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and of the Joyce Foundation.
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The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born
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The couple's second daughter, Natasha (Sasha), was born
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Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 3, 2005, becoming the only Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus. CQ Weekly characterized him as a "loyal Democrat" based on analysis of all Senate votes from 2005 to 2007.
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Obama held assignments on the Senate Committees for Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works and Veterans' Affairs through.
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In December 2006, President Bush signed into law the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act, marking the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor.
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He left the Environment and Public Works committee and took additional assignments with Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He also became Chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs.
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Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois.
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Later in 2007, Obama sponsored an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act to add safeguards for personality-disorder military discharges. This amendment passed the full Senate in the spring of 2008
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On June 3, 2008, Senator Obama—along with Senators Tom Carper, Tom Coburn, and John McCain—introduced follow-up legislation: Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008.
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Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate to turn down public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1976.
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Obama won the presidency with 365 electoral votes to 173 received by McCain. Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote to McCain's 45.7 percent. He became the first African American to be elected president.
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Obama announced on November 13, 2008, that he would resign his Senate seat on November 16, 2008, before the start of the lame-duck session, to focus on his transition period for the presidency.
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Obama tried to quit smoking several times, sometimes using nicotine replacement therapy, and, in early 2010, Michelle Obama said that he had successfully quit smoking.
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Obama announced his reelection campaign for 2012 in a video titled "It Begins with Us" that he posted on his website and filed election papers with the Federal Election Commission
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Obama won 332 electoral votes, exceeding the 270 required for him to be reelected as president. With 51.1 percent of the popular vote, Obama became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win the majority of the popular vote.
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FAVORITE BOOKS: Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), Moby Dick,
Shakespeare's Tragedies, Parting the Waters, Gilead (Robinson), Self-Reliance (Emerson), The Bible, Lincoln's Collected Writings.
FAVORITE MUSIC: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder,
Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees.
FAVORITE MOVIES: Casablanca, Godfather I & II, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
FAVORITE TV SHOS: Sportscenter -
His campaign slogan was "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
—PRESIDENT OBAMA
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIDEGN4Js40
