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- Early Life
- Making History
- Prioritizing Health Care
- Fighting Terrorism
- Opening Doors
- Supreme Court shake-up
- Lasting Legacy
Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was raised by his mother and her parents. He was the first president born there and the first to be born after the country had 50 states. Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, before transferring to New York’s Columbia University. He took a break from sch...
A Democrat, Obama became the first African American to run for president on a major political party’s ticket. He then went on to become the first African American to be elected president of the United States. (His white mother was from Kansas; his black father from Kenya, a country in Africa.) He took office during the biggest economic crisis since...
Obama’s biggest goal as president was to help all citizens afford health care. At the time, almost 50 million Americans didn’t have health insurance, which meant that some families didn’t have the money to go to the doctor. Obama wanted to change that. Obama called his health care plan the Affordable Care Act (ACA); it later became nicknamed Obamac...
Although the economy continued to improve in the United States, Obama faced challenges in other countries. The United States was fighting two wars in the Middle Eastern countries of Afghanistan and Iraq. President George W. Bush had sent troops to Afghanistan after the terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. Bus...
Despite wars overseas, Obama reached out to other nations in hopes of maintaining peace. In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cut ties with the island nation of Cuba because of its support for the communist Soviet Union (now Russia). Obama tried to ease those tensions by re-opening an embassy there in 2015. He also went to Hiroshima, Japan, wher...
During the first two years of Obama’s presidency, he appointed two new justices to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States. Obama replaced the retiring male justices with women: Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the first person of Latino heritage on the high court. For the first time, the court had three female justices. Obama’s n...
Obama left office after two terms in January 2017 with a 60 percent approval rating, higher than most presidents at the end of their presidency. He remained in Washington, D.C., where he and his wife, Michelle, started the Obama Foundation to provide mentoring and education to kids, and to award scholarships to college students. Obama made history ...
1:49. Introduction. Barack Obama was the first African American to be elected president of the United States. In 2008 he defeated John McCain to become the country’s 44th president. Obama was reelected in 2012. Early Life. Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Official White House Video. Obama’s key foreign-policy challenges were the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout the presidential campaign he had argued that the focus of U.S. military efforts should be in Afghanistan rather than Iraq.
Mar 24, 2016 · 24 March 2016. Getty Images. The current US president is Barack Obama, who was elected in November 2008 and officially took over the role in January 2009. He is the 44th president of the US and...
