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Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States of America on January 20, 2009. He is the country's first African-American president. In the 2008 election, Obama, the Democratic party nominee, defeated John McCain, the Republican party candidate.
With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. 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 his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.
He 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.
While in Chicago, Obama also became active in state government. 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.
In 2004, he won a United States senate seat in a landslide victory, and began to rise to prominence on the national political scene. As a U.S. senator, he worked to understand his role as a legislator, reaching across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, locking up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bringing transparency to government by putting federal spending online.
He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. He and his wife, Michelle, are the parents of two daughters, Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8.
Parts Contributed by whitehouse.gov
Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
1st African American to be elected President to the United states
5th African American to be elected to the U.S. Senate
First African American to be President of the Harvard Law Review
Graduate of Columbia University
Graduate of Harvard Law School
Former Civil Rights Attorney
2 Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album in Audacity of Hope and Dreams from my Father
"Yes We Can" speech composed by several different artists won an Emmy
Named Time magazine's Person of the Year