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[h3]It may be argued that Barack Hussain Obama is truly ‘blessed’, as his first name is translated in Swahili. As a candidate for the Democratic Party in the United States of America primaries, the Junior Senator from Illinois may become the first African-American President in the nation’s history. [/h3]

However, the fact that this is a man who regards 8am as ‘sleeping in’ time , gives one a glimpse into the energy that Obama expends and the tenacity of his ambitions.

Obama was born in Hawaii on 4 August 1961, to a black Kenyan father and white American mother. In the 2004 Democratic Party National Convention keynote speech, which launched him on both national and international platforms, Obama revealed that he felt that his presence on the stage was “pretty unlikely” considering the fact that his father had been “a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya” who “grew up herding goats” and “went to school in a tin-roof shack.”

[urlnew=http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/entertainment/photo_gallery/130/Election_Razzmatazz_-_U_S_Style_.htm][b]CLICK HERE FOR THE ELECTION BATTLE IN PICTURES[/b][/urlnew]

In fact, Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old, and later divorced. His mother remarried when he was six and they moved to Indonesia, but Obama moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend school at the age of ten. However, despite the fact the he last saw his father in 1971 and that his memories of his father derive mainly from photographs, Obama was clearly heavily influenced by his father and inherited from him the same drive that saw his father gain a scholarship to study in Hawaii where his parents first met.

In the first of his two books, the bestselling, “Dreams from My Father” Obama has described how he spent much of his youth drinking and taking drugs in an attempt to escape and to “push questions of who I was out of my mind”. Obama may still not have escaped the consequences of his youth entirely however, as he admits that he still struggles with his attempts at quitting smoking, having to “strenuously” chew nicotine chewing gum.

Obama has struggled to overcome adversity throughout his life. After studying political science with a specialisation in international relations at Columbia University in New York and working for three years as a community organiser in Chicago, Obama left to attend Harvard Law School. Obama has commented that his experience serving in the community imbued in him a sense of “a larger American story” and that he went to law school in order to be able to do the things that he could not achieve through grass roots activism. It was here in 1990 that he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review .

Throughout his campaign to become leader of the Democratic Party, Obama has made many references to the fact that he did not use the law degree he gained in 1991 to become a corporate lawyer, instead choosing to work as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago, which he did from 1993 to 2004. He also worked as a lecturer teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 2003 to 2004. His experience at the Chicago civil rights firm, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, representing, amongst others, victims of discrimination, led him to run for the Illinois State Senate.
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In 1996 Obama was elected as State Senator for Illinois from the 13th district, which encompassed mostly impoverished areas of Chicago’s south side, such as Hyde Park and Englewood. In 2000, Obama made an ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at the Democratic primaries for the US House of Representatives against a well-known fourth term incumbent, Bobby Rush. Rush himself said of the attempt that “Obama believes in Obama. And, frankly, that has its good side but it also has its negative side.”

Undeterred by this failure, Obama went on to be re-elected to the State senate in 1998 and 2002, working to gain bi-partisan support from the Republican and Democratic parties for policies relating to, amongst other things, healthcare. He was also a strong proponent of gun control.

In 2003, he launched his campaign to be elected to the US Senate. Following the primaries which he won by a majority of 52%, Obama went on to win the seat by a landslide of 70% of the votes against his republican rival, Alan Keyes and was sworn in as senator on 4 January, 2005.

As a senator, Obama serves on the Health, Education, Labour and Pensions Committee, which oversees issues of health care, schools, employment, and retirement programs. He is also a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which plays a role in shaping American policy around the world, including its policy in Iraq. Obama has been vocal in his opposition to the war in Iraq since 2003, before the invasion, seeing it as “a rash war” .

Obama has not however let his political career overshadow his personal life. In October 1992 he married Michelle Robinson, whom he had met in 1988 and with whom he has two daughters, Malia Anne, born in 1998 and Natasha, known as Sasha, born in 2001.

With his family and [urlnew=http://www.thebiographychannel.co.uk/biography_home/169:0/Oprah_Winfrey.htm]Oprah Winfrey[/urlnew] behind him, Obama is now fighting once more to achieve an even great feat than those which he can boast today. As a candidate in the Democratic Primaries, Obama went head to head with Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday and won the vote in 21 states, including Iowa, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. His charisma and celebrity backing has seen him galvanise the support of both black and white Americans to elect the county’s first African-American president.

[b][urlnew=/tag/1678/Elli_Lewis.htm]Elli Lewis[/urlnew][/b]
Barack Obama biography

Barack Obama biography

Barack Obama biography