With his mother from Kansas and his father from Kenya, Barack Obama grew up seeing America from varied places and viewpoints – from his early days in Hawaii and Indonesia to his years in New York and Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer with a group of Christian churches to help bring jobs to the jobless when the local steel plant closed.
Obama went on to earn his law degree from Harvard, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Soon after, he turned down big law firms to practice as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago.
As an Illinois state Senator for eight years, he brought Democrats and Republicans together to make progress on tough issues – from expanding children’s health care to providing tax cuts for the working poor; from passing a ban on racial profiling to enacting welfare reform and ethics reform and death penalty reform.
In 2002, Obama gave a speech that opposed giving President Bush the authority to invade Iraq, demonstrating the judgment and courage to stand against a popular war.
In the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama has tackled challenges with a new kind of politics that unites Americans, rather than divides them. He was his party’s point person on passing the most sweeping lobbying reform since Watergate, and he’s worked with Republican Senator Dick Lugar, the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to pass a law that will prevent some of the world’s most deadly weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists.
At this defining moment in our history, Barack Obama believes that in order to change our politics and transform our country, we must come together around a common purpose. He currently resides in Chicago with his wife Michelle and his two children, Sasha and Malia.