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Barack Obama went from being a virtual unknown in 2004 to becoming the 44th President of the United States in 2009.
Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, HI. His father, an economist, was born in Kenya and his mother was born in Kansas. At the time of Obama's birth, both his parents were students at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. When Obama was two years old, the couple was divorced and Ann Obama then married another East-West Center student from Indonesia. The family moved to Jakarta, where Obama's half-sister Maya was born (another half-sister, the daughter of Obama's father by a later marriage, lives in Nairobi).
Obama was raised, mostly in Hawaii, by his late mother and grandparents. He graduated from Columbia University in New York and received his law degree, graduating magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. He became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review and later worked as a civil rights lawyer and as a community organizer in New York and Chicago. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1997, where he served as chairman of the Public Health and Welfare Committee. He and his wife, Michelle, are the parents of two daughters.
He was the third African-American to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention when he took the stage at the 2004 convention in Boston, MA. A few months later, the former law professor at the University of Chicago became the fifth African-American US senator in history, winning with a landslide 70% of the vote.
On February 10, 2007, Obama entered the race for President of the United States. The competition for Democratic nominee was narrowed down fairly quickly to be a race between Obama, the first serious African American candidate, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first serious woman candidate for US president. In the end, Obama beat Clinton and then the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain.
He was inaugurated as the 44th — and the United States' first African American — President on January 20, 2009, with Joseph Biden as his second-in-command.
Last updated: January 21, 2009.
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