Children: Malia (daughter), born 1999; Natasha (daughter), born 2001
Education: B.A. Columbia University 1983;
J.D. Harvard Law, 1991
Political Party: Democratic
Political Office: U.S. Senator from Illinois, elected 2004;
Member, Illinois State Senate 1997-2004;
Business & Professional Experience: Attorney, law firm of Miner Barnhill;
Galland (Chicago, IL), 1993-2004
Why Our Users Selected Obama
Our users overwhelmingly selected Barack Obama among 50 other candidates with the ability of changing the world. The majority factors included his personality, moral integrity, vision, rich and varied experiences of life, charisma, work as a community organizer, strength and ability to unite different people for a common goal, and helping working families to get ahead in life.
Obama's Biography
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya, where he grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British.
Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton's army.
Barack moved to Chicago in 1985, where he became a community organizer with a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment.
His personality, rich and varied experiences of life, charisma, work as a community organizer, strength and ability to unite different people for a common goal, working with both Democrats and Republicans to help working families get ahead. He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
He returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law. His advocacy work led him to run for the Illinois State Senate, where he served for eight years.
In 2004, he became the third African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate including growing up in different countries and places with people who had differing ideas - that have influenced his political career.
He believes in the ability to unite people around a politics that puts solving the challenges of everyday Americans ahead of partisan calculation and political gain.
In the Illinois State Senate, he worked with both Democrats and Republicans to help working families get ahead by creating programs like the state Earned Income Tax Credit, which in three years provided over $100 million in tax cuts to families across the state.
He also pushed through an expansion of early childhood education, and after a number of inmates on death row were found innocent, Senator Obama worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.
