B arack Obama (1961 - ) was the 44th president of the United States. Inaugurated on January 20, 2009, he became the first African American to serve in that office and was re-elected to a second term in 2012.

His family origins were different from his predecessors—his mother was white, his father black, from Kenya. His parents met while they were in college in Hawaii. After they divorced and his mother remarried, Barack Obama moved with his mother to her new husband’s home in Indonesia. Obama later moved back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. For college, he moved to the continental U.S. and earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. When working as a community organizer in Chicago, he met his future wife Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. They married in 1992 and had two daughters—Malia and Sasha.

In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate, where he served for eight years. In 2004, representing the state of Illinois, he won a seat in the US Senate by a record majority. Three years later, he announced his candidacy for president of the United States and won the Democratic Party’s nomination against former New York Senator and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. He then went on to defeat his Republican opponent Senator John McCain in the general election.

As President, Obama faced many challenges: an economy grappling with the consequences of the 2008 Great Recession, the controversial “bail-out” package for struggling financial institutions, and the many troop deployments across the globe including Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the first two years of President Obama’s first term in office, the Democrats—Obama’s own party—controlled both houses of Congress. This helped him facilitate improvements to the economy, pass healthcare reform legislation—popularly known as Obamacare, and withdraw most US troops from Iraq. When Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, President Obama’s efforts for changes to taxes, the Federal budget, and the Federal deficit were mostly unsuccessful. As he entered his second term, Obama focused on securing legislation on immigration reform and gun control. Neither were achieved.

Republicans won control of the Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections. This prompted the President to focus on actions he could take unilaterally by invoking Executive authority. In matters outside the United States, Obama concentrated on the Middle East and climate change.

President Obama’s second term ended on January 20, 2017. He and his family stayed in the Washington D.C. area to allow their youngest daughter to graduate high school. Obama remained engaged in public affairs while also participating in the development of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Illinois.