Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961; IPA pronunciation: [bəˈɹɑːk oʊˈbɑː.mə]) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois. According to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, he is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history and the only African American currently serving in the U.S. Senate.[1]
Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996. Four years later, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives. After rededicating his efforts to the state senate and winning reelection unopposed in 2002, Obama ran for an open seat in the U.S. Senate two years later. Midway through the campaign, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, raising his national stature. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with a landslide 70% of the vote.[2]
On January 16, 2007, Obama announced that he had taken the first step toward becoming a candidate for the 2008 presidential election by forming an exploratory committee.[3] Recent opinion polls rank him as the second most popular choice among Democratic voters for their party's nomination, after Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY).[4]
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (born in Alego, a village in Nyanza Province, Kenya) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas). His parents met while both were attending the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student.[5]
When Obama was two years old, his parents separated and later divorced; his father went to Harvard to pursue Ph.D. studies, eventually returning to Kenya.[6] His mother married an Indonesian foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, with whom she had one daughter. The family moved to Jakarta where Obama attended Catholic school and public school from ages 6 to 10. [7] He then returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents.[8] He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a large, private college preparatory school in Honolulu, which he attended through 12th grade, graduating in 1979.[9][10] His father died in a car accident in Kenya when Obama was 21 years old.[11] Obama's mother died of cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.[12]
In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's white, middle class family. His knowledge about his absent black Kenyan father came mainly through family stories and photographs. Of his early childhood, Obama wrote: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind."[13] As a young adult, he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. Obama writes about using marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."[14]