President Obama

Barack Obama, the forty-fourth President of the United States, is the first African American president and was born in the capital of Hawaii. He was born on August 4, 1961. His parents, Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr., were married in 1961 and divorced in 1964. After high school, he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. Then, he majored in politics at Columbia University and graduated in 1983. He spent four years in New York City and attended Harvard from 1988 to 1991.

Obama was elected into the Illinois Senate in 1996 and held that place until 2004, when he was elected into the United States Senate. He resigned from the U.S. Senate in 2008 in order to work on his presidential campaign. Obama won the position in November with 52.9 percent of the vote. One of the first things he did was issue an order to start strategies to remove the troops from Iraq. He has announced that the combat operations would end by August 31, 2010.

On October 3, 1992, Obama married Michelle Robinson. Their first daughter was born almost six years later, followed by a second that was born in 2001.

On December 10, 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the 4th president to receive this award. This decision was met with both criticism and praise. Many people thought that it was too early to make this choice, but the members who were a part of the committee stood by their decision.