Barack obama biography achievements

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he became the first African American to hold the office. Obama faced major challenges during his two-term tenure in office. His primary policy achievements included health care reform, economic stimulus, banking reform and consumer protections, and a repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy preventing lesbian and gay Americans from serving openly in the military.

Obama’s father, Barack Sr., a Kenyan economist, met his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, when both were students in Hawaii, where Barack was born on August 4, 1961. They later divorced, and Barack’s mother married a man from Indonesia, where he spent his early childhood. Before fifth grade, he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents and attend a private prep school on scholarship. In his memoir Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama describes the complexities of discovering his identity in adolescence.

After two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he transferred to Columbia University, where he studied political science and international relations. Following graduation in 1983, Obama worked in New York City, then became a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, coordinating with churches to improve housing conditions and create job-training programs in a community hit hard by steel mill closures. In 1988, he went to Harvard Law School, where he attracted national attention as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. Returning to Chicago, he joined a small law firm specializing in civil rights.

In 1992, Obama married Michelle Robinson, a lawyer who had also excelled at Harvard Law. Their daughters, Malia and Sasha, were born in 1998 and 2001. Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, and then to the U.S. Senate in 2004. At the Democratic National Convention that summer, he delivered an acclaimed keynote address. In 2008, after winning the Democratic nomination after a hard-fought prima

When President Obama left office on January 20, 2017, his impact and legacy were unclear. He will always be the first African American president in US history, and his administration was notable for its stability. With Republicans in control of both the presidency and the Congress in 2017, however, some of Obama’s most notable achievements—the Affordable Care Act, the Paris climate change agreement, and Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals—were overturned or under attack. 

Obama’s lasting impact on American life may turn out to have been greatest in terms of the crises that did not happen. Despite teetering on the edge of economic catastrophe, the nation did not fall into the abyss of a second Great Depression in 2009. And despite calls for more aggressive military action, the nation scaled back on its troop commitments rather than launching additional wars. How long and in what form Obama’s policy changes will endure remains to be seen. Those that depended on unilateral executive action have been the most fragile, since they can be undone by subsequent actions by his successors in the presidency.

Obama’s job approval rating in polls of the American people rose during his second term, cresting at about 60 percent during his final months in office. The public also rated him highly in comparison with other recent presidents. A Quinnipiac University polls released in late January 2017 found that 29 percent said he was the greatest president since World War II, just one point behind Ronald Reagan, who was named by 30 percent and well ahead of every other postwar president.

Scholars who were surveyed at about the same time agreed. In a C-SPAN survey of 91 historians, political scientists, and other presidential scholars, Obama was ranked 12th among all presidents since George Washington for the overall quality of his performance as chief executive. Among his recent predecessors, Obama surpassed George W. Bush, who ranked 33

Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, has received numerous honors in recognition of his career in politics.

Obama received the Norwegian Nobel Committee's Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, The Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education's Ambassador of Humanity Award in 2014, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2017, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award in 2018. He was on TIME Magazine's Time Person of the Year in 2008 and 2012.

He also received two Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album for Dreams from My Father (2006), and The Audacity of Hope (2008) as well as two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Narrator for Our Great National Parks (2022), and Working: What We Do All Day (2023).

National honors

Nobel Peace Prize

On October 9, 2009, Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Foreign honors

Scholastic

Honorary degrees