On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama (full name Barack Hussein Obama) will be officially inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States at 6 p.m. Dutch time. He is also the first American president of African-American descent. Obama has charisma and he inspires confidence and hope in many Americans and worldwide. Who is Barack Obama? A life in photos with information. It has been written that Obama looks a lot like his mother. Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother, named Stanley Ann Dunham, was an American anthropologist, also agnostic. His father was from Kenya. He was named after his father, who was also called Barack Obama. However, his parents’ relationship did not last. The marriage broke up two years after Barack Jr.’s birth. His father left America and returned to his home country, Kenya. Barack Obama and his father met only once after that.
Obama and Indonesia
Because his mother remarried an Indonesian, Barack Obama spent part of his youth in Jakarta from 1967 onwards. From his mother’s second marriage to the Indonesian Lolo Soetore, a daughter was born, Obama’s half-sister Maya.
Obama grandparents
At the age of ten, Obama returned to Honolulu and was raised by his maternal grandparents. His mother returned to Hawaii for a short time but returned to Indonesia. Obama had a very good relationship with his grandparents. In 1980, his mother also divorced his second father, Lolo Soetoro. His grandfather Stanley Dunham was a furniture dealer and his grandmother Toot worked at a bank.
School and study
Obama attended high school and went to college in Los Angeles at Occidental College. He then continued his studies in political science at Columbia University in New York and Havert Law School. He was chairman of the Harvard Law Review, a literary publication. He graduated in 1983, specializing in international relations. When he was 21 years old, his biological father died in a car accident in Kenya. His mother died in 1995, at the age of 52, from cancer.
Dreams Of My Father, book by Barack Obama
Shortly before his mother’s death, Obama’s book Dreams From My Father was published. In the book he describes the search for the identity of a son born to a white American mother and a black father from Africa. It is also a search for the life of his father from whom he had become so estranged.
Work
After graduating, Obama worked as a researcher at the New York Public Interest Group, but from 1985 he did projects in poorer neighborhoods in Chicago. He then became the head of DCP, the Developing Communities Projects, an aid program of the Catholic Church. At the end of that period he visited Kenya, among other places, where he visited and met his relatives on his father’s side. Obama taught law at the University of Chicago and served as an Illinois senator from 1997. From 2005, he became a senator in Washington D. He was elected the 44th President of the United States of America. He served as president from January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017.
Marriage to Michelle Robinson
In 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson. She had studied law at Harvard and worked at the same law firm as Barack Obama. They hit it off and a relationship developed. They married a few years later, in 1992. The marriage resulted in two daughters, Malia Ann, born in 1998, and Natascha, born in 2001.
Obama and the economic crisis
As president, Barack Obama will have a hard time turning the tide of the American economy. He also decided to end the senseless war in Iraq. However, the growth of the American economy has already come to a standstill and subsequently collapsed. There are too many debts and consumers are spending less and less money, causing unemployment to increase, which in turn means that there is less money to spend, causing unemployment to increase even further. Banks are in trouble because there is a shortage of money on all sides. The plan is then to provide financial support to the most important industries to combat the growth of unemployment, such as a rescue plan for the car industry.
Monetary devaluation
Additional money is printed, which in turn results in monetary depreciation. However, in January 2015, Obama emphasized the economic strength of his country in his sixth official State of the Union. The economic crisis is out of the doldrums and the economy is growing again. More and more work is being created and unemployment is falling again. More than 11 million jobs have been created in 5 years.
Obamacare and gay marriage
Other changes that Obama brought about are Obamacare and gay marriage. Obamacare was abolished in 2017 by Obama’s successor, the 45th president of the United States: Donald Trump.