Barack Obama, born in Honolulu on 4 August 1961, was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017 and the first African American to hold the office. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Barack Hussein Obama II was born on 4 August 1961 at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is the only president born outside the contiguous United States. His mother, Ann Dunham, was an 18-year-old American born in Wichita, Kansas, and his father was a 27-year-old Kenyan. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and worked as a community organiser in Chicago, then enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1988, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.
He became a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois Senate, where he served until 2004. In 2000 he ran for Illinois’s 1st congressional district but lost to the incumbent, Bobby Rush. In 2004 he was elected to the US Senate, representing Illinois until 2008.
In the 2008 presidential race, after a close primary against Hillary Clinton, he won the Democratic nomination, chose Joe Biden as his running mate and defeated John McCain and Sarah Palin. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts in international diplomacy, a decision that drew both praise and criticism.
In his first term he responded to the 2008 financial crisis with measures including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and passed health care reform. He appointed Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic American on the court, and Elena Kagan. He oversaw the end of the Iraq War and ordered Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. In 2011 he ordered the military intervention in Libya under UN Security Council Resolution 1973.
He defeated Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in the 2012 election. In his second term, he pushed for gun control after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, signed the Paris Agreement on climate change, and presided over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. He negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear agreement with Iran, normalised relations with Cuba, and imposed sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and again after its interference in the 2016 election. He became the first sitting president to publicly support same-sex marriage. He also ordered military intervention in Iraq after gains by ISIL following the 2011 withdrawal, relied more on air strikes and special forces than the earlier counterinsurgency model, and reduced the number of US soldiers in Afghanistan, although some remained throughout his presidency.
Since leaving office in 2017 he has stayed politically active, campaigning for candidates including Biden in 2020. He has published three books: Dreams from My Father (1995), The Audacity of Hope (2006) and A Promised Land (2020). Historians and political scientists rank him highly among US presidents, and as of 2026 he is the youngest living former president.
Image: Barack Obama opening the door of the Oval Office (file photo). Photo: White House (Chuck Kennedy) / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
