Barack Obama

After his first year of studying business administration at Hawaii, the elder Obama met a young freshman named Stanley Ann Dunham in a beginning Russian class.

Dunham was born in Kansas but moved around the country to California, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington and, eventually Hawaii. "My name is Stanley," she said. "My father wanted a boy, and that's that." She followed her parents to Hawaii and enrolled at the university. Dunham became friends with Obama, and the two flew off to Maui to be married in secret on Feb. 2, 1961, when Dunham was 19. Their son, Barack Obama Jr., was born six months later on Aug. 4, 1961.

Birth Certificate Controversy

Barack Obama Jr.'s official birth certificate became the subject of considerable debate during the 2008 presidential campaign, and even after he became president. The "birther" movement claimed that Obama was actually born in Kenya and that his mother later registered his birth in Hawaii. To dispel the rumors, Obama released his "certificate of live birth," the only form legally available from the state of Hawaii, in June 2008, but the fact that it wasn't the original only seemed to stoke the flames of conspiracy theorists, mostly on the right.

When real-estate magnate Donald Trump, toying with a 2012 presidential run, again demanded to see the original birth certificate, and polls showed a quarter of Americans believed the president was born outside the U.S., the president decided in April 2011 to finally release the so-called "long-form" original birth certificate issued by the state of Hawaii.

Single Mother

Dunham, who was now going by just Ann, dropped out of school to take care of her son. Her new husband graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hawaii in 1962. He earned a graduate faculty fellowship to study economics at Harvard, but the scholarship did not come with money to support a family, so he went East alone. Eventually, he returned to Kenya and had very little contact with his son, visiting just once ten years later. Barack Obama Sr. died in a car crash in 1982.

Dunham stayed in Hawaii, divorced her husband after he went to Harvard, and returned to school, earning a degree in math. She raised Barack Obama Jr., with the help of her parents. "I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live-in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race," Obama wrote in his 1995 best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Dunham eventually married Lolo Soetoro, another foreign student at the University of Hawaii. Soetoro returned to his native country of Indonesia in 1966, and Dunham, with her 6-year-old son in tow, followed him to Jakarta in 1967. She taught English to Indonesian businessmen. Indonesia was an exotic place for the young Obama. He had a pet ape and what he described as a "small zoo" in his backyard with chickens, dogs, a cockatoo and crocodiles. He ate dog meat, snake meat and grasshoppers.

Obama's mother didn't want him to fall behind in his studies, so she got up every morning at 4 a.m. to tutor him in English. At age 10, Obama was accepted to Punahou, an elite prep school in Hawaii. His mother saw this as a great opportunity, so she sent him to live with his grandparents in Honolulu. She stayed in Indonesia to live with Soetoro and continue her work with underprivileged women. Thus Obama was mainly raised by his grandparents, Madelyn and Stan Dunham. In his famous speech on race in March of the 2008 presidential election, Obama called his grandmother, who died two days before he was elected "a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world."

Obama's mother worked in Pakistan and India, as well as in Indonesia, developing micro-financing networks to provide credit for working women. In 1979, she started a dissertation about metal-workers in Indonesia. It took 13 years, but she finished her 1,000-page dissertation in 1992. She returned home to Hawaii in 1995 after being diagnosed with cancer just months after her father died. She lived in an apartment next to her mother, underwent chemotherapy and eventually died on Nov. 7, 1995, days before Obama was set to visit her.

College Years

Obama lived with his grandparents in Hawaii from the time he was 10 through high school. At that time, Obama, who was going by the nickname Barry (or "Bar" for short), was not as interested in school as he was in recreational activities. He played a lot of basketball and used drugs - marijuana and cocaine but never heroine, according to his first memoir. In the same book, Obama tells a story of his mother coming home during his senior year to find his grades slipping and his college applications unfinished. Obama told her that he was thinking about skipping college, instead staying in Hawaii and taking a couple of classes. "Remember what that's like? Effort?" she said. "Damn it, Bar, you can't just sit around like some good-time Charlie waiting for luck to see you through."

Obama ended up at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and he stayed on the partying track during his first year. He talked about social activism but rarely participated. But during his second year, he got involved with a campaign to encourage the college to divest from South African companies because of apartheid. He organized a rally, wrote to the faculty and asked members of the African National Congress to speak on campus. When he gave a speech at the rally, "people slowed down to listen," said classmate Eric Moore. Obama said the experience made him "hungry for words." Around that time, Obama began to feel that staying at Occidental was a "dead end … that somehow I needed to connect with something bigger than myself."

He transferred to Columbia University and dove into his studies, living what he described as a hermetic existence. He read, studied, went for long walks and slept. He also changed his name, or rather how he was referred to, back to Barack. "Going to New York was really a significant break," Obama said. "It's when I left a lot of stuff behind."

Community Organizing

Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983, and decided he wanted to be a community organizer. When friends asked him what a community organizer did, he said he didn't really know. But he would rattle on about the need for change.

Getting a job as an organizer wasn't easy, and Obama spent a couple years repaying loans with a corporate job. In 1985, a community organizer named Gerald Kellman approached Obama and offered him a job in Chicago, a city that had just elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. For three years, Obama worked on Chicago's South Side, going to churches and tending to unemployed steel-mill workers. Kellman said he thought Obama dreamed of being Chicago mayor, but Obama was uninterested. "I was somewhat disdainful of politics," he said. "I was much more interested in mobilizing people to hold politicians accountable."

In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama explained why he decided to become a community organizer. "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. … Change won't come from the top," Obama wrote. "Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That's what I'll do, I'll organize black folks."

Harvard Law School

After three years in Chicago, Obama applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School. It was a community filled with racial tension over affirmative action and the lack of tenured minority professors. Obama mostly stayed out of the fray, getting a job as an editor of the Law Review in his second year.

The summer after his first year at Harvard, he was hired as an associate at Sidley Austin LLP in Chicago. It was there that he met his future wife, Michelle Robinson. A Harvard Law School graduate herself, Robinson was assigned to mentor the hot-shot summer associate. At first she was skeptical that he was as talented as his reputation. But Obama actively courted Robinson, and an early date of theirs was at a church where he had organized. He gave an inspirational speech, saying that too often people settle for the world as it is "even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations."

That date helped win over Robinson, who had toyed with the idea of entering public service before taking a job at Sidley Austin. "He had no money," Robinson told a local newspaper, the Hyde Park Press. "He was really broke. He wasn't ever going to try to impress me with things. His wardrobe was kind of cruddy. … His first car had so much rust that there was a rusted hole in the passenger door. You could see the ground when you were driving. He loved that car. It would shake ferociously when it would start up. I thought, 'This brother is not interested in ever making a dime.'"

Obama and Robinson continued to date long-distance while he was at Harvard. At the end of his second year, he was elected the first black president of Harvard Law Review. Classmates say Obama was practically drafted into the prestigious post. Even the conservative students liked him because he was willing to listen to all sides of an argument.

"They thought that he would be able to bring together the factions that had developed as a result of the divisions, the ideological divisions on the law review, on the left and the right," said Cassandra Butts, a close friend of Obama's during law school and now his White House deputy counsel. After he became president, Obama appointed several conservatives to top positions at Law Review, which angered some liberals.

As Law Review president, Obama likely could have gotten almost any clerkship he wanted. But he never showed an interest. "Never did it cross his mind," his future wife said. Instead, he returned to the streets of Chicago. "Unbelievable talent is not cultivated; a lot of time, it's crushed," Obama said. "Over the long run, the way to improve the conditions in the cities and schools - to fight crime and drugs - is to work on the local level."

Obama soon asked Robinson to marry him and began working for Project Vote, a large voter-registration drive that targeted African-Americans. Obama and Robinson were married by Rev. Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ in 1992. Obama also inspired his new wife to leave her corporate job and work in the mayor's office under Valerie Jarrett. "We had many debates about how to best affect change," Michelle Obama told the Daily Princetonian. "We both wanted to affect the community on a larger scale than either of us could individually, and we wanted to do it outside of big corporations."

Illinois State Senate

In 1993, Obama became a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago and joined the civil rights firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.

Obama worked there for three years until he decided to run for the Illinois state Senate in 1996. Rep. Mel Reynolds (D-Ill.) had resigned from the U.S. House after being convicted of charges related to having sex with a 16-year-old campaign worker.

State Senator Alice Palmer (D) tried to succeed Reynolds, and encouraged Obama to try and replace her in the Illinois Senate. By the time she lost the House primary to now Rep.-Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D), Obama had already launched his campaign. Palmer wanted to rejoin the race for state Senate, but Obama refused to drop out. Palmer hastily filed her petitions to enter the contest, but Obama's campaign successfully challenged them. Palmer was kicked out of the race. Obama's campaign also challenged the petitions of the other Democratic contenders and won easily. In a Democratic district, winning the primary was an easy ride to the general election.

Race for the U.S. House

But Obama was always thinking ahead and had much bigger ambitions. He never wanted to be a "lifer in the state legislature." In 2000, he made his first attempt at national office. He challenged Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), a former Black Panther who had been elected to the House four times. Obama struggled to raise money and failed to gain traction. The race was nasty: Obama produced negative ads attacking Rush for a lack of commitment to voters. Rush accused Obama of not being black enough to represent Illinois' 1st district and criticized him for raising money from white people outside of the district.

Obama went to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles to try to raise his profile. His credit card was rejected at the rental car agency, and he couldn't get a week-long floor pass. "It was a race in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong," Obama wrote in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope. Rush's son was murdered in October, and Obama suspended his campaign out of compassion. When he restarted it a few weeks later, he had no momentum. Rush was endorsed by President Bill Clinton and won the March primary, 61 to 30 percent. "That was the one time he semi-seriously thought about giving up politics," said Abner Mikva, a former congressman who tried to convince Obama to clerk for him on the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit. "He was frustrated."

U.S. Senate

Obama stayed in the state Senate, and, a couple years later, he saw another opportunity.

Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R) was up for re-election in 2004. Fitzgerald had beaten scandal-tarred Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D) in 1998, but Moseley-Braun had proven that a black politician could win an election for Illinois statewide office. Obama sat down with friends and family at a brunch and everyone told him why he shouldn't run. When it was his turn to speak, Obama convinced everyone that running was the right thing to do. "His counterargument was similar to his counterargument always: We can change politics, we can change the agenda, we can help average people," said longtime aide Dan Shomon. At the time, Moseley- Braun was thinking about running herself, and Obama didn't want to challenge her. But when she decided to run for president instead of senator, Obama announced his candidacy - along with seven other candidates.

Obama ran a strong campaign, but he also got very lucky. Two candidates were considered his biggest challengers in the Democratic Senate primary: state Comptroller Dan Hynes and millionaire businessman Blair Hull. Hull was self-financing his campaign, so Obama was allowed to raise $6,000 per donor instead of the typical $2,000 because of the "millionaire amendment" in the recently passed McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. But shortly before the primary, Hull's divorce papers became public, revealing allegations of domestic abuse. Hull stayed in the race, but only won 10 percent of the vote. Obama captured the Democratic nod with 53 percent. He dominated in Chicago and won the surrounding suburban counties, where many thought a black man would never win. "I think it is fair to say the conventional wisdom was we could not win," Obama said on election night. "We didn't have enough money. We didn't have enough organization. There was no way that a skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name like Barack Obama could ever win a statewide race. Sixteen months later, we are there."

The general election was a cakewalk for Obama. His opponent, Jack Ryan (R), was forced to withdraw after allegations about his sex life surfaced. The GOP was unable to find a viable candidate (it tried to draft longtime football coach Mike Ditka), and Obama beat Alan Keyes, 70 to 27 percent.

2004 Democratic National Convention

Obama won so easily that his general election would be just a footnote in his political career if it weren't for the speech he gave at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) wanted speakers who were inspirational and who would stay positive. Kerry's campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill suggested Obama, and Obama's campaign manager David Axelrod lobbied hard to get him the keynote slot. "I was impressed by him," Kerry said. "[I] thought on a personal level he would be able to convey the kind of message I wanted to convey out of my convention: a message of inclusiveness and change, a new view about how we can make our politics more relevant to people and in a sense, just put a little bit of different language in front of folks."

Friend Martin Nesbitt tells a story about walking down the streets of Boston with Obama the night before his speech and seeing a crowd form around the senate candidate. "Man, you're like a rock star," Nesbitt said. As Nesbitt explains it: "He looked at me and said, 'Marty, you think it's bad today, wait until tomorrow.' And I said, 'What do you mean?' And he said, 'My speech is pretty good.'"

In front of a television audience of millions, Obama, who had written the speech himself, was electrifying, immediately thrusting himself onto the national stage. "The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats," Obama said. "But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

The week after the speech, Obama campaigned in downstate Illinois, and events that were supposed to have 100 people now featured crowds of 500 to 1,000. "Everyone knew exactly what everyone else was thinking," said Robert Gibbs, then an Obama spokesperson. "Wow."

2008 Presidential Campaign

Immediately, Obama was flooded with questions about whether he would run for president in 2008, despite the fact that he was only a first-term senator.

Greeted like a celebrity, he received standing ovations in movie theaters and was talked about on Sunday TV shows. He was said to be on every vice presidential short list four years before the 2008 presidential election. Obama regularly said he wasn't interested and that he would serve out his term in the Senate, but by 2006 he was no longer ruling out a promotion. Fellow Illinois Senator and mentor Dick Durbin (D) told Obama that sitting around in the Senate casting thousands of votes wasn't going to make him any more qualified to be president. "After seeing the response I was getting around the country, I had to step back and ask: Is there something about my message that is sufficiently unique and could potentially be useful enough to moving the country forward?" Obama said. "And ultimately, the answer was yes."

Taking on Hillary Rodham Clinton

Obama was a big underdog in the 2008 presidential race. He was running against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who had spent eight years in the White House as first lady and eight more as a senator, and former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), who was the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, along with a handful of other top candidates.

When he officially announced his candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007, in Springfield, Ill. in front of 15,000 people, Obama admitted the "presumptuousness" of running for president after just two years in the Senate. But he also said his lack of experience was a good thing. "I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change," he said. It was a message he would use throughout the two-year campaign. The change mantra resonated in Iowa, where Obama spent a significant amount of time and money leading up to the January 3, 2008 caucus, the first testing ground for his candidacy. But despite major momentum from the caucus win, and growing interest from African-Americans, Obama lost New Hampshire to Clinton, and a long primary battle ensued.

The key to Obama's win was his preparation for a long, hard battle. Early in the contest, campaign manager David Plouffe devised a "Feb. 5 and beyond" strategy that focused not just on the big states and Super Tuesday contests, but also on small states that often voted Republican in the general election. Plouffe realized that Obama could nab the Democratic nod by collecting his share of delegates in every state. Democrats awarded delegates proportional to the percentage of the primary vote instead of giving them all to the state's winner. Clinton's campaign seemed to have missed that crucial fact, which was much-criticized in the press.

Obama won a string of 11 primaries after Super Tuesday, building a lead in delegates that proved insurmountable. Four days after the last Democratic primary on June 3, 2008, Clinton conceded and pledged to campaign vigorously for Obama, which she did.

Race in the 2008 Election

In the 2008 race, Obama used his experience as a community organizer. For the most part, he avoided talking about race. The son of an African man and a white woman, he benefited greatly from the progress made during the 1960s. But Obama also missed a large part of that critical era. He lived in Indonesia from 1967 to 1971, a period that included the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the riots that followed, along with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In his campaigns, he has never stressed race as much as prominent black politicians from previous generations.

"I've always felt a curious relationship to the sixties," Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope. "I was too young at the time to fully grasp the nature of those changes, too removed … to see the fallout on American's psyche. Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother. … Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she would drill into me the values that she saw there: tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged."

Obama's atypical campaign didn't earn initial support from the black establishment. Rev. Al Sharpton told Obama "not to take the black vote for granted," and Rev. Jesse Jackson criticized Obama for not taking a large enough role in the "Jena Six" case in Louisiana, where six black teenagers were charged with beating a white classmate. After Obama's victory in Iowa, Jackson told him to bolster "hope with substance." Obama was once again accused of not being "black enough," in part because he tried to make race a non-factor. The only time he addressed the issue directly was after videos surfaced of his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, giving explosive sermons in which he intoned, "God Damn America!" among other controversial statements.

On March 18, 2008, Obama gave a speech about race that many compared to President John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech on religion. "He's always believed he would have to address race in this campaign," said longtime friend Cassandra Butts. "I believe he chose the right moment to do it. It was the kind of sweeping, historic speech that put everything on the table."

2008 General Election

As it turns out, Obama's general election campaign against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) proved less daunting than the primary against Clinton. The primary had endured for months and involved nearly 20 debates. But that grueling schedule had also allowed Obama to hone responses to attacks against his relationship with controversial figures such as Rev. Wright and Chicago real estate developer Antoin "Tony" Rezko.

Exposing himself to criticism but giving himself a major tactical advantage, Obama opted out of public financing and raised a staggering $750 million for his campaign, $300 million of which was dedicated to the general election. Meanwhile, McCain was forced to use the $84 million allotted to him by the Treasury under public financing. Still, McCain was running close in the polls (though almost always slightly behind) until the financial meltdown worsened in September 2008.

McCain announced he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington and help pass the proposed $700 billion bailout. Obama called McCain's actions erratic and voters appeared to agree, breaking heavily for Obama after that.

On Nov. 4, 2008, Obama became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win more than 50 percent of the vote on Election Day, and he took 365 of the 538 Electoral College votes, including improbable wins in previous Republican strongholds such as Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina.

His international standing was solidified when in October 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

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