Personal:

• Born: August 4, 1961
• Age: 47
• Birthplace: Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Father: Barack Obama Sr.Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya
• Mother: Ann Dunham, White American form Kansas
• Nationality: American
• Occupation: Attorney, Politician
• Religion: Christian
• Spouse: Michelle Obama
• Children: Malia Ann (born 1998), Sasha (born 2001)
• Alma Mater: Occidental College,Columbia University,Harvard Law School

Political Career:

• Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois’s 13th District, which then spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park-Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn.
• Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws.
• He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare.
• In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan’s payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.
• Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the General Election, and reelected again in 2002.
• In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one.
• In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority.
• He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations.
• During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms.
• Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in November 2004 following his election to the US Senate.
• Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 4, 2005. Obama was the fifth African-American Senator in U.S. history, and the third to have been popularly elected.
• He was the only Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus.CQ Weekly, a nonpartisan publication, characterized him as a “loyal Democrat” based on analysis of all Senate votes in 2005–2007, and the National Journal ranked him as the “most liberal” senator based on an assessment of selected votes during 2007.
• In 2005 he was ranked sixteenth, and in 2006 he was ranked tenth.
• In 2008, Congress.org ranked him as the eleventh most powerful Senator.
• Obama announced on November 13, 2008 that he would resign his senate seat on November 16, 2008, before the start of the lame-duck session, to focus on his transition period.
• This enabled him to avoid the conflict of dual roles as President-elect and Senator in the lame duck session of Congress, which no sitting member of Congress had faced since Warren Harding.

2008 Us Presidential Election

• On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois.
• On August 23, 2008, Obama selected Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate.
• Obama’s former rival Hillary Clinton gave a speech in support of Obama’s candidacy and later called for Obama to be nominated by acclamation as the Democratic presidential candidate.
• After McCain was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, there were three presidential debates between Obama and McCain in September and October 2008.
• In November, Obama won the presidency with 53% of the popular vote and a wide electoral college margin. His election sparked street celebrations in numerous cities in the United States and abroad.

President Elect of The United States of America

• On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain in the general election with 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173  and became the first African American to be elected President of the United States.
• In his victory speech, delivered before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park, Obama proclaimed that “change has come to America”.
• President-elect Obama is scheduled to be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States at midday on January 20, 2009