Barack Obama’s colourful journey

He was born at a time when a Black American president was a mirage, and his mixed heritage did not help matters, but he still made it to the top.

Born: August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Parents: Kenyan father Barack Obama Snr and American mother Ann Dunham.

Father’s career: Barack Obama Snr was senior ranking economist in the Kenyan government.

Mother’s career: Anne Dunham was an anthropologist. Obama’s parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Mânoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.

Schooling: Barack Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School.

1982: Obama’s father, Barack Obama Snr, dies in a tragic road accident in Kenya.

1987: Obama makes his first trip to Kenya, seeking to find his father’s roots.

1992: Obama makes a second trip to Kenya accompanied by his wife Michelle.

2006: Obama makes third trip to Kenya as a US senator.

February 1990: Obama is elected to head the Harvard Law Review. He is the first Black man to be elected to the position in the university’s 104-year history. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

1992-2004: Worked as a community organiser in Chicago before earning his law degree. He also worked as a civil rights lawyer and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law.

2004: He is elected Illinois Senator.

2007: Obama launches presidential campaign.

2008: Beats his close opponent Hillary Clinton to win sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries and receives the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

2009: Obama defeats Republican nominee John McCain in the General Election to become the first Black president of the United States of America.

FAMILY LIFE

Barack and Michelle met at a law firm —Sidley & Austin — in 1989. Michelle was a first-year associate and had been assigned to mentor Barack, who was coming into the law firm as a summer associate. On October 3, 1982, the pair got married at Trinity United Church after a three-year courtship. Rev Jeremiah A Wrigh. Jr presided over the ceremony.

188,000 miles: Total number distance Obama travelled between January and December 2014 according to estimates by the Washington Post. As of June 2015, Obama had made 41 international trips to 50 different countries since his presidency began in January 2009.

March 23, 2010: Obama launches “Obamacare” or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to reform the health care industry whose aim is to lower the cost of medical care and give more Americans access to affordable, quality health insurance.

16.4 million: Number of people who have gained health insurance coverage since Obamacare became law. However, the National Center for Health Statistics estimates that 37 million others still lacked coverage last year. Obama’s popularity with the public has gone up, with 53 per cent of Americans viewing him favourably, according to a new Gallup poll published in May 2015. This is the strongest approval rating for Obama in nearly two years, a four-point increase since March and the best he has seen since September 2013.

THEY SAID…

I’ve never experienced anything like that… I cried my eyelashes off. And what I saw with Barack Obama was something that was transcendent and I felt transformational for me as a human being and for this country. I often wondered what it would be like to sit and listen to Lincoln speak or Roosevelt speak, or what it would have been like to have been old enough to understand what Martin Luther King was saying 45 years ago today. And what he did brought that home in a way that I could never have imagined.

TV host Oprah Winfrey, on the night Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in 2008

I have seen the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder — alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware — is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

Barack Obama, in the preface to the 2004 edition of Dreams From My Father