Barack Obama: From a Jakarta Childhood to Two Terms in the White House

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, making him the only U.S. president born outside the contiguous United States. His parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii: Ann Dunham, an 18 year old from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a 27 year old Luo scholarship student from Kenya. They divorced by 1964, and his father visited him only once, in 1971, before dying in a car crash in 1982. After his mother married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, the family moved to Jakarta in the late 1960s. He graduated from Columbia in 1983, worked as a community organizer in Chicago, became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004.

Elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, he lost badly to Representative Bobby Rush in a 2000 House race, then won a U.S. Senate seat in 2004. He launched his presidential campaign in 2007 at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and, with running mate Joe Biden, beat John McCain in 2008. His presidency brought the Recovery Act, Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act, repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Paris agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, alongside expanded drone strikes and the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Historians point to a paradox: he won two popular majorities while Democrats lost both chambers of Congress and nearly a thousand state legislative seats.

• Genealogical research linked his mother's ancestry to John Punch, an enslaved African in 17th century Virginia.
• In the 2000 House race, critics cast him as too academic and aloof compared with Rush.
• He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
• He appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and became the first sitting president to publicly support same-sex marriage.
• His campaign organization, Obama for America and later Organizing for Action, operated largely outside the Democratic National Committee.