essay about president obama

Barack Obama

The 44 th president of the United States, Barack Obama is the first Black American who has been elected to the Oval Office. He served from 2009 until 2017.

We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back.

Quick Facts

Early life and family, marriage to michelle obama and daughters, illinois political career, 2008 presidential election and inauguration, first term as u.s. president, second term as u.s. president, notable speeches, life after the presidency, how tall is obama, books and grammy, movies about obama.

1961-present

Who Is Barack Obama?

Barack Obama was the 44 th president of the United States and the first Black commander-in-chief. He served two terms, from 2009 until 2017. The son of parents from Kenya and Kansas, Obama was born and raised in Hawaii. He graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review . After serving on the Illinois State Senate, he was elected a U.S. senator representing Illinois in 2004. In 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize . He and his wife, Michelle Obama , have two daughters, Malia and Sasha .

FULL NAME: Barack Hussein Obama II BORN: August 4, 1961 BIRTHPLACE: Honolulu, Hawaii SPOUSE: Michelle Obama (1992-present) CHILDREN: Malia and Sasha ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu to Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham. He has six half-siblings, including half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng who he grew up with.

Obama’s Parents

Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa and eventually earned a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams of going to college in Hawaii.

Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was born on an Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham’s father, Stanley, enlisted in the military and marched across Europe in General George Patton ’s army. Dunham’s mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and after several moves, ended up in Hawaii.

While studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham. They married on February 2, 1961, and Barack II was born six months later. As a child, Obama did not have a relationship with his father. When his son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University and pursue a doctorate degree. Obama’s parents officially separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964, when their son was 2. Soon after, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya.

In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a University of Hawaii student from Indonesia. A year later, the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng was born in 1970. Several incidents in Indonesia left Dunham afraid for her son’s safety and education, so at the age of 10, Obama was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. His mother and half-sister later joined them.

Obama struggled with the absence of his father, whom he saw only once more after his parents divorced when Obama Sr. visited Hawaii for a short time in 1971. “[My father] had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact,” he later reflected. “They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed.”

Life in Hawaii

While living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou School. He excelled in basketball and graduated with academic honors in 1979. As one of only three Black students at the school, he became conscious of racism and what it meant to be African American.

Obama later described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage with his own sense of self: “I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog... and that Santa was a white man,” he wrote. “I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me.”

Obama’s Half-Siblings

Obama’s family includes six half-siblings located around the world. He shares a mother with half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and has five paternal half-siblings.

According to Oprah Daily , he has maintained a warm and close relationship with half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng. The two grew up together and both graduated from the Punahou School. “He took his job as big brother seriously,” she said of Obama. “Our mother divorced my father, and our grandfather died. So he really ended up being the man of the house.” Soetoro-Ng campaigned for Obama in both the 2008 and 2012 elections, and the two have shared family vacations in Indonesia and Christmases in Hawaii.

Obama’s oldest paternal half-sibling, Malik Obama, was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1958, and the two didn’t meet until 1985. Malik told the Associated Press in 2004 he served as the best man at Barack’s wedding and vice versa. However, Malik notably criticized Obama’s presidency in 2016 and announced his support for Republican candidate Donald Trump in that year’s election. He attended the third presidential debate as Trump’s guest.

Barack’s other half-siblings include:

• Half-sister Auma Obama, born 1960 in Nairobi. She and Barack met for the first time when they were in their 20s in Chicago.
• Half-brother Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, born in Nairobi in 1965. He and Barack have met several times following their 1988 introduction in Kenya.
• Half-brother David Ndesandjo, born in 1967. Although it’s not clear when, he died in a motorcycle accident, according to Politico .
• Half-brother George Hussein Onyango Obama, born in 1982 in Kenya. Barack has only spoken to his youngest half-brother a few times.

Obama entered Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979. After two years, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science.

After his undergrad studies, Obama worked in the business sector for two years. He moved to Chicago in 1985, where he worked on the impoverished South Side as a community organizer for low-income residents in the Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens communities.

It was during this time that Obama, who said he “was not raised in a religious household,” joined the Trinity United Church of Christ. He also visited relatives in Kenya and paid an emotional visit to the graves of his biological father, who died in a car accident in November 1982, and his paternal grandfather.

“For a long time, I sat between the two graves and wept,” Obama wrote. “I saw that my life in America—the Black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away.”

Returning from Kenya with a sense of renewal, Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. The next year, he met with constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. Their discussion so impressed Tribe that when Obama asked to join his team as a research assistant, the professor agreed. In February 1990, Obama was elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review . He graduated magna cum laude with his juris doctor from Harvard Law School in 1991.

In 1989, while still in law school, Obama joined the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin as a summer associate. There, he met Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer who was assigned to be his adviser. Initially, Michelle refused to date Barack, believing that their work relationship would make the romance improper. However, she relented not long after, and the couple fell in love.

On October 3, 1992, he and Michelle were married. They moved to Kenwood, on Chicago’s South Side. Barack and Michelle welcomed two daughters several years later: Malia , born in 1998, and Sasha , born in 2001. The couple has stated that their personal priority is their children. The Obamas tried to make their daughters’ world as “normal” as possible while living in the White House, with set times for studying, going to bed and getting up.

After law school, Obama returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer with the firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He also taught constitutional law part-time at the University of Chicago Law School between 1992 and 2004—first as a lecturer and then as a professor—and helped organize voter registration drives during Bill Clinton ’s 1992 presidential campaign.

Obama’s advocacy work led him to run for and win a seat in the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat in 1996. During his years as a state senator, Obama worked with both Democrats and Republicans to draft legislation on ethics, as well as expand health care services and early childhood education programs for the poor. He also created a state earned-income tax credit for the working poor. As chairman of the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, Obama worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases after a number of death-row inmates were found to be innocent.

In 2000, Obama made an unsuccessful Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat held by four-term incumbent candidate Bobby Rush. Undeterred, he created a campaign committee in 2002 and began raising funds to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004. With the help of political consultant David Axelrod, Obama began assessing his prospects for a Senate win.

Illinois Senator

Encouraged by poll numbers, Obama decided to run for the open U.S. Senate seat, vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. In the 2004 Democratic primary, he defeated multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes with 52 percent of the vote.

That summer, he was invited to deliver the keynote speech in support of John Kerry at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Obama emphasized the importance of unity and made veiled jabs at the George W. Bush administration and the diversionary use of wedge issues.

After the convention, Obama returned to his U.S. Senate bid in Illinois. His opponent in the general election was supposed to be Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, a wealthy former investment banker. However, Ryan withdrew from the race in June 2004 following public disclosure of unsubstantiated sexual deviancy allegations by his ex-wife, actor Jeri Ryan. That August, diplomat and former presidential candidate Alan Keyes accepted the Republican nomination to replace Ryan.

In the November 2004 general election, Obama received 70 percent of the vote to Keyes’ 27 percent, the largest electoral victory in Illinois history. With his win, Obama became only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction.

Sworn into office on January 3, 2005, Obama partnered with Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia. Then, with Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, he created a website to track all federal spending. Obama also spoke out for victims of Hurricane Katrina, pushed for alternative energy development, and championed improved veterans’ benefits.

In February 2007, Obama made headlines when he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was locked in a tight battle with then-U.S. senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton . On June 3, 2008, Obama became the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee after winning a sufficient number of pledged delegates during the primaries.

He campaigned on an ambitious agenda of financial reform, alternative energy, and reinventing education and health care—all while bringing down the national debt. Because these issues were intertwined with the economic well-being of the nation, he believed all would have to be undertaken simultaneously.

On November 4, 2008, Obama defeated Republican presidential nominee John McCain , 52.9 percent to 45.7 percent, in the popular vote and won election as the 44 th president of the United States. A historic victory, Obama would soon be the first Black president in the nation’s history.

Obama’s inauguration took place on January 20, 2009. When he took office at age 47, Obama inherited a global economic recession, two ongoing foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lowest-ever international favorability rating for the United States. During his inauguration speech, Obama summarized the situation by saying, “Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.”

First 100 Days and Nobel Peace Prize

Obama coaxed Congress to expand health care insurance for children and provide legal protection for women seeking equal pay. A $787 billion stimulus bill was passed to promote short-term economic growth in the face of the Great Recession. Housing and credit markets were put on life support, with a market-based plan to buy U.S. banks’ toxic assets. The government made loans to the auto industry, and new regulations were proposed for Wall Street.

Obama cut taxes for working families, small businesses, and first-time home buyers. The president also loosened the ban on embryonic stem cell research and moved ahead with a $3.5 trillion budget plan.

Obama undertook a complete overhaul of America’s foreign policy. He reached out to improve relations with Europe, China, and Russia and to open dialogue with Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. He lobbied allies to support a global economic stimulus package. He committed an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan and set an August 2010 date for withdrawal of nearly all U.S. troops from Iraq. (Obama was an early opponent of President George W. Bush’s push to invade Iraq as part of the “war on terror” initiative, saying at an October 2002 rally: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”)

In more dramatic incidents, Obama ordered an attack on pirates off the coast of Somalia and prepared the nation for a swine flu outbreak. He signed an executive order banning excessive interrogation techniques and ordered the closing of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba within a year—a deadline that ultimately would not be met.

In recognition of his administration’s early work, the Nobel Committee in Norway awarded Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Affordable Care Act

Obama signed his signature health care reform plan, the Affordable Care Act, into law in March 2010. The new law prohibited the denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions, allowed citizens under 26 years old to be insured under parental plans, provided for free health screenings for certain citizens, and expanded insurance coverage and access to medical care to millions of Americans.

Casually known as “Obamacare,” the hallmark legislation faced strong opposition from Congressional Republicans and the populist Tea Party movement even after its passage. In October 2013, a dispute over the federal budget and Republican desires to defund or derail the Affordable Care Act caused a 16-day shutdown of the federal government.

The rollout of the reforms were initially bumpy. October 2013 saw the failed launch of HealthCare.gov, the website meant to allow people to find and purchase health insurance. Extra technical support was brought in to work on the troubled website, which was plagued with glitches for weeks. The health care law was also blamed for some Americans losing their existing insurance policies, despite repeated assurances from Obama that such cancellations would not occur.

The legislation has faced numerous challenges in court and wound up at the U.S. Supreme Court three times. In June 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which required citizens to purchase health insurance or pay a tax. In a 5-4 decision, the court said that the health care law’s signature provision fell within the taxation power granted to Congress under the Constitution.

In the summer of 2015, the Supreme Court upheld part of the Act regarding health care tax subsidies. Without these tax credits, buying medical insurance might have become too costly for millions of people.

The latest Supreme Court decision about the Affordable Care Act began in 2017 when Congressional Republicans dropped the individual mandate tax penalty to zero. Texas and 17 other Republican states quickly sued to strike down the Affordable Care Act, mainly based on their opposition to its individual mandate. A Texas federal judge ruled in favor of the suit, saying that because there was no longer a tax, the law was unconstitutional.

The case was sent to an appeals court. A final ruling came in June 2021 when the U.S. Supreme Court voted , 7-2, to uphold the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the objecting states were not required to pay anything under the mandate provision and thus had no standing to bring the challenge to court. As of January 2023, nearly 15.9 million Americans were insured through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace.

Killing Osama bin Laden

On April 29, 2011, Obama approved a covert operation in Pakistan to track down infamous al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden , the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks who had been in hiding for nearly 10 years. On May 2, an elite team of U.S. Navy SEALs raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and, within 40 minutes, killed bin Laden in a firefight. There were no American casualties, and the team was able to collect invaluable intelligence about the workings of al-Qaeda.

The same day, Obama announced bin Laden’s death on national television. “The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda,” Obama said. “As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not—and never will be—at war with Islam.”

Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

In 2011, Obama signed a repeal of the military policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which prevented openly gay troops from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. He became the first president to voice support for same-sex marriage in May 2012.

2012 Reelection and Second Term Priorities

As he did in 2008, during his campaign for a second presidential term, Obama focused on grassroots initiatives. Celebrities such as Anna Wintour and Sarah Jessica Parker aided the president’s campaign by hosting fundraising events.

In the 2012 general election, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden faced Republican opponent Mitt Romney and his vice-presidential running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan . On November 6, 2012, Obama won a second term as president, capturing more than 60 percent of the Electoral College.

Obama officially began his second term on January 21, 2013, when U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office. In his second inaugural address, Obama called the nation to action on such issues as climate change, health care, the federal deficit, and marriage equality. Although he made progress on some of these fronts, he also faced waning public support—his approval rating hit a low of 38 percent in September 2014, according to a Gallup poll —and a divided government, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for the final two years of Obama’s administration.

NSA Wiretapping Controversy

In June 2013, after Edward Snowden shared confidential government documents with journalists, the news broke that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program was much broader than American citizens knew. Obama defended the NSA’s email monitoring and telephone wiretapping during a visit to Germany that month. “We are not rifling through the emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anyone else,” he said. Obama stated that the program had helped stop roughly 50 threats.

However, the president suffered a significant drop in his approval ratings, to 45 percent, partially due to the revelations. In October 2013, German Chancellor Angela Merkel revealed that the NSA had been listening in to her cell phone calls. “Spying among friends is never acceptable,” Merkel told a summit of European leaders.

ISIS Airstrikes

In late summer 2013, Obama was unsuccessful in his attempts to persuade Congress, and the international community at large, to take military action against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad , who had used chemical weapons against his country’s civilians. But there was interest in combatting the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which had seized large portions of Iraq and Syria and conducted high-profile beheadings of foreign hostages.

In August 2014, Obama ordered the first airstrikes against the Islamic State on targets in Syria, though the president pledged to keep combat troops out of the conflict. Several Arab countries joined the airstrikes against the extremist group. “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force,” Obama said in a speech to the United Nations. “So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death.”

Efforts to dismantle the Islamic State have continued after Obama’s presidency. As recently as April 2023, a top ISIS leader was killed in an airstrike. However, U.S. airstrikes have also been responsible for a large civilian death toll. As of December 2021, more than 1,400 people have died, according to military officials. Outside watchdog organizations, like Airwars, estimate the number of casualties could be as many as several thousand.

Iran Nuclear Deal and Other Foreign Diplomacy

In September 2013, Obama made diplomatic strides with Iran. He spoke with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the phone, which marked the first direct contact between the leaders of the two countries in more than 30 years.

This groundbreaking move by Obama was seen by many as a sign of thawing in the relationship between the United States and Iran. “The two of us discussed our ongoing efforts to reach an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program,” reported Obama at a press conference.

In July 2015, Obama announced that, after lengthy negotiations, the United States and five world powers had reached an agreement with Iran. The deal allowed inspectors entry into Iran to make sure the country kept its pledge to limit its nuclear program and enrich uranium at a much lower level than would be needed for a nuclear weapon. In return, the United States and its partners removed the tough sanctions imposed on Iran and allowed the country to ramp up sales of oil and access frozen bank accounts. That year, Obama also traveled to India and reached a civilian nuclear agreement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi that opened the door to U.S. investment in India’s energy industry.

Elsewhere, Obama moved to reestablish diplomatic ties with Cuba in December 2014. He and Cuban President Raul Castro announced the normalizing of diplomatic relations between the countries for the first time since 1961. The policy change came after the exchange of American citizen Alan Gross and another unnamed American intelligence agent for three Cuban spies. However, the long-standing U.S. economic embargo on Cuba, instituted by President John F. Kennedy , remained in effect. On March 20, 2016, Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Cuba since 1928, as part of his larger program to establish greater cooperation between the two countries.

Just prior to the trip, on March 10, 2016, Obama met at the White House with newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the first official visit by a Canadian leader in nearly 20 years.

Obama’s Climate Change Policies

In August 2015, the Obama administration announced the Clean Power Plan, a major climate change policy that included the first national standards to limit carbon pollution from coal-burning power plants and called for more renewable energy from sources like wind and solar power. Ultimately, the plan never took effect after facing backlash and lawsuits from business groups, companies, 27 states, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell , who was then the Republican minority leader. In February 2019, the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, to block the plan by putting a hold on regulations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, mostly from coal power plants. That June, the Clean Power Plan was replaced by with the Affordable Clean Energy rule .

Obama also worked to respond to climate change on the global level. In November 2015, he was a primary player in the international COP21 summit held outside of Paris that resulted in the Paris Climate Agreement. The agreement requires all participating nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to limit the rise of global temperatures and also to allocate resources for the research and development of alternative energy sources.

Obama pledged that the United States would cut its emissions more than 25 percent by 2030. On October 5, 2016, the United Nations announced the Paris Climate Agreement had been ratified by a sufficient number of countries—including China and the United States, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases—to allow it to take effect starting on November 4, 2016. But on June 1, 2017, President Donald Trump made good on his campaign promise to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Supreme Court Nominees

During his presidency, Obama filled two seats in the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor , who was confirmed in 2009 and is the court’s first Hispanic justice, and Elena Kagan , who was confirmed in 2010. Both justices were confirmed under a Democratic-majority Senate.

After the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, Obama once again had an open Supreme Court seat to fill. In March, the president held a press conference at the White House to present 63-year-old U.S. Court of Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland as his nominee for replacing the conservative stalwart. Garland was considered a moderate “consensus” candidate.

Garland’s nomination was immediately rebuffed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others in the Republican Party. They stated their intention to block any nominee put forward by Obama, fearing that such a confirmation would tip the balance toward a more liberal-leaning court. Garland was never granted a Senate confirmation hearing, and the seat sat empty until April 2017 when Neil Gorsuch , nominated by President Donald Trump, was confirmed.

Last Days in Office and Presidential Legacy

On January 19, 2017, Obama’s last full day in office, he announced 330 commutations for nonviolent drug offenders. The presidents granted a total of 1,715 clemencies, including commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning , the U.S. Army intelligence analyst who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks.

Over the course of his administration, Obama led the country away from financial catastrophe as the Great Recession gave away to market stability and a declining unemployment rate. He expanded the country’s diplomatic relations, and the Affordable Care Act marked the biggest health care expansion since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. Although he made inroads on immigration reform through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the United States continues to face a broken immigration system.

Obama also struggled to enact the gun control measures he hoped for, such as universal background checks and the resurrection of the federal ban on sales of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Some of the mass shootings during his time include at Sandy Hook Elementary School (20 children and six adult fatalities) in Connecticut; an Aurora, Colorado movie theater (12 fatalities); a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina (9 fatalities); and a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida (49 fatalities).

Ever the optimist, Obama shared these parting words at his last press conference with the White House press corps:

“I believe in this country. I believe in the American people. I believe that people are more good than bad. I believe tragic things happen. I think there’s evil in the world, but I think at the end of the day, if we work hard and if we’re true to those things in us that feel true and feel right, that the world gets a little better each time. That’s what this presidency has tried to be about. And I see that in the young people I’ve worked with. I couldn’t be prouder of them.”

2010 State of the Union

On January 27, 2010, Obama delivered his first State of the Union speech. During his oration, Obama addressed the challenges of the economy, proposed a fee for larger banks, announced a possible freeze on government spending in the following fiscal year, and spoke against the Supreme Court’s reversal of a law capping campaign finance spending.

Obama also challenged politicians to stop thinking of reelection and start making positive changes. He criticized Republicans for their refusal to support legislation and chastised Democrats for not pushing hard enough to get legislation passed.

He also insisted that, despite obstacles, he was determined to help American citizens through the nation’s current domestic difficulties. “We don’t quit. I don’t quit,” he said. “Let’s seize this moment to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more.”

2015 State of the Union

In his 2015 State of the Union address, Obama declared that the nation was out of recession. “America, for all that we’ve endured; for all the grit and hard work required to come back... know this: The shadow of crisis has passed,” he said. He went on to share his vision for ways to improve the nation through free community college programs and middle-class tax breaks.

With Democrats outnumbered by Republicans in both the House and the Senate, Obama threatened to use his executive power to prevent any tinkering by the opposition on his existing policies. “We can’t put the security of families at risk by taking away their health insurance, or unraveling the new rules on Wall Street, or re-fighting past battles on immigration when we’ve got to fix a broken system,” he said. “And if a bill comes to my desk that tries to do any of these things, I will veto it.”

2016 State of the Union

On January 12, 2016, Obama delivered what would be his final State of the Union address. Diverging from the typical policy-prescribing format, Obama’s message for the American people was centered around themes of optimism in the face of adversity, asking them not to let fears about security or the future get in the way of building a nation that is “clear-eyed” and “big-hearted.”

This did not prevent him from taking thinly disguised jabs at Republican presidential hopefuls for what he characterized as their “cynical” rhetoric, making further allusions to the “rancor and suspicion between the parties” and his failure as president to do more to bridge that gap.

Farewell Address

On January 10, 2017, Obama returned to his adopted home city of Chicago to deliver his farewell address. In his speech, Obama spoke about his early days in the Windy City and his continued faith in the power of Americans who participate in their democracy.

He called on politicians and American citizens to come together despite their differences. “Understand, democracy does not require uniformity,” he said. “Our founders quarreled, and compromised, and expected us to do the same. But they knew that democracy does require a basic sense of solidarity—the idea that for all our outward differences, we are all in this together; that we rise or fall as one.”

Obama also appealed for tolerance along racial and ethnic lines and curbing discrimination:

“After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. Such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. All of us have more work to do. After all, if every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and undeserving minorities, then workers of all shades will be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.

“If we decline to invest in the children of immigrants, just because they don’t look like us, we diminish the prospects of our own children—because those brown kids will represent a larger share of America’s workforce. Going forward, we must uphold laws against discrimination... But laws alone won’t be enough. Hearts must change.”

He quoted Atticus Finch, the main character in Harper Lee ’s To Kill a Mockingbird , asking Americans to heed the fictional lawyer’s advice: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Obama concluded his farewell address with a call to action: “My fellow Americans, it has been the honor of my life to serve you,” he said. “I won’t stop; in fact, I will be right there with you, as a citizen, for all my remaining days. But for now, whether you are young or whether you’re young at heart, I do have one final ask of you as your president—the same thing I asked when you took a chance on me eight years ago. I am asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change—but in yours.”

After leaving the White House, the Obama family moved to a home in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C., to allow younger daughter Sasha to continue school there.

Obama embarked on a three-nation tour in late fall 2017, meeting with such heads of state as President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

National Portrait Gallery

On February 12, 2018, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery unveiled its official portraits of Barack and Michelle. Both rendered by African American artists, Kehinde Wiley’s work featured Barack in a chair surrounded by greenery and symbolic flowers, while Amy Sherald’s portrait of the former first lady depicted her in a flowing dress, gazing back at viewers from a sea of blue.

Netflix Content and Podcasts

In May 2018, Barack and Michelle finalized a multi-year deal with Netflix to create exclusive content for the streaming service through their production company, Higher Ground. The fruits of the collaboration first appeared with the August 2019 release of American Factory , an Oscar-winning documentary about the 2015 launch of a Chinese-owned automotive glass factory in Dayton, Ohio, and the clash of differing cultures and business interests.

The Obamas helped produce the 2020 documentary Crip Camp , which was nominated for best documentary feature at the 2021 Academy Awards. Higher Ground’s children’s series Ada Twist, Scientist and We the People each won awards at the inaugural Children’s and Family Emmy Awards in 2022.

Higher Ground has expanded into podcasts, including Renegades: Born in the USA —a series of conversations between Barack and musician Bruce Springsteen about life, music, and their love for America.

Barack Obama Presidential Center

In May 2015, the Barack Obama Foundation announced plans to construct the Barack Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. The complex would be home to a Chicago Public Library branch, a museum, as well as office and activity spaces for the foundation.

In July 2016, Jackson Park was selected as the host site. Construction began in August 2021, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held the following month with Barack, Michelle, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot all in attendance.

The project has been the subject of two lawsuits from volunteer nonprofit Protect Our Parks, which claimed the city and state of Illinois violated their public trust obligations to protect pubic land in approving the project. They were dismissed by a federal judge in 2019 and 2022, respectively.

The project is expected to be completed by 2025 , according to the Obama Foundation.

Barack Obama Presidential Library

In September 2021, the Barack Obama Presidential Library announced plans to employ a virtual model with records available online, making it the first fully digital presidential library. According to the library, around 95 percent of the Obama administration’s Presidential records were born digital, including photos, documents, tweets, and emails.

According to White House documents , Obama’s physician measured him at 6 feet 1.5 inches tall during a 2016 physical exam.

Obama published his autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance , in 1995. The work received high praise from literary figures such as Toni Morrison . It has since been printed in more than 25 languages, including Chinese, Swedish and Hebrew. The book had a second printing in 2004 and was adapted for a children’s version. The audiobook version of Dreams , narrated by Obama, received a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word album in 2006.

His second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream , was published in October 2006. It hit No. 1 on both the New York Times and Amazon’s best-seller lists.

The first volume of Obama’s presidential memoirs, A Promised Land , was released in November 2020.

Obama is one of the world’s most recognizable basketball enthusiasts. He played during his youth and for the junior varsity and varsity teams at the Punahou School, winning a state championship with the team in 1979.

Unsurprisingly, Obama became a fan of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls during his time living in Chicago. He appeared in The Last Dance , a 2020 documentary profiling Michael Jordan ’s career and final championship season with the Bulls in 1997-98.

Obama was known for playing pickup games during his first presidential campaign and throughout his presidency, with opponents including NBA and WNBA players. According to GQ , Obama also had a basketball-themed 49 th birthday party and invited stars like LeBron James , Chris Paul , Kobe Bryant , Carmelo Anthony , Magic Johnson , and Bill Russell to play for a group of wounded veterans at Washington’s Fort McNair.

Obama also became famous for filling out NCAA men’s and women’s tournament brackets every year in a segment for ESPN called “Barack-etology.” He correctly picked the men’s March Madness champion only once during his presidency: the University of North Carolina Tarheels in 2009.

In 2021, Obama joined NBA Africa as a strategic partner to help promote the league’s community efforts throughout the continent.

Other Hobbies

Obama has said he grew up a huge comic book fan and was particularly fond of Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian . He also told students at a 2015 virtual field trip that some of his favorite books included The Hardy Boys , Treasure Island , The Hobbit , and The Lord of the Rings .

As for movies and TV, Obama has cited the first two Godfather movies as his top films, and classics like Casablanca (1942), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) among his favorites . Obama is a fan of the HBO drama The Wire , as well as Mad Men , Entourage , Downton Abbey , House of Cards , and The Knick . According to a 2013 article , he is also a Star Trek fan and enjoyed watching live sports at the White House and aboard Air Force One. In addition to the NBA’s Bulls, Obama is also a fan of Chicago’s MLB team the White Sox.

In terms of music, Obama told Rolling Stone in 2008 he had “probably 30” Bob Dylan songs on his iPod. He also said he listens to The Grateful Dead; Earth, Wind and Fire; Elton John ; and The Rolling Stones. However, his favorite artist of all-time is Stevie Wonder .

Obama isn’t totally old school; he follows contemporary media and releases a yearly list of his favorite books music and television from the prior 12 months.

Barack and Michelle’s first date in Chicago was the focus of the 2016 romantic drama film Southside With You ; Parker Sawyer played Barack.

That same year, Netflix released the film Barry about Obama’s time at Columbia University.

In August 2021, HBO released the documentary series Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union in conjunction with the former president’s 60 th birthday.

• Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old.
• We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
• Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.
• No single individual built America on their own. We built it together. We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another.
• We are a nation that endures because of the courage of those who defend it.
• I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
• So don’t let anyone tell you that change is not possible. Don’t let them tell you that standing out and speaking up about injustice is too risky. What’s too risky is keeping quiet. What’s too risky is looking the other way.
• Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law—for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
• I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.
• It is easier to start wars than to end them.
• We don’t quit. I don’t quit. Let’s seize this moment to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and strengthen our union once more.
• It’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.
• What Washington needs is adult supervision.
• When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.
• You’ve shown us, Boston, that in the face of evil, Americans will lift up what’s good. In the face of cruelty, we will choose compassion.
• If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.
• My job is not to represent Washington to you, but to represent you to Washington.
• Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
• Hope—hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.
• If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.
• Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can.
• And where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear... we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words—yes, we can.

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

U.S. Presidents

Oppenheimer and Truman Met Once. It Went Badly.

Who Killed JFK? You Won’t Believe Us Anyway

John F. Kennedy

Jimmy Carter

Inside Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s 77-Year Love

Abraham Lincoln

Who Is Walt Nauta, the Man Indicted with Trump?

Hunter Biden and Other Presidential Problem Kids

Controversial Judge Aileen Cannon Not Out Just Yet

10 Celebrities the Same Age as President Joe Biden

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

• Backchannel
• Newsletters
• WIRED Insider
• WIRED Consulting

President Barack Obama

Barack Obama: Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive

When WIRED asked me to guest-edit the November issue, I didn’t hesitate. I know it’s the height of election season, and I happen to have a day job that keeps me pretty busy. But given the chance to immerse myself in the possibility of interplanetary travel or join a deep-dive conversation on artificial intelligence, I’m going to say yes. I love this stuff. Always have. It’s why my favorite movie of last year was The Martian . Of course, I’m predisposed to love any movie where Americans defy the odds and inspire the world. But what really grabbed me about the film is that it shows how humans—through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other—can science the heck out of just about any problem.

I’m a guy who grew up watching Star Trek —and I’d be lying if I said that show didn’t have at least some small influence on my worldview. What I loved about it was its optimism, the fundamental belief at its core that the people on this planet, for all our varied backgrounds and outward differ­ences, could come together to build a better tomorrow.

I still believe that. I believe we can work together to do big things that raise the fortunes of people here at home and all over the world. And even if we’ve got some work left to do on faster-than-light travel, I still believe science and technology is the warp drive that accelerates that kind of change for everybody.

Here’s another thing I believe: We are far better equipped to take on the challenges we face than ever before. I know that might sound at odds with what we see and hear these days in the cacophony of cable news and social media. But the next time you’re bombarded with over-the-top claims about how our country is doomed or the world is coming apart at the seams, brush off the cynics and fearmongers. Because the truth is, if you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one. Right here in America, right now.

Eric Ravenscraft

Medea Giordano

Julian Chokkattu

Let’s start with the big picture. By almost every measure, this country is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago, or even eight years ago. Leave aside the sepia tones of the 1950s, a time when women, minorities, and ­people with disabilities were shut out of huge parts of American life. Just since 1983, when I finished college, things like crime rates, teen pregnancy rates, and poverty rates are all down. Life expectancy is up. The share of Americans with a college education is up too. Tens of mil­lions of Americans recently gained the security of health insurance. Blacks and Latinos have risen up the ranks to lead our businesses and communities. Women are a larger part of our workforce and are earning more money. Once-quiet factories are alive again, with assembly lines churning out the components of a clean-energy age.

And just as America has gotten better, so has the world. More countries know democracy. More kids are going to school. A smaller share of humans know chronic hunger or live in extreme poverty. In nearly two dozen countries—including our own—­people now have the freedom to marry whomever they love. And last year the nations of the world joined together to forge the most comprehen­sive agreement to battle climate change in human history.

This kind of progress hasn’t happened on its own. It happened because people organized and voted for better prospects; because leaders enacted smart, forward-­looking policies; because people’s perspectives opened up, and with them, societies did too. But this progress also happened because we scienced the heck out of our challenges. Science is how we were able to combat acid rain and the AIDS epidemic. Technology is what allowed us to communicate across oceans and empathize with one another when a wall came down in Berlin or a TV personality came out. Without Norman Borlaug’s wheat, we could not feed the world’s hungry. Without Grace Hopper’s code, we might still be analyzing data with pencil and paper.

That’s one reason why I’m so optimistic about the future: the constant churn of scientific progress. Think about the changes we’ve seen just during my presidency. When I came into office, I broke new ground by pecking away at a Black­Berry. Today I read my briefings on an iPad and explore national parks through a virtual-­reality headset. Who knows what kind of changes are in store for our next president and the ones who follow?

That’s why I centered this issue on the idea of frontiers—stories and ideas about what’s over the next horizon, about what lies on the other side of the barriers we haven’t broken through yet. I wanted to explore how we get past where we are today to build a world that’s even better for us all—as individuals, as communities, as a country, and as a planet.

Because the truth is, while we’ve made great progress, there’s no shortage of challenges ahead: Climate change. Economic inequality. Cybersecurity. Terrorism and gun violence. Cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ­antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Just as in the past, to clear these hurdles we’re going to need everyone—policy makers and commu­nity leaders, teachers and workers and grassroots activists, presidents and soon-to-be-former presidents. And to accelerate that change, we need science. We need researchers and academics and engineers; programmers, surgeons, and botanists. And most important, we need not only the folks at MIT or Stanford or the NIH but also the mom in West Virginia tinkering with a 3-D printer, the girl on the South Side of Chicago learning to code, the dreamer in San Antonio seeking investors for his new app, the dad in North Dakota learning new skills so he can help lead the green revolution.

That’s how we will overcome the challenges we face: by unleashing the power of all of us for all of us. Not just for those of us who are fortunate, but for everybody. That means creating not just a quicker way to deliver takeout downtown but also a system that distributes excess produce to communities where too many kids go to bed hungry. Not just inventing a service that fills your car with gas but also creating cars that don’t need fossil fuels at all. Not just making our social networks more fun for sharing memes but also harnessing their power to counter terrorist ideologies and online hate speech.

The point is, we need today’s big thinkers thinking big. Think like you did when you were watching Star Trek or Star Wars or Inspector Gadget . Think like the kids I meet every year at the White House Science Fair. We started this event in 2010 with a ­simple premise: We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated but the winner of the science fair. Since then, I’ve met young people who are tackling everything from destroying cancer cells to using algae to produce clean energy to distributing vaccines to remote areas of the world—all before most of them can even vote.

And as I meet with these young ­people, I can’t help but wonder what might be next—what might happen at a White House Science Fair in five years or 20 years or 50 years? I imagine a student who grows an artificial pancreas right in front of the president—an idea that eventually eliminates waiting lists for lifesaving organs. I imagine the girls who discover a new fuel based on only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide; the teenager who makes voting and civic activism as addictive as scrolling through your Twitter feed; the boy from Idaho who grows potatoes from a plot of soil brought back from our colony on Mars. And I imagine some future president strolling out on the South Lawn with a student who invented a new kind of telescope. As the president looks through the lens, the girl turns the telescope to a planet she just discovered, orbiting a faraway star at the very edge of our galaxy. Then she says she’s hard at work on another invention—one that will take us there someday.

These kinds of moments are closer than you think. My hope is that these kids—maybe some of your kids or grandkids—will be even more curious and creative and confident than we are today. But that depends on us. We must continue to nurture our children’s curiosity. We must keep funding scientific, technological, and medical research. And above all, we must embrace that quintes­sentially American compulsion to race for new frontiers and push the bound­aries of what’s possible. If we do, I’m hopeful that tomorrow’s Americans will be able to look back at what we did—the diseases we conquered, the social problems we solved, the planet we protected for them—and when they see all that, they’ll plainly see that theirs is the best time to be alive. And then they’ll take a page from our book and write the next great chapter in our American story, emboldened to keep going where no one has gone before.

This article appears in the November 2016 issue. Subscribe now .

Grooming by Jackie Walker

Louise Matsakis

Morgan Meaker

Aarian Marshall

Lauren Goode

Will Knight

Matt Burgess

Matt Reynolds

MA in American History : Apply now and enroll in graduate courses with top historians this summer!

• AP US History Study Guide
• History U: Courses for High School Students
• History School: Summer Enrichment
• Lesson Plans
• Classroom Resources
• Spotlights on Primary Sources
• Professional Development (Academic Year)
• Professional Development (Summer)
• Book Breaks
• Inside the Vault
• Self-Paced Courses
• Browse All Resources
• Search by Issue
• Search by Essay
• Become a Member (Free)
• Monthly Offer (Free for Members)
• Program Information
• Scholarships and Financial Aid
• Applying and Enrolling
• Eligibility (In-Person)
• EduHam Online
• Hamilton Cast Read Alongs
• Official Website
• Press Coverage
• Veterans Legacy Program
• The Declaration at 250
• Black Lives in the Founding Era
• Celebrating American Historical Holidays
• Browse All Programs
• Donate Items to the Collection
• Search Our Catalog
• Research Guides
• Rights and Reproductions
• See Our Documents on Display
• Bring an Exhibition to Your Organization
• Interactive Exhibitions Online
• About the Transcription Program
• Civil War Letters
• Founding Era Newspapers
• College Fellowships in American History
• Scholarly Fellowship Program
• Richard Gilder History Prize
• David McCullough Essay Prize
• Affiliate School Scholarships
• Nominate a Teacher
• Eligibility
• State Winners
• National Winners
• Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
• Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize
• George Washington Prize
• Frederick Douglass Book Prize
• Our Mission and History
• Annual Report
• Contact Information
• Student Advisory Council
• Teacher Advisory Council
• Board of Trustees
• Remembering Richard Gilder
• President's Council
• Scholarly Advisory Board
• Internships
• Our Partners
• Press Releases

History Resources

Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address, 2009

A spotlight on a primary source by barack obama.

Obama delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2009, to the largest crowd ever assembled for a presidential inauguration. The new president called for an end to the divisive spirit of recent politics: "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics." Obama called on Americans to unite and look toward their common national heritage as a guide for facing the challenges of the future, declaring, "The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness."

A full transcript is available.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many—and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009

Questions for Discussion

Read the document introduction, the excerpt, and if available, the text of the speech. Then apply your knowledge of American history in order to answer the questions that follow.

• Why were the issues facing the nation at the time of President Obama’s inauguration considered extraordinary? Use portions of the speech to provide evidence.
• What do you think President Obama meant when he said that “The time has come . . . to choose our better history”?
• In what way did the speech attempt to unite Americans in a common goal?

A printer-friendly version is available here .

Stay up to date, and subscribe to our quarterly newsletter..

Learn how the Institute impacts history education through our work guiding teachers, energizing students, and supporting research.

Jump to main content

Jump to navigation

• Latest News Read the latest blog posts from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave
• Share-Worthy Check out the most popular infographics and videos
• Photos View the photo of the day and other galleries
• Video Gallery Watch behind-the-scenes videos and more
• Live Events Tune in to White House events and statements as they happen
• Music & Arts Performances See the lineup of artists and performers at the White House
• Your Weekly Address
• Speeches & Remarks
• Press Briefings
• Statements & Releases
• White House Schedule
• Presidential Actions
• Legislation
• Nominations & Appointments
• Disclosures
• Cabinet Exit Memos
• Criminal Justice Reform
• Civil Rights
• Climate Change
• Foreign Policy
• Health Care
• Immigration Action
• Disabilities
• Homeland Security
• Reducing Gun Violence
• Seniors & Social Security
• Urban and Economic Mobility
• President Barack Obama
• Vice President Joe Biden
• First Lady Michelle Obama
• Dr. Jill Biden
• The Cabinet
• Executive Office of the President
• Senior White House Leadership
• Other Advisory Boards
• Office of Management and Budget
• Office of Science and Technology Policy
• Council of Economic Advisers
• Council on Environmental Quality
• National Security Council
• Joining Forces
• Reach Higher
• My Brother's Keeper
• Precision Medicine
• State of the Union
• Inauguration
• Medal of Freedom
• Follow Us on Social Media
• We the Geeks Hangouts
• Mobile Apps
• Developer Tools
• Tools You Can Use
• Tours & Events
• Jobs with the Administration
• Internships
• White House Fellows
• Presidential Innovation Fellows
• United States Digital Service
• Leadership Development Program
• We the People Petitions
• Contact the White House
• Citizens Medal
• Champions of Change
• West Wing Tour
• Eisenhower Executive Office Building Tour
• Video Series
• Décor and Art
• First Ladies
• The Vice President's Residence & Office
• Eisenhower Executive Office Building
• Air Force One
• The Executive Branch
• The Legislative Branch
• The Judicial Branch
• The Constitution
• Federal Agencies & Commissions
• Elections & Voting
• State & Local Government

Search form

President obama's handwritten essay marking the 150th anniversary of the gettysburg address.

One hundred and fifty years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most memorable speeches in U.S. history from Gettysburg, PA. In dedicating the military cemetery where thousands of soldiers were buried following the Battle of Gettysburg, fought just four months earlier, Lincoln described "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Paying tribute to the historic speech, President Obama hand wrote an essay for an exhibit at the Lincoln Presidential Library . President Obama joins former Presidents Clinton, Carter and H.W. Bush who have submitted their contributions, along with other notable essayists including Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, General Colin Powell, and Martin Luther King III, among hundreds of others.

You can read President Obama's essay here , and below:

Here's the full text of President Obama's essay:

In the evening, when Michelle and the girls have gone to bed, I sometimes walk down the hall to a room Abraham Lincoln used as his office.  It contains an original copy of the Gettysburg address, written in Lincoln’s own hand. I linger on these few words that have helped define our American experiment: “A new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps more than anyone, the burdens required to give these words meaning.  He knew that even a self-evident truth was not self-executing; that blood drawn by the lash was an affront to our ideals; that blood drawn by the sword was in painful service to those same ideals. He understood as well that our humble efforts, our individual ambitions, are ultimately not what matter; rather, it is through the accumulated toil and sacrifice of ordinary men and women – those like the soldiers who consecrated that battlefield – that this country is built, and freedom preserved.  This quintessentially self-made man, fierce in his belief in honest work and the striving spirit at the heart of America, believed that it falls to each generation, collectively, to share in that toil and sacrifice. Through cold war and world war, through industrial revolutions and technological transformations, through movements for civil rights and women’s rights and workers’ rights and gay rights, we have.  At times, social and economic change have strained our union.  But Lincoln’s words give us confidence that whatever trials await us, this nation and the freedom we cherish can, and shall, prevail.

The fifth and final copy of the Gettysburg Address, which President Lincoln wrote in his own hand, is on display in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House. Take a closer look of the only version that Lincoln titled, signed, and dated through the Google Art Project . 

Learn more:

• Watch President Obama read the Gettysburg Address as part of the Learn the Address Project
• Learn more about President Abraham Lincoln

Kori Schulman

• Follow @KS44

Watch President Obama's final State of the Union address.

Read what the President is looking for in his next Supreme Court nominee.

Take a look at America's three newest national monuments.

• Inauguration

FULL TRANSCRIPT: President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address

President Barack Obama delivers inaugural address from Washington, D.C.

Jan. 20, 2009 -- Full transcript as prepared for delivery of President Barack Obama's inaugural remarks on Jan. 20, 2009, at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.

My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many.

They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

Help inform the discussion

Barack Obama: Foreign Affairs

Iraq and afghanistan.

In addition to inheriting an economy in crisis when he took office, President Obama inherited two wars, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. An early opponent of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Obama promised during the 2008 election campaign to withdraw American troops as soon as possible. In February 2009, he announced a plan to bring troop levels down from 160,000 to 50,000 by August 2010, including the removal of all combat forces. The remaining troops, he added, would be withdrawn by the end of 2011. For several years, the withdrawal proceeded smoothly, in part because Obama was able to build on the gains achieved by Bush's “surge” of 20,000 additional troops in 2007, which had helped the government of Iraq to restore a measure of stability to the country. By 2012, only 150 American troops were in Iraq, a number that remained level for about three years.

Obama’s other war-related campaign promise was to step up the US military commitment in Afghanistan in order to keep the extremist Taliban regime from regaining power and allowing al Qaeda once again to use the country as a base of terrorist operations against the United States and its allies. Soon after taking office, Obama granted the military’s request, initially made at the end of the Bush presidency, to send an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, raising the American military presence there to about 60,000.

As his first year as president unfolded, however, Obama became convinced that a change in military strategy was needed so that the government of Afghanistan eventually would be able to defeat the Taliban on its own. In June, he appointed a new military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, and asked him to recommend a new course of action. McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops and promised to deploy them to train Afghan forces to fight the Taliban instead of relying on American might. After an extended series of meetings beginning in September, Obama announced in a speech on December 1, 2009 , at West Point that he had approved a short-term surge of 33,000 troops with a proviso that American forces must begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011. The president soon fired McChrystal for making disparaging remarks about members of the administration, and he replaced him with General David Petraeus, who had developed and implemented the successful surge in Iraq that inspired McChrystal's new strategy for Afghanistan.

After the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Republicans were much more interested in domestic policy than foreign policy, which allowed President Obama to accomplish a complete disengagement of US forces, at least in terms of active combat, from Afghanistan by 2014. The number of American troops in Afghanistan, which peaked at 97,000 in 2011, declined steadily to about 12,000 in 2015 before leveling off at that figure as the president reluctantly acknowledged that the campaign to defeat the Taliban was not yet won. Buttressing Obama’s credentials on military matters was the May 2, 2011, killing of al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, by a team of Navy SEALS. Intelligence agencies had concluded that bin Laden was probably hiding in a residential compound near Abbottabad, Pakistan. Lacking certainty on the matter, and realizing the risks attending a military strike, Obama nonetheless ordered the attack, which was successful. In celebrating bin Laden's death, Americans applauded the president's decisiveness and judgment.

Even after United States soldiers killed bin Laden in May 2011 and began disengaging from Iraq and Afghanistan, the president expanded the strategic deployment of special forces and drones in a “secret war” against suspected terrorists. (Drones are remotely controlled, unpiloted aircraft that conduct surveillance and drop precision-targeted bombs.) Moreover, the White House joined with NATO to help Libyan rebels end the reign of dictator, Colonel Muamar el-Qaddafi. The administration argued that the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to report to Congress when he deploys American forces, did not apply because a state of “hostilities” did not exist.

Obama and his national security team claimed that they were using a new approach to war that relied on multinational rather than unilateral action, and surgical air and Special Forces strikes rather than on massive troop deployments. The administration’s reliance on bombing rather than ground troops in Libya, however, deprived it of any means to reduce the chaos that ensued after Qaddafi was killed. One unfortunate consequence was a radical mob attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in which four American officials were killed.

Syria and ISIS

During the first year of his second term, President Obama seemed determined to take the United States off a “perpetual war footing.” Sensing the country’s war fatigue and noting resistance from both Democrats and Republicans to additional commitments in the Middle East, the president decided not to launch missile strikes in Syria in support of rebels fighting the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad, even though the brutal dictator had crossed Obama’s stated “red line” by using chemical weapons against civilians. Calling off a planned air attack on Syria at virtually the last minute, Obama decided to refer the matter to Congress, which had little interest in endorsing his proposed course. A few days later, Obama accepted Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s offer to persuade Syria to get rid of its chemical weapons.

As the president acknowledged, his administration underestimated the danger of ISIS’s incursions into Syria and Iraq; indeed, Obama initially dismissed these fighters as a “JV team.” But the steady advance of the self-proclaimed Caliphate and the powerful public reaction to ISIS’s release of videos that graphically showed the beheading of two American journalists spurred the President to action. In a September 10, 2014, speech to the nation, Obama announced a plan to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.” Two weeks later, soon after ordering air strikes on dozens of ISIS targets in Syria, the president issued an even more militant call to arms against the self-described Islamic State in an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations. The number of American troops in Iraq with a mission to help fight ISIS rose to more than 5,000 by 2016, and his administration conducted more than 10,000 air strikes against the radical organization.

Although the air strikes in Syria had strong bipartisan support, constitutional and partisan issues lurked just beneath the surface. In his speech to the nation, Obama said he “welcomed congressional support for this effort,” yet insisted he had “the authority to address the threat from ISIL.” That authority, he claimed, resided in the resolution Congress passed in 2001 authorizing President George W. Bush to use military force against those “who planned, authorized, committed or aided” in the September 11 attacks. The White House argued that the resolution covered a war on ISIS because the terrorist organization is “the true inheritor of Osama bin Laden’s legacy—notwithstanding the recent public split between al Qaeda’s senior leadership and ISIS.”

The president took pains to ensure that the battle against ISIS would be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because it “would not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Yet the military action involved not just “a systematic campaign of airstrikes” but the deployment of additional troops “to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence, and equipment.” Notwithstanding the strong public sentiment to strike back against ISIS’ atrocities, the failure of Congress to place limits on a new Middle East mission renewed concerns about executive power.

Legal and constitutional issues aside, the situation on the ground in Iraq and, especially, Syria remained troubled at the end of Obama’s tenure as president. Nightmarish instability in Syria had consequences not just for the region but for Europe as well, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled in pursuit of refuge from the chaotic conditions in their country. Growing Russian ambitions in the Middle East under Putin also were a source of frustration, as was the Putin-ordered military occupation of neighboring Ukraine in 2014. In response to the Russian occupation, the United States and European nations imposed economic sanctions against Russia but they brought about no withdrawal of Russian forces.

Iran Nuclear Agreement and Trade Policy

Obama’s foreign policy goals extended beyond the wars he inherited or that broke out while he was in office. At the start of his second term in 2013, he and the leaders of five other nations began negotiations with Iran that resulted in a 2015 agreement designed to prevent that country from developing nuclear weapons for at least a decade in return for removing United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. Under the agreement, Iran surrendered 97 percent of its enriched uranium. 

Obama also restored diplomatic relations with communist Cuba in December 2014 for the first time in more than a half century and visited the country in March 2016. In 2014, the president reached a bilateral climate agreement in which China and the United States agreed to substantially reduce carbon emissions. That agreement laid the foundation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015, at which nearly every country in the world agreed to monitor their emissions and develop plans to reduce them. 

In an effort to tie Pacific nations more closely to the United States than to China, Obama negotiated a multinational trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with twelve trading partners from round the Pacific basin. TPP was caught up in election-year politics in 2016, however, when the leading candidates in both major political parties opposed it, and it was never presented to Congress. So controversial had free trade become by the end of Obama’s second term that even Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state had called TPP “the gold standard” in trade agreements, opposed it.

Other than in his fervent long-term concern about climate change, Obama’s approach to foreign policy was pragmatic and piecemeal. He enunciated no sweeping Obama Doctrine analogous to the Monroe Doctrine or the Bush Doctrine, preferring to deal with situations as they arose around the globe on a case-by-case basis. More than anything else, Obama said, his rule was, “Don’t do stupid stuff,” sometimes substituting a different four-letter word for “stuff” in private conversation.

Michael Nelson

Professor of Political Science Rhodes College

More Resources

Barack obama presidency page, barack obama essays, life in brief, life before the presidency, campaigns & elections, domestic affairs, foreign affairs (current essay), family life, impact and legacy, related video.

Race and policing

Get the latest miller center news, subscribe to our e-newsletter.

• Ethics & Leadership
• Fact-Checking
• Media Literacy
• The Craig Newmark Center
• Reporting & Editing
• Ethics & Trust
• Tech & Tools
• Business & Work
• Educators & Students
• Training Catalog
• Custom Teaching
• For ACES Members
• All Categories
• Broadcast & Visual Journalism
• Fact-Checking & Media Literacy
• In-newsroom
• Memphis, Tenn.
• Minneapolis, Minn.
• St. Petersburg, Fla.
• Washington, D.C.
• Poynter ACES Introductory Certificate in Editing
• Poynter ACES Intermediate Certificate in Editing
• Ethics & Trust Articles
• Get Ethics Advice
• Fact-Checking Articles
• International Fact-Checking Day
• Teen Fact-Checking Network
• International
• Media Literacy Training
• MediaWise Resources
• Ambassadors
• MediaWise in the News

Support responsible news and fact-based information today!

Why it worked: A rhetorical analysis of Obama’s speech on race

The National Conference of Teachers of English (NCTE) has declared today a National Day on Writing.  I celebrate such a day.  The introduction of my book "Writing Tools" imagines what America might look like and sound like if we declared ourselves a “nation of writers.” After all, what good is freedom of expression if we lack the means to express ourselves?

To mark this day – and to honor language arts teachers everywhere – Poynter is republishing an essay I wrote almost a decade ago.  Remember? It was the spring of 2008 and Barack Obama was running for president. Many of us wondered if America was ready to elect an African-American president (a man with the middle name Hussein).

To dispel the fears of some white Americans and to advance his chances for election, Obama delivered a major address on race in America, a speech that was praised even by some of his adversaries. Obama had/has a gift for language. He is a skilled orator. To neutralize that advantage, his opponents – including Hillary Clinton at one point – would characterize Obama’s words as empty “rhetoric” – an elaborate trick of language.

The Spring of 2008 seems like such a long time ago.  A time just before the Great Recession.  A time just before the ascendancy of social networks and the trolls who try to poison them.  A time before black lives were said to matter in a more assertive way. A time before fake news was anything more dangerous that a piece of satire in the Onion. A time before Colin Kaepernick took a knee — except when he was tired.  A time before torch-bearing white supremacists marched through the night in Charlottesville, Virginia.   

It feels like the perfect time for a restart on a conversation about race. To prepare us, let’s take another look at the words of Barack Obama before he was president. Let’s review what he said, and, more important, how and why he said it. My X-ray analysis of that speech is meant not as a final word on that historical moment, but as an invitation, a doorway to a room where we can all reflect on American history and the American language.

Have a great National Day on Writing.  

More than a century ago, scholar and journalist W.E.B. DuBois wrote a single paragraph about how race is experienced in America. I have learned more from those 112 words than from most book-length studies of the subject:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro;  two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

Much has been said about the power and brilliance of Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race, even by some of his detractors. The focus has been on the orator's willingness to say things in public about race that are rarely spoken at all, even in private, and his expressed desire to move the country to a new and better place. There has also been attention to the immediate purpose of the speech, which was to reassure white voters that they had nothing to fear from the congregant of a fiery African-American pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. 

Amid all the commentary, I have yet to see an X-Ray reading of the text that would make visible the rhetorical strategies that the orator and authors used so effectively. When received in the ear, these effects breeze through us like a harmonious song. When inspected with the eye, these moves become more apparent, like reading a piece of sheet music for a difficult song and finally recognizing the chord changes.

Such analysis, while interesting in itself, might be little more than a scholarly curiosity if we were not so concerned with the language issues of political discourse. The popular opinion is that our current president, though plain spoken, is clumsy with language. Fair or not, this perception has produced a hope that our next president will be a more powerful communicator, a Kennedy or Reagan, perhaps, who can use language less as a way to signal ideology and more as a means to bring the disparate parts of the nation together. Journalists need to pay closer attention to political language than ever before.

Like most memorable pieces of oratory, Obama's speech sounds better than it reads. We have no way of knowing if that was true of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but it is certainly true of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. If you doubt this assertion, test it out. Read the speech and then experience it in its original setting recited by his soulful voice.

The effectiveness of Obama's speech rests upon four related rhetorical strategies:

1.  The power of allusion and its patriotic associations. 2.  The oratorical resonance of parallel constructions. 3.  The "two-ness" of the texture, to use DuBois's useful term. 4.  His ability to include himself as a character in a narrative about race.

Allusion Part of what made Dr. King's speech resonate, not just for black people, but for some whites, was its framing of racial equality in familiar patriotic terms: "This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, 'My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty of thee I sing.  Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.'"  What follows, of course, is King's great litany of iconic topography that carries listeners across the American landscape: "Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!…"

In this tradition, Obama begins with "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union," a quote from the Constitution that becomes a recurring refrain linking the parts of the speech. What comes next is "Two hundred and twenty one years ago," an opening that places him in the tradition of Lincoln at Gettysburg and Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial: "Five score years ago."

On the first page, Obama mentions the words democracy, Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia convention, 1787, the colonies, the founders, the Constitution, liberty, justice, citizenship under the law, parchment, equal, free, prosperous, and the presidency. It is not as well known as it should be that many black leaders, including Dr. King, use two different modes of discourse when addressing white vs. black audiences, an ignorance that has led to some of the hysteria over some of Rev. Wright's comments.

Obama's patriotic lexicon is meant to comfort white ears and soothe white fears. What keeps the speech from falling into a pandering sea of slogans is language that reveals, not the ideals, but the failures of the American experiment: "It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations." And "what would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part … to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."

Lest a dark vision of America disillusion potential voters, Obama returns to familiar evocations of national history, ideals, and language:

— "Out of many, we are truly one." — "survived a Depression." — "a man who served his country" — "on a path of a more perfect union" — "a full measure of justice" — "the immigrant trying to feed his family" — "where our union grows stronger" — "a band of patriots signed that document."

Parallelism At the risk of calling to mind the worst memories of grammar class, I invoke the wisdom that parallel constructions help authors and orators make meaning memorable. To remember how parallelism works, think of equal terms to express equal ideas. So Dr. King dreamed that one day his four children "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." ( By the content of their character is parallel to by the color of their skin .)

Back to Obama: "This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign — to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America." If you are counting, that's five parallel phrases among 43 words. 

And there are many more:

Two-ness I could argue that Obama's speech is a meditation upon DuBois' theory of a dual experience of race in America. There is no mention of DuBois or two-ness, but it is all there in the texture. In fact, once you begin the search, it is remarkable how many examples of two-ness shine through:

— "through protests and struggles" — "on the streets and in the courts" — "through civil war and civil disobedience" — "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas." — "white and black" — "black and brown" — "best schools … poorest nations" — "too black or not black enough" — "the doctor and the welfare mom" — "the model student and the former gang-banger …" — "raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor" — "political correctness or reverse racism" — "your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams"

Such language manages to create both tension and balance and, without being excessively messianic, permits Obama to present himself as the bridge builder, the reconciler of America's racial divide.

Autobiography There is an obnoxious tendency among political candidates to frame their life story as a struggle against poverty or hard circumstances. As satirist Stephen Colbert once noted of presidential candidates, it is not enough to be an average millionaire. To appeal to populist instincts it becomes de rigueur to be descended from "goat turd farmers" in France.

Without dwelling on it, Obama reminds us that his father was black and his mother white, that he came from Kenya, but she came from Kansas: "I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slave and slave owners — an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

The word "story" is revealing one, for it is always the candidate's job (as both responsibility and ploy) to describe himself or herself as a character in a story of his or her own making. In speeches, as in homilies, stories almost always carry the weight of parable, with moral lessons to be drawn.

Most memorable, of course, is the story at the end of the speech — which is why it appears at the end. It is the story of Ashley Baia, a young, white, Obama volunteer from South Carolina, whose family was so poor she convinced her mother that her favorite meal was a mustard and relish sandwich. 

"Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue.  And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. … He simply says to everyone in the room, 'I am here because of Ashley.'"

During most of the 20th century, demagogues, especially in the South, gained political traction by pitting working class whites and blacks against each other. How fitting, then, that Obama's story points in the opposite direction through an old black man who feels a young white woman's pain.  

CORRECTION : An earlier version of this post incorrectly attributed the phrase, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union" to the Declaration of Independence.

Opinion | We’re set for the presidential debates. Now what?

The first debate is set for June 27, much earlier than usual. It will appear on CNN. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate.

The World Health Organization’s pandemic plan won’t end free speech

A draft of the WHO’s pandemic accord says that the document will be used with respect to individual’s personal freedoms

Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa, experts on democracy and AI to lead GlobalFact as keynote speakers

Other speakers at the fact-checking summit include Steve Levitsky, Nikita Roy and Craig Silverman

Opinion | Q&A: Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on the perils of covering war

Yingst, 30, has spent the past several years in some of the most dangerous places in the world.

Opinion | Planning a town hall with candidates? Try a reverse town hall instead.

They spend so much time talking. It’s their turn to listen.

Start your day informed and inspired.

Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Notebook

Obama’s Eulogy, Which Found Its Place in History

Obama delivers eulogy in charleston, the president delivered the eulogy for reverend clementa c. pinckney, a victim of the mass shooting at emanuel a.m.e. church in charleston, s.c. [correction: june 28, 2015. an earlier version of the caption for this video misspelled mr. pinckney’s surname as pickney.].

OBAMA: Giving all praise and honor to God. (APPLAUSE) The Bible calls us to hope, to persevere and have faith in things not seen. They were still living by faith when they died, the scripture tells us. (APPLAUSE) They did not receive the things promised. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. We are here today to remember a man of God who lived by faith, a man who believed in things not seen, a man who believed there were better days ahead off in the distance, a man of service, who persevered knowing full-well he would not receive all those things he was promised, because he believed his efforts would deliver a better life for those who followed, to Jennifer, his beloved wife, Eliana and Malana, his beautiful, wonderful daughters, to the Mother Emanuel family and the people of Charleston, the people of South Carolina. I cannot claim to have had the good fortune to know Reverend Pinckney well, but I did have the pleasure of knowing him and meeting him here in South Carolina back when we were both a little bit younger... (LAUGHTER) ... back when I didn’t have visible gray hair. (LAUGHTER) The first thing I noticed was his graciousness, his smile, his reassuring baritone, his deceptive sense of humor, all qualities that helped him wear so effortlessly a heavy burden of expectation. Friends of his remarked this week that when Clementa Pinckney entered a room, it was like the future arrived, that even from a young age, folks knew he was special, anointed. He was the progeny of a long line of the faithful, a family of preachers who spread God’s words, a family of protesters who so changed to expand voting rights and desegregate the South. Clem heard their instruction, and he did not forsake their teaching. He was in the pulpit by 13, pastor by 18, public servant by 23. He did not exhibit any of the cockiness of youth nor youth’s insecurities. Instead, he set an example worthy of his position, wise beyond his years in his speech, in his conduct, in his love, faith and purity. As a senator, he represented a sprawling swathe of low country, a place that has long been one of the most neglected in America, a place still racked by poverty and inadequate schools, a place where children can still go hungry and the sick can go without treatment — a place that needed somebody like Clem. (APPLAUSE) His position in the minority party meant the odds of winning more resources for his constituents were often long. His calls for greater equity were too-often unheeded. The votes he cast were sometimes lonely. But he never gave up. He stayed true to his convictions. He would not grow discouraged. After a full day at the Capitol, he’d climb into his car and head to the church to draw sustenance from his family, from his ministry, from the community that loved and needed him. There, he would fortify his faith and imagine what might be. Reverend Pinckney embodied a politics that was neither mean nor small. He conducted himself quietly and kindly and diligently. He encouraged progress not by pushing his ideas alone but by seeking out your ideas, partnering with you to make things happen. He was full of empathy and fellow feeling, able to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes. No wonder one of his Senate colleagues remembered Senator Pinckney as “the most gentle of the 46 of us, the best of the 46 of us.” Clem was often asked why he chose to be a pastor and a public servant. But the person who asked probably didn’t know the history of AME Church. (APPLAUSE) As our brothers and sisters in the AME Church, we don’t make those distinctions. “Our calling,” Clem once said, “is not just within the walls of the congregation but the life and community in which our congregation resides.” (APPLAUSE) He embodied the idea that our Christian faith demands deeds and not just words, that the sweet hour of prayer actually lasts the whole week long, that to put our faith in action is more than just individual salvation, it’s about our collective salvation, that to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity but the imperative of a just society. What a good man. Sometimes I think that’s the best thing to hope for when you’re eulogized, after all the words and recitations and resumes are read, to just say somebody was a good man. (APPLAUSE) You don’t have to be of high distinction to be a good man. Preacher by 13, pastor by 18, public servant by 23. What a life Clementa Pinckney lived. What an example he set. What a model for his faith. And then to lose him at 41, slain in his sanctuary with eight wonderful members of his flock, each at different stages in life but bound together by a common commitment to God — Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson. Good people. Decent people. God-fearing people. (APPLAUSE) People so full of life and so full of kindness, people who ran the race, who persevered, people of great faith. To the families of the fallen, the nation shares in your grief. Our pain cuts that much deeper because it happened in a church. The church is and always has been the center of African American life... (APPLAUSE) ... a place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships. Over the course of centuries, black churches served as hush harbors, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses, where their free descendants could gather and shout “Hallelujah...” (APPLAUSE) ... rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad, bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement. They have been and continue to community centers, where we organize for jobs and justice, places of scholarship and network, places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harms way and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter. (APPLAUSE) That’s what happens in church. That’s what the black church means — our beating heart, the place where our dignity as a people in inviolate. There’s no better example of this tradition than Mother Emanuel, a church... (APPLAUSE) ... a church built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery only to rise up again, a phoenix from these ashes. (APPLAUSE) When there were laws banning all-black church gatherers, services happened here anyway in defiance of unjust laws. When there was a righteous movement to dismantle Jim Crow, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached from its pulpit, and marches began from its steps. A sacred place, this church, not just for blacks, not just for Christians but for every American who cares about the steady expansion... (APPLAUSE) ... of human rights and human dignity in this country, a foundation stone for liberty and justice for all. That’s what the church meant. (APPLAUSE) We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history, but he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress... (APPLAUSE) ... an act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination, violence and suspicion, an act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin. Oh, but God works in mysterious ways. (APPLAUSE) God has different ideas. (APPLAUSE) He didn’t know he was being used by God. (APPLAUSE) Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer would not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group, the light of love that shown as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle. The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn’t imagine that. (APPLAUSE) The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley, how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond not merely with revulsion at his evil acts, but with (inaudible) generosity. And more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life. Blinded by hatred, he failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood — the power of God’s grace. (APPLAUSE) This whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace. (APPLAUSE) The grace of the families who lost loved ones; the grace that Reverend Pinckney would preach about in his sermons; the grace described in one of my favorite hymnals, the one we all know — Amazing Grace. (APPLAUSE) How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. (APPLAUSE) I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see. (APPLAUSE) According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God. (APPLAUSE) As manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace — as a nation out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. (APPLAUSE) He’s given us the chance where we’ve been lost to find out best selves. We may not have earned this grace with our rancor and complacency and short-sightedness and fear of each other, but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift. For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate Flag stirred into many of our citizens. (APPLAUSE) It’s true a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge, including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise... (APPLAUSE) ... as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. (APPLAUSE) For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression... (APPLAUSE) ... and racial subjugation. (APPLAUSE) We see that now. Removing the flag from this state’s capital would not be an act of political correctness. It would not an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be acknowledgement that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong. (APPLAUSE) The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong. (APPLAUSE) It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds. It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races, striving to form a more perfect union. By taking down that flag, we express adds grace God’s grace. (APPLAUSE) But I don’t think God wants us to stop there. (APPLAUSE) For too long, we’ve been blind to be way past injustices continue to shape the present. (APPLAUSE) Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty... (APPLAUSE) ... or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. (APPLAUSE) Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal-justice system and lead us to make sure that that system’s not infected with bias. (APPLAUSE) ... that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement... (APPLAUSE) ... and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure. (APPLAUSE) Maybe we now realize the way a racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal... (APPLAUSE) ... so that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote... (APPLAUSE) ... by recognizing our common humanity, by treating every child as important, regardless of the color of their skin... (APPLAUSE) ... or the station into which they were born and to do what’s necessary to make opportunity real for every American. By doing that, we express God’s grace. (APPLAUSE) For too long... (APPLAUSE) For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation. (APPLAUSE) Sporadically, our eyes are open when eight of our brothers and sisters are cut down in a church basement, 12 in a movie theater, 26 in an elementary school. But I hope we also see the 30 precious lives cut short by gun violence in this country every single day... (APPLAUSE) ... the countless more whose lives are forever changed, the survivors crippled, the children traumatized and fearful every day as they walk to school, the husband who will never feel his wife’s warm touch, the entire communities whose grief overflows every time they have to watch what happened to them happening to some other place. The vast majority of Americans, the majority of gun owners want to do something about this. We see that now. (APPLAUSE) And I’m convinced that by acknowledging the pain and loss of others, even as we respect the traditions, ways of life that make up this beloved country, by making the moral choice to change, we express God’s grace. (APPLAUSE) We don’t earn grace. We’re all sinners. We don’t deserve it. (APPLAUSE) But God gives it to us anyway. (APPLAUSE) And we choose how to receive it. It’s our decision how to honor it. None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight. Every time something like this happens, somebody says, “We have to have a conversation about race.” We talk a lot about race. (APPLAUSE) There’s no shortcut. We don’t need more talk. (APPLAUSE) None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy. It will not. People of good will will continue to debate the merits of various policies as our democracy requires — the big, raucous place, America is. And there are good people on both sides of these debates. Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allow ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again. (APPLAUSE) Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual. That’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society. (APPLAUSE) To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change, that’s how we lose our way again. It would be a refutation of the forgiveness expressed by those families if we merely slipped into old habits whereby those who disagree with us are not merely wrong, but bad; where we shout instead of listen; where we barricade ourselves behind preconceived notions or well-practiced cynicism. Reverend Pinckney once said, “Across the south, we have a deep appreciation of history. We haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” (APPLAUSE) What is true in the south is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other; that my liberty depends on you being free, too. (APPLAUSE) That — that history can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind. But more importantly, an open heart. That’s what I felt this week — an open heart. That more than any particular policy or analysis is what’s called upon right now, I think. It’s what a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.” That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible. (APPLAUSE) If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Amazing grace, amazing grace. Amazing grace... (SINGING) (APPLAUSE) ... how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now, I see. (APPLAUSE) Clementa Pinckney found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... Cynthia Hurd found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... Susie Jackson found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... Ethel Lance found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... DePayne Middleton Doctor found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... Tywanza Sanders found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... Daniel L. Simmons, Sr. found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... Sharonda Coleman-Singleton found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... Myra Thompson found that grace... (APPLAUSE) ... through the example of their lives. They’ve now passed it onto us. May we find ourselves worthy of that precious and extraordinary gift as long as our lives endure. May grace now lead them home. May God continue to shed His Grace on the United States of America.

By Michiko Kakutani

• July 3, 2015

Barack Obama’s eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was remarkable not only because the president sang the opening refrain of “Amazing Grace” on live television, and not only because of his eloquence in memorializing the pastor and eight other parishioners killed by a white gunman . It was also remarkable because the eulogy drew on all of Mr. Obama’s gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect — first glimpsed in “Dreams From My Father,” his deeply felt 1995 memoir about identity and family. And because it used those gifts to talk about the complexities of race and justice, situating them within an echoing continuum in time that reflected both Mr. Obama’s own long view of history, and the panoramic vision of America, shared by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a country in the process of perfecting itself.

Mr. Obama’s view of the nation’s history as a more than two-century journey to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence (“that all men are created equal”) real for everyone, his former chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, suggested in an email, is “both an American and a religious sentiment” — predicated upon the belief that individual sinners and a country scarred by the original sin of slavery can overcome the past through “persistent, courageous, sometimes frustrating efforts.”

For Mr. Obama, America is “a constant work in progress,” a nation founded upon the idea of new beginnings, and the enduring belief, as he once wrote in an essay about Lincoln, that “we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.” Like his two moving speeches in Selma, Ala., in 2007 and this year, Mr. Obama’s eulogy used the prism of history to amplify and crystallize the meaning of the occasion — a wide-angle lens that reminds us of the distance we’ve come from the days of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow, and the distance we have yet to travel in addressing enduring prejudice and inequities.

These are themes that have animated Mr. Obama’s writings and oratory for years, going back to his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address and 2008 “ A More Perfect Union ” speech, to his 2013 speech commemorating the 1963 March on Washington. History, he believes, is an odyssey, a crossing, a relay in which one generation’s achievements serve as the paving stones for the next generation’s journey.

In his eulogy on June 26, Mr. Obama recounted the history of Charleston’s “Mother Emanuel” — how “a church built by blacks seeking liberty” was “burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery” and how it rose again, “a phoenix from these ashes,” to become a sacred place where Dr. King would preach from its pulpit. He spoke of how history “must be a manual” to avoid “repeating the mistakes of the past” while building “a roadway toward a better world.”

Obama Sings ‘Amazing Grace’

The president broke into the spiritual after delivering the eulogy for the rev. clementa c. pinckney, the slain south carolina state senator and former pastor of emanuel a.m.e. church..

This looking back at what has been overcome and looking forward toward a better tomorrow is a bedrock tradition in the black church — which, having borne witness to so much suffering, looks to the promised land ahead. And it is a fundamental theme in the sermons of Dr. King, who talked in his great “ Dream ” speech of hewing “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” of transforming “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” Mr. Obama, like Dr. King, is fond of quoting the words of the 19th-century minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker : “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In grappling with the wounds of the Civil War, Lincoln similarly looked to the broad vistas of history and the lessons of Scripture — both for solace and as a way of framing and universalizing his own arguments. In the Gettysburg Address , he effectively redefined the founders’ vision of America and how we read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and in his Second Inaugural Address , he recognized the sin of slavery and the terrible scourge of war that was part of its price, and at the same time, sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” to find a way forward “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural was on the mind of Mr. Obama’s chief speechwriter, Cody Keenan, when he was preparing a first draft of the Charleston eulogy. He spoke with the president on June 22 about the speech and hoped to emulate Lincoln’s tone of reconciliation and healing. Like many classical eulogies, the narrative begins by memorializing the dead, then addresses the tasks remaining for the living: exhorting the congregation and the nation, as Lincoln put it, to “finish the work we are in.”

A draft of the Charleston eulogy was given to the president around 5 p.m. on June 25 and, according to Mr. Keenan, Mr. Obama spent some five hours revising it that evening, not merely jotting notes in the margins, but whipping out the yellow legal pads he likes to write on — only the second time he’s done so for a speech in the last two years. He would rewrite large swaths of the text.

Mr. Obama expanded on a short riff in the draft about the idea of grace, and made it the central theme of the eulogy: the grace family members of the shooting victims embodied in the forgiveness they expressed toward the killer; the grace the city of Charleston and the state of South Carolina manifested in coming together in the wake of the massacre; the grace God bestowed in transforming a tragedy into an occasion for renewal, sorrow into hope.

As he’s done in his most powerful earlier work, Mr. Obama drew upon his own knowledge of Scripture and literature and history — much the way Lincoln and Dr. King did in their writings — to create a musical narrative that uses biblical and historical allusions to widen the dimensions of his storytelling, while moving between the vernacular and the metaphorical, between particular issues (inequities in the criminal justice system, the need for gun control, the hurt and hate represented by the Confederate battle flag) and larger moral and spiritual imperatives.

He also inserted lines from his favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace,” as a refrain, and, on the way to Charleston aboard Marine One, he told his advisers that he might sing some of those lines “if it feels right.”

It did feel right. Mr. Obama, now in the final quarter of his presidency, has grown increasingly assertive and outspoken about issues close to his heart: In a recent podcast interview with the comedian Marc Maron, he spoke of how experience and the “fearlessness” that comes from having survived being in “the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls” have brought a sense of liberation. At the same time, the eulogy he delivered that Friday afternoon in Charleston turned out to be the capstone to a dizzying and momentous week in which Southern politicians began calling for a renunciation of the Confederate battle flag, while the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and found that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

It was a week in which a lot of Americans felt they were actually watching the arc of history bend in front of their eyes, and it was a eulogy that both spoke to the moment and connected that moment to the past and the future of what Mr. Obama calls the great “American experiment.”

Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani

Barack Obama - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, holds a significant place in history as the first African American to hold the office. Essays on Barack Obama could explore his political career, the challenges and accomplishments during his presidency, or his influence on global politics. Additionally, discussions could extend to his post-presidential role, his memoirs, or the social and cultural impact of his presidency in the broader discourse on race and identity in America. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Barack Obama you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

How did Barack Obama Change the World

Barack Obama A good leader represents the characteristics of honesty, caring, good personality, and being understandable. Obama was a leader that is educated and inspiring to people and he was talented and he had accomplished many things in life. Barack Obama was the first senator in Illionois. Barack was also the first African American president in the United States. Barack made a healthcare program that has changed many people’s lives and this is called Obamacare. Obama was a good leader […]

Rhetorical Analyzation of Barack Obama’s Victory Speech

On November 4th, 2008 Democrat Senator Barack Obama walked through the blinding lights and roaring crowd to deliver The Election Night Victory Speech at Grant Park, Illinois. During this keynote acceptance speech, he emphasized that the American dream was not on its deathbed because "change has come to America." His enticing and passionate speech echoed the words of famous speakers, unified a divided front both physically and emotionally, rhythmically explained his campaign struggles, and emphasized a call to action by […]

Black Nationalist Movement: Malcolm X

Throughout the history of the United States, the standing and equality of minorities, particularly those of African descent, has been debated and fought over, with many working for the goal of equality from myriad angles. African Americans were brought to the new world in chains, considered only 3/5th a person in the Constitution, and the US fought a tragic civil war to triumphantly end slavery. After the civil war, inequality persisted through “Black Codes” meant to restrict African American economic […]

We will write an essay sample crafted to your needs.

Leader Profile: Barack Obama

The Early Life of Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama Sr. and S. Ann Dunham. In Barack's early life, he was educated in both public schools and religious private schools that instructed with catholic or Islamic principles. He began his college career at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He transferred and earned his Bachelor of Political Science at Columbia University in New York. The experience of pursuing his […]

Barack Obama: the 44th President of the United States of America

Name: Barack Hussein Obama II Place of Birth and Date: Born August 4, 1961 (age 57), in Honolulu, Hawaii. Family Background: Obama was raised by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and later by his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, alongside his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is the daughter of his mother and her second husband. Obama's parents divorced when he was two. After the divorce, his father, Barack Obama Sr., moved to Massachusetts and eventually returned to Kenya. Obama […]

Barrack Obama: a Great President

Throughout his Presidency, Barrack Obama proved to be a skilled policymaker than a politician, conventional wisdom aside. His accomplishments are numerous, impressive, and exceed what his supporters thought he could ever achieve. Although some critics complain that he did not do enough to transform the United States of America, he introduced remarkable policies and regulations in 2009 and 2010. These policies did a lot to shape the American public life and government and contributed to the development of a society […]

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney

On Tuesday, November 6th, 2012, the United States presidential election was held, alongside many federal elections, state, and local elections. The incumbent Barack Obama candidate for the Democratic Party has defeated the Republican Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 332-206 (Electoral College) and 51.38%- 48.61% (popular vote). In most cases, both candidates’ political positions were aligned as liberal and conservative ideologies. In the 2012 presidential election, both Obama and Romney spent over one billion dollars during their campaign. They have […]

The Election of Barack Obama

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African American president, being the 44th president in office. The picture I chose with Barack Obama, including the word "Hope" was his campaign poster in his 2008 presidential election. The poster is also seen with the words "Change" or "Progress" which all these words represented him in his campaign. When Barack Obama was elected as the first African American president, he raised the hopes of many Americans, especially the African American population, he […]

How Obama Impacted Society

Barack Hussein Obama II was born in state capital, Hawaii on August 04, 1961. His parents Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. were an interracial couple and they didn't last long. His parents divorced when Obama was just 2 years old and his parents both remarried and had children. Obama doesn't have any biological siblings but he does have 8 half-siblings. Although Obama's dad wasn't really around, the two still wrote to each other until the early 1980s when Barack […]

Barack Obama: his Life and Career

BARACK OBAMA Barack Obama was born in August 4, 1961,in Honolulu, Hawaii and later became the first African American president. Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, and the first African American to serve as the president of the United States of America. First elected to the presidency in 2008, He served two terms as the 44 President of the United States. Early Life. His mother, Ann Dunham, was born in Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during […]

Barack Obama’s Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama’s Inaugural speech of 2013, promoted equality for all Americans. In the United States Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president for the second time in history. Barack Obama led our nation to new developments and growth. He  united our nation, which drew strength and courage from younger people who denied their generations indifferences. In 2013, Barack Obama made his Inaugural Address speech to persuade the American people that he could form America into a  better place with […]

Biography of Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Hussein Obama is an american politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2008-2017. Obama was the first black president and him being sworn in as president is said to be  "the best thing to happen to america in a long time". Being the first black president was just the beginning of what would be an interesting presidential run for Obama. Like many people expected, Obama made some great changes that helped better the country. […]

Barack Obama History Paper

Barack Obama was born on August 8th, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to his mother, Ann Durham, and his father, Barack Sr., who met at the University of Hawaii Manoa campus. His father was from Kenya and was the first-ever student from an African country to attend this university. His mother was originally from Kansas, where her ancestors were antislavery activists. His parents' marriage was short—interracial marriages were very rare at that time and illegal in some states. His mother's family […]

Roots of Resilience: Unveiling the Story of Barack Obama Parents

The lineage of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, threads back to an intricate tapestry woven by his parents, each contributing an indelible mark to his extraordinary journey. Born to Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr., the President's story is intertwined with the resilience, diversity, and determination of his parents. Ann Dunham, an intrepid and spirited woman, hailed from Kansas and embodied the tenacity and curiosity that defined her son. Her boundless curiosity and passion for learning […]

President Barack Obama and Operation Geronimo to Assassinate Osama Bin Laden Discursive Essay

Operation Geronimo, a pivotal mission executed under the administration of President Barack Obama, marked a significant moment in the history of the United States' fight against terrorism. The operation, carried out on May 2, 2011, resulted in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the leader of the terrorist group al-Qaeda. This mission symbolized a major triumph in the War on Terror and a defining moment in Obama's presidency. The decision to carry […]

Barack Obama and Gay Marriage

Thesis sentenceI was raised in a Christian home like most American people, where we were taught by the church that being homosexual is a sin. I grew up believing this for most of my life until I met a dear friend who would change my views on the subject matter. I watched this person be humiliated and discriminated against because of her sexual orientation. This made me wonder how one sin would be worse than another. I know I have […]

Unforgettable Event that Changed my Life

Our lives are always shaped by events around us. This implies that human life is surrounded by everyday life decisions and choices which always bring about a result which may impact a closer or a far-off individual either positively or negatively. Despite the fact that we as low-level members of the society may not have had a hand in the decision made or we may not even have control over the outcome, it is upon us to synthesize the experience […]

The Presidency of Barack Obama: a First Historical Assessment

This content aims to critically review the book "The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment," by Julian E. Zelizer. He is a CNN political analyst based in the department of History and Public Affairs in Princeton University. Zelizer has authored a variety of books that have significant information on the occurrences and explanations of events in the United States. Zelizer also appears regularly as a news commentator on various platforms such as radio, television, and print. The book […]

Books about Barack Obama

Remnick David is both a writer and journalist born October 29 in New Jersey. In the year 1994, won the Publishers accolade for his novel the Lenin's Tombs: the last days of the Empire. He a graduate from Princeton University. Today Remnick is an editor with the New Yorker magazines. He has written several books including the bridge: the rise and life of Barrack Obama. This was his sixth book to be written by him. Current Rennick is married to […]

Influential Women – Ellen DeGeneres

I believe that Ellen Lee DeGeneres deserves more credit and ovation for what she has done in her life by inspiring men and women all the world. She was born in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Growing up she wanted to become a veterinarian but said she wasn't “book smart”. Ellen grew up a funny girl, she started doing stand-up comedy at a young age. In a article I read, the author stated “At the age of 23, […]

The Development of Cultural Racism Associated with American Politics

Abstract Politics in the United States have always been a heated issue, and never more so than now. The surprising election of Donald Trump has created a clear cultural divide on many levels that continues to cultivate hate, and gifts not just Americans but the entire world with cultural racism that we have not seen for a long time. The political divide in America affects every American, every day, so much so that you would be hard-pressed to find someone […]

“Dreams from my Father”: a Journey of Self-Discovery and Racial Identity

In the rich tapestry of memoirs written by American figures, Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father" holds a unique place. Crafted long before his presidency, the book offers a candid and introspective look into the early life of the 44th President of the United States. It chronicles Obama's personal journey to understand his racial identity, his heritage, and the intricate relationship he had with his absentee father. This deeply personal narrative is more than just an autobiography; it delves into […]

A Statistical Analysis and Graphic Data of the Affordable Care Act in America

The political support for the Affordable Care Act is something that is bound to vary throughout the country. Each state has an opinion on the new healthcare initiative enacted by Barack Obama, and it can easily be seen which states supported it. Looking at the information from the dataset health.csv, one can easily analyze and construct plots and tables that help to view correlations and lack thereof. One major correlation between two factors is that of percent_favorable_aca and Obama_share_12, which […]

Analysis of the Affordable Care Act and the Birth Control Pill

Obamacare was signed into law in March 2010. The law covers various types of health plans, benefits, and services. Just years ago millions of women were paying for or couldn't afford birth control. Now, "an estimated 27 million women are currently benefiting from Obamacare's no-cost services” (Ressler). Birth Control is an ongoing debate on whether the pill itself should be covered for by taxes due to peoples rights and beliefs about its use. Another issue about the contraception is who […]

Public Policy in Government Essay

Public policy is used by the government to create order or to look into the issues that are affecting the citizens of the United States. They are carried out through following guidelines that are indicated in the constitution. A policy is not a tangible thing but rather, public policy is used to describe a set of laws, regulations, and mandates. They are made through a political process. This legal process helps the government be able to create laws that serve […]

Why have Americans Lost Trust in the Government?

Throughout history Americans have viewed the government as the highest department to ever exist. Whenever there was a problem in the country we looked to the government and the officials within the government to solve the issues at hand. As we’ve evolved as a society or even more than that, a country, we’ve began to lose trust and respect for the government. Why might such a high departement lose the trust of their citizens? Looking deeper into the behaviors of […]

Barack Obama: a Historic Journey to Becoming America’s First Black President

When Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States in 2008, it was not just a political victory; it was a monumental chapter in the annals of American history. His election as the first black president marked a profound change in the nation's narrative, breaking centuries-old racial barriers and redefining the American dream. But the significance of this event goes beyond just a historical first; it's a story of societal evolution, a reflection of changing attitudes, […]

Additional Example Essays

• Letter From Birmingham Jail Rhetorical Analysis
• Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address
• Martin Luther King as Activist and Outsider
• New Imperialism
• Zami Lifestyle in Audre Lorde's Book
• Argument Essay - Disobedience
• George Washington: Research Paper
• Leadership and the Army Profession
• Compare And Contrast In WW1 And WW2
• Why College Should Not Be Free
• Shakespeare's Hamlet Character Analysis
• A Raisin in the Sun Theme

How to Write an Essay About Barack Obama

Understanding barack obama's legacy.

Before writing an essay about Barack Obama, it is essential to understand his impact and legacy both as the 44th President of the United States and as a public figure. Obama's presidency marked a series of significant milestones and policies that left a lasting impact on American politics and society. Start your essay by providing a brief background about Obama, including his early life, education, and rise in politics. Discuss his historical significance as the first African American president and the context in which he was elected. Understanding Obama's key domestic and foreign policies, his leadership style, and his contributions to issues like healthcare, economic reform, and international diplomacy is crucial for a comprehensive analysis.

Developing a Thesis Statement

A strong essay about Barack Obama should be centered around a clear, concise thesis statement. This statement should present a specific viewpoint or argument about Obama's presidency, political ideology, or legacy. For instance, you might explore the impact of the Affordable Care Act, analyze Obama's approach to international relations, or discuss his influence on American political discourse. Your thesis will guide the direction of your essay and provide a structured approach to your topic.

Gathering Supporting Evidence

To support your thesis, gather evidence from various sources, including Obama's speeches, policy documents, biographies, and analyses by political experts. This might include statistical data on policy outcomes, excerpts from Obama’s memoirs, or commentary from political analysts. Use this evidence to support your thesis and build a persuasive argument. Be sure to consider different perspectives and address potential counterarguments.

Analyzing Obama's Presidency and Impact

Dedicate a section of your essay to analyzing key aspects of Obama's presidency and his broader impact. Discuss specific policies and initiatives, their implementation, and their short-term and long-term effects. Explore the challenges Obama faced, such as economic crises, political opposition, and global issues, and how he addressed them. Also, consider the social and cultural significance of his presidency in the context of American history.

Concluding the Essay

Conclude your essay by summarizing the main points of your discussion and restating your thesis in light of the evidence provided. Your conclusion should tie together your analysis and emphasize the significance of Barack Obama's contribution to American politics and society. You might also want to reflect on his ongoing influence after his presidency and his role in current political discussions.

Reviewing and Refining Your Essay

After completing your essay, review and refine it for clarity and coherence. Ensure that your arguments are well-structured and supported by evidence. Check for grammatical accuracy and ensure that your essay flows logically from one point to the next. Consider seeking feedback from peers, educators, or political analysts to further improve your essay. A well-written essay on Barack Obama will not only demonstrate your understanding of his presidency but also your ability to engage with complex political and historical topics.

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Barack Obama — Operation Geronimo Persuasive

Operation Geronimo: a Justified Use of Force in Self-defense

• Categories: 9/11 Barack Obama Osama Bin Laden

About this sample

Words: 886 |

Published: Apr 17, 2023

Words: 886 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, operation geronimo.

• Dunlap, C. (2019, February 01). Yes, the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden was lawful. Retrieved November 21, 2020, from https://sites.duke.edu/lawfire/2019/01/31/yes-the-raid-that-killed-osama-bin-laden-was-lawful/
• Hodgin, S.L. (2014). Killing Osama Bin Laden: Legal and Necessary. Widener Law Review Delaware Law: Widener University. https://widenerlawreview.org/files/2014/09/3-Hodgin.pdf
• International law, codification, legal affairs, legal, committee, Terrorism, charter, criminal accountability, administration of justice, jurisdictional immunities, cloning, safety of United Nations and associated personnel, ad hoc, Diplomatic Conferences, Reports of International Arbitral Awards, Summaries of International Court of Justice Judgments and Advisory Opinions, Legislative Series, Juridical Yearbook, Repertory of Practice of United Nations Organs, Books (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2020, from https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml
• Legality of Targeted Killing Program under International Law. (2019, October 31). Retrieved November 21, 2020 https://www.lawfareblog.com/legality-targeted-killing-program-under-international-law
• Wpengine. (2014, November 14). The Legality of Killing Osama bin Laden. Retrieved November 21, 2020, from https://harvardnsj.org/2011/05/the-legality-of-killing-osama-bin-laden/          

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Government & Politics

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 331 words

2 pages / 887 words

2 pages / 1133 words

2 pages / 872 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Barack Obama

Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, is often celebrated for his political accomplishments and leadership skills. However, less well-known is his background as a social worker. Before entering politics, Obama [...]

Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech was delivered in 2008, during his presidential campaign. This speech was significant for many reasons, including its historical context, rhetorical strategies, and impact on American [...]

Barack Obama's inaugural address in 2009 was a historic and monumental moment in American history. As the first African American president, Obama's speech was not only significant for its cultural and social implications, but [...]

From 16th century when North America was colonized by French and British through the history of The United States there has been a various instance of colonialism and racism and mass killing of the North American natives. Up to [...]

As a first-grader in the United States, I witnessed the historic election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. In the days leading up to his Inauguration, my parents were brimming with excitement. As my [...]

As President of the United States, you are expected to carry out a multitude of jobs and duties. Presidents are not only expected to lead the country and its people to succeed but also motivate and encourage them along the way. [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Operation Geronimo and Presidential Authority Essay

Introduction, supporting arguments.

On April 29, 2011, the then US commander in chief, President Obama, authorized an operation that ultimately led to the killing of the most wanted man on the CIA watch list, Osama bin Laden. In this Operation Geronimo persuasive essay, we discuss historical actions via the spectrum of legal and political lenses.

Reports indicate that President Obama had been consulting with the National Security Council for months on the probability of Osama bin Laden being within the suspected hideout and the possibility of authorizing a mission. Ultimately, President Obama gave the orders, and Osama bin Laden was killed in a military exercise dubbed Operation Geronimo, thus ending a decade-long search mission to capture the head of Al Qaeda. The killing of Osama bin Laden was a reprieve for millions of Americans and the international community, especially after the events of September 11, 2001, the infamous Twin Towers bomb attack by Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, questions abound on whether President Obama had legal authority for Operation Geronimo. Read this Operation Geronimo case study and discover arguments supporting Obama’s right to execute the plan.

One needs to investigate the decision using US domestic and international laws to understand President Obama’s legality in authorizing Operation Geronimo. The agnosticism surrounding the legality of permitting Operation Geronimo hinges on President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, which states, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination” (Fisher & Becker, 2021, p. 2). However, this order does not define assassination contextually (Koven & Perez, 2022), and thus, the Operation cannot be termed illegal based on this understanding. In addition, after the 9/11 bombings, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution. The resolution allows the US commander-in-chief “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons” (Fisher & Becker, 2021, p. 2). Therefore, under this resolution, President Obama was within the confines of the US domestic laws to authorize the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, who was actively involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

However, even with the legality of such authorization, questions abound on how the execution of the operation observed laws of armed conflict, viz. “military necessity, proportionality, and distinction/discrimination” (Solis, 2021, p. 268). Military necessity was qualified in this case as Bin Laden had attacked the US, and he was a threat to international peace by propagating terrorism. Likewise, the force that was used after entering Bin Laden’s house was proportional to the danger that he posed to the elite squad, for he allegedly reached for his firearm to retaliate. Finally, the discrimination requirement was fulfilled as the people who died in the ensuing confrontation were collateral damage but not targets of the assault. Operation Geronimo case study could become an ideal tool for assessing the behavior of public officials in the national security context.

As mentioned earlier, the authorization had to align with international laws. Under the international law rules of jus ad bellum, “State can justify an international use of force if the force was either used in self-defense following an armed attack or expressly permitted by the United Nations (UN) Security Council” (Lieblich, 2021, p. 1). In this case, the US was a victim of Bin Laden’s armed attack on 9/11, and capturing him was a way of self-defense. Conversely, the rules of jus in bello set “the parameters on the allowable scope and nature of that force” (Lieblich, 2021, p. 2). Therefore, the US had the legal basis to enter Pakistan and execute its mission within the confines of international law. There have been allegations that the US violated Pakistani sovereignty by raiding Bin Laden’s hideout without the involvement of the local authorities (Roy et al., 2022). The UN Charter emphasizes respect for territorial sovereignty, which all nations should respect (Koven & Perez, 2022). However, Article 51 of the same UN Charter creates a legal leeway for the US to pursue its aggressors as self-defense, even to the extent of breaching the other countries’ territorial sovereignty (Finkelstein, 2021). Therefore, President Obama acted within international law by authorizing Operation Geronimo.

Osama Bin Laden orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which changed the way the US defended itself against such hostilities. After the attacks, Congress authorized the then-US President to pursue the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks inside and outside the country. Therefore, after President Obama received intelligence reports that Bin Laden’s hideout had been identified, he had the legal obligation and power to authorize a military attack. Later, questions on the legality of such authorization based on domestic and international laws were raised. Operation Geronimo’s persuasive essay proved an essential step towards realizing the nuanced nature of presidential powers in national security. More questions emerged about how the mission was executed and whether rules of armed conflict were observed. However, this paper has answered these questions to uphold the argument that President Obama had the legal authority to order Operation Geronimo and to execute the plan.

Finkelstein, C. (2021). The status of state and nonstate actors in postwar hostilities: Restoring the rule of law to US targeted killing operations . Vand. J. Transnat’l L ., 54, 1163. Web.

Fisher, D., & Becker, M. H. (2021). The heterogeneous repercussions of killing Osama bin Laden on global terrorism patterns . European Journal of Criminology , 18(3), 301-324. Web.

Koven, S. G., & Perez, A. F. (2022). Ethics of targeted killings and assassinations . Public Integrity , 24(3), 319-328. Web.

Lieblich, E. (2021). The humanization of jus ad bellum: prospects and perils . European Journal of International Law , 32(2), 579-612. Web.

Roy, M. I., Khalid, A., Rehman, A., & Khalid, F. (2022). Operation Neptune Spear and the Manhunt (Implications for Pakistan United States Counter Terrorism Synergism 2001-2020) . Journal of Political Studies , 29(2). Web.

Solis, G. (2021). The law of armed conflict: International humanitarian law in war (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, September 24). Operation Geronimo and Presidential Authority. https://ivypanda.com/essays/operation-geronimo-and-presidential-authority/

"Operation Geronimo and Presidential Authority." IvyPanda , 24 Sept. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/operation-geronimo-and-presidential-authority/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Operation Geronimo and Presidential Authority'. 24 September.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Operation Geronimo and Presidential Authority." September 24, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/operation-geronimo-and-presidential-authority/.

1. IvyPanda . "Operation Geronimo and Presidential Authority." September 24, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/operation-geronimo-and-presidential-authority/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Operation Geronimo and Presidential Authority." September 24, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/operation-geronimo-and-presidential-authority/.

• Operation Geronimo’s International Liability
• Operation Geronimo by the US Forces
• Apache Resistance to American Settlement on the West
• Local Police Role in Homeland Security
• Counterterrorism and Mitigation of Disasters
• Structure of Homeland Security
• Homeland Security: Police and Profiling
• Homeland Security: Current Perspectives