Barack Hussein Obama - Research Paper Example

President Obama has plenty of detractors and many blame him for things that he really has no control over. But despite this, Barack Obama represents America in ways that few other Presidents have in the past. He is a unique president that has been elected because he has experiences and attributes that appeal to the rapidly changing demographics of the United States of America. An important distinction that President Obama has that makes him unique among Presidents of the United States is his ethnicity.

President Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a student in Honolulu, Hawaii when she met Barack Obama Sr. They were both studying in the same program at the university. Ann was from a working class family that had lived throughout the Midwest before relocating to Hawaii. She was a smart, able student with a passion for learning about cultures from all around the world. Barack Obama Sr. was from the Luo tribe in Kenya. As a child, he herded goats in his native Kenya. He was attending college on a scholarship.

Ann and Barack Obama Sr. married in 1961 and Barack Obama Jr. was born a few months later. The fact that Ann was a white woman from the Midwest and Barack Obama Sr. was a black man from Africa is significant. President Obama became self-conscious about his race when he was a young teenager (Barack Obama Biography, 2011). He wondered why being black was looked down on by some white people. This is significant because President Obama is leading America during an age when ethnic minorities are the new majorities in several major metropolitan regions.

America is a more ethnically diverse place and it is important that there are people in leadership that have experienced discrimination first hand. Some minorities think the Barack Obama should do more for them than he has while he has been in office. There may be few legislative victories he can point to, but it is good to have an ethnically mixed President so the issue of race can be discussed in a more constructive way than in the past in America. Barack is an important President for our day and age because he is a minority and that helps all Americans know that minorities are capable of sound judgment and capable leadership.

Barack Obama’s parents divorced when he was two years old. He then moved to Indonesia and lived with his step-father, mother and step-sister for several years. This is a second reason that President Obama is uniquely qualified to be our President. He is the only President in the history of the United States to have lived in a Muslim country for any period of time. America’s relations with the Muslim world are at an all time low in many respects. We still have close allies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Yemen.

But many Muslim countries hate America and Americans. Having experienced Muslim culture first hand, President Obama is in a strong position to understand the Muslim world. He knows from first hand experience that not all people in the Muslim world are bad. He understands that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people that want peace with America. President Obama gave a famous speech in Cairo soon after he was elected. In this speech he called for greater unity and understanding between the western, democratic nations and the Arab, Muslim nations (Holzman, 2009).

It is interesting to note that many of those people that heard this speech would begin peaceful protests two years later,