President Barack Obama - Research Paper Example

Obama achieved national attention during his time as a senator. Encouraged by his popularity and determination to excel, Obama ran for the Democratic Presidential Candidacy for the 2008 presidential election and won the party nomination beating Hilary Rodham Clinton. He went on to win the presidential election and sworn in as president on 20th January, 2009. Later in the year Obama also achieved the honor of being the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 2009 (Gormley). As a patriot and loyalist countryman, Obama had a very lucid vision about his country which he wanted his fellow countrymen to adopt; the vision of unity, accord and common good (Price).

In his address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004 he said: There’s not a liberal America or a conservative America, there’s United States of America. There’s not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America, there’s United States of America. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. Obama had to face a lot of challenges soon after assuming the office of the President of the United States most significant of which were the dwindling economy and effectual exit from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform, Consumer Protection Act and the Budget Control Act are some of the most important legislative measures taken by the Obama administration which are being deemed as very effective and successful for solving issues related to worsening economic conditions and social welfare. Obama achieved remarkable success in foreign policy in the form of the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after a successful military operation in a mountain town in Pakistan, the ouster of undemocratic and tyrant government of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and the success of strategic exit of forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, the process which is still underway.

Gaining confidence from the success of his domestic and foreign policies, Obama declared his intensions for re-election in the 2012 Presidential Elections (Horn). Obama was born in Hawaii to parents of ethnically diverse descent; his father was an African from Kenya while his mother was of Irish descent. Obama had to struggle to understand his multiracial origin during his childhood. To further complicate things, after getting divorced his mother remarried an Indonesian student and had to move to Indonesia when Suharto, a military leader of Indonesia called back all Indonesian students from foreign universities, that is why Obama spent his early childhood in Indonesia and owing to this he is very popular in Indonesia.

Obama came back to US and started living with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii where he attended high school. Being brought up in a multiracial culture was not very easy for Obama to understand as a child because multiracial background was not very common in the US at that time however it helped him having an expansive vision he practiced in his political life and enabled him to develop the quality of understanding the aspirations of people from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds (Hill).

Being an African American