Samaria graham biography of barack obama
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To address the financial crisis he inherited, he passed a stimulus bill, bailed out the struggling auto industry and Wall Street, and gave working families a tax cut.
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Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996 and served there for eight years. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops deployed in difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.During the first two years of his first term, President Obama was able to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to improve the economy, pass health-care reform legislation, and withdraw most US troops from Iraq.
But as a presidential biography it proves a mind-numbing exercise in patience and pointless perseverance – 2 stars (Full review here)
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* “Barack Obama: The Story” (2012) by David Maraniss
I had a great experience with Maraniss’s biography of the young Bill Clinton and this book on Barack Obama’s early life did not disappoint.
He won a scholarship to study economics at the University of Hawaii, where he met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from Wichita, Kansas, whose father had worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression and fought with the U.S. Army in World War II before moving his family to Hawaii in 1959. It takes time to develop, and not until the book’s second half does the future president come into sharp focus.
He helped create a state earned-income tax credit that benefited the working poor, promoted subsidies for early childhood education programs and worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.
Re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Democratic primary for the U.
S. House of Representatives seat held by the popular four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. After the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, the president spent significant time and political effort negotiating, for the most part unsuccessfully, with congressional Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit.
Its focus, somewhat to my surprise, is as much on Obama’s forebears as Obama himself. After winning a closely fought contest against New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee for president, in the general election.
When President Obama took office, he faced very significant challenges.
If elected, Palin would have been the nation’s first-ever female vice-president.
As in the primaries, Obama’s campaign worked to build support at the grassroots level and used what supporters saw as the candidate’s natural charisma, unusual life story and inspiring message of hope and change to draw impressive crowds to Obama’s public appearances, both in the U.S.
and on a campaign trip abroad. The economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W. Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help struggling financial institutions. Taking the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters, Malia Obama and Sasha Obama, he acknowledged the historic nature of his win while reflecting on the serious challenges that lay ahead.
Barack and Ann’s son, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.
Did you know?
Not only was Obama the first African American president, he was also the first to be born outside the continental United States. After winning reelection in 2012, Obama began his second term focused on securing legislation on immigration reform and gun control, neither of which he was able to achieve.
Unfortunately, the degree of satisfaction a reader achieves by patiently navigating its ten chapters is inadequate compensation for the persistently tedious experience.
Garrow makes no discernible effort to separate mundane details from consequential facts and there are few, if any, overarching themes or theses. He partnered with another Republican, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia.
I promise you, we as a people will get there.”
Barack Obama was sworn in as the first Black president of the United States on January 20, 2009.
Barack Obama: Life in Brief
Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States—becoming the first African American to serve in that office—on January 20, 2009.
The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii.
That July, Obama gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, shooting to national prominence with his eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. “The road ahead will be long, our climb will be steep. And yet, in hindsight, his political ascent makes almost perfect sense.
Because his presidency ended so recently, and due to his young age, it could be three decades or more before the definitive biography of Obama is written.
But Remnick’s reporting eye and his tenacity in seeking out interviews of everyone who ever knew Obama are remarkable.