Barack Obama Encyclopedia

6/9/2019 Barack Obama -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Barack Obama
Barack Obama, in
full Barack
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Hussein Obama II,
Introduction
(born August 4,
Early life
1961, Honolulu,
Hawaii, U.S.), 44th Politics and ascent to the presidency
president of the Presidency
United States President Obama’s cabinet
(2009–17) and the
rst African
American to hold the of ce. Before winning the
presidency, Obama represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate
(2005–08). He was the third African American to be
Obama, Barack
elected to that body since the end of Reconstruction
Barack Obama, 2012.
(1877). In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Pete Souza—Official White House Photo
“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international
diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
Early life
Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage

goatherd in rural Kenya, won a scholarship to study in
the United States, and eventually became a senior
economist in the Kenyan government. Obama’s mother,
Barack Obama—with his wife, Michelle— S. Ann Dunham, grew up in Kansas, Texas, and
being sworn in as the 44th president of the Washington state before her family settled in Honolulu.
United States, Jan. 20, 2009. In 1960 she and Barack Sr. met in a Russian language
MSgt Cecilio Ricardo, U.S. Air Force/U.S.
class at the University of Hawaii and married less than a
Department of Defense
year later.
When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at

Harvard University; shortly thereafter, in 1964, Ann and
Barack Sr. divorced. (Obama saw his father only one
more time, during a brief visit when Obama was 10.)
Key events in the life of Barack Obama.
Later Ann remarried, this time to another foreign
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
student, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, with whom she
had a second child, Maya. Obama lived for several years
https://www.britannica.com/print/article/973560 1/39
in Jakarta with his half sister, mother, and stepfather. While there, Obama attended both a
government-run school where he received some instruction in Islam and a Catholic private
school where he took part in Christian schooling.
He returned to Hawaii in 1971 and lived in a modest apartment, sometimes with his
grandparents and sometimes with his mother (she remained for a time in Indonesia,
returned to Hawaii, and then went abroad again—partly to pursue work on a Ph.D.—before
divorcing Soetoro in 1980). For a brief period his mother was aided by government food
stamps, but the family mostly lived a middle-class existence. In 1979 Obama graduated from
Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu.
Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years and then
transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where in 1983 he received a bachelor’s
degree in political science. In uenced by professors who pushed him to take his studies
more seriously, Obama experienced great intellectual growth during college and for a couple
of years thereafter. He led a rather ascetic life and read works of literature and philosophy by
William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Toni Morrison, and others. After serving for a
couple of years as a writer and editor for Business International Corp., a research, publishing,
and consulting rm in Manhattan, he took a position in 1985 as a community organizer on
Chicago’s largely impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three years later and
graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard University’s law school, where he was the
rst African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer
associate in 1989 at the Chicago law rm of Sidley Austin, Obama had met Chicago native
Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer at the rm. The two married in 1992.
After receiving his law degree, Obama moved to Chicago and became active in the
Democratic Party. He organized Project Vote, a drive that registered tens of thousands of
African Americans on voting rolls and that is credited with helping Democrat Bill Clinton win
Illinois and capture the presidency in 1992. The effort also helped make Carol Moseley Braun,
an Illinois state legislator, the rst African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
During this period, Obama wrote his rst book and saw it published. The memoir, Dreams
from My Father (1995), is the story of Obama’s search for his biracial identity by tracing the
lives of his now-deceased father and his extended family in Kenya. Obama lectured on
constitutional law at the University of Chicago and worked as an attorney on civil rights
issues.
Politics and ascent to the presidency
In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois Senate, where, most

notably, he helped pass legislation that tightened
campaign nance regulations, expanded health care to

poor families, and reformed criminal justice and welfare
laws. In 2004 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating
Republican Alan Keyes in the rst U.S. Senate race in
which the two leading candidates were African
Americans. While campaigning for the U.S. Senate,
Obama gained national recognition by delivering the
Barack Obama, 2004. keynote address at the Democratic National Convention
Nam Y. Huh/AP in July 2004. The speech wove a personal narrative of
Obama’s biography with the theme that all Americans
are connected in ways that transcend political, cultural,
and geographical differences. (See primary source
document: Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention.) The address lifted Obama’s once
obscure memoir onto best-seller lists, and, after taking
of ce the following year, Obama quickly became a major
gure in his party. A trip to visit his father’s home in
Kenya in August 2006 gained international media
attention, and Obama’s star continued ascending. His
second book, The Audacity of Hope (2006), a mainstream
polemic on his vision for the United States, was
published weeks later, instantly becoming a major best
seller. In February 2007 he announced at the Old State
Capitol in Spring eld, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln
Barack Obama delivering the keynote had served as a state legislator, that he would seek the
speech at the Democratic National Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008. (For
Convention in Boston, July 27, 2004.
coverage of the 2008 election, see United States
Ron Sachs/REX/Shutterstock.com
Presidential Election of 2008.)
Obama’s personal charisma, stirring oratory, and his

campaign promise to bring change to the established
political system resonated with many Democrats,
especially young and minority voters. On January 3, 2008,
Obama won a surprise victory in the rst major
nominating contest, the Iowa caucus, over Sen. Hillary
Clinton, who was the overwhelming favourite to win the
nomination. Five days later, however, Obama nished
second to Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, and a
bruising—and sometimes bitter—primary race ensued.
Obama won more than a dozen states—including Illinois,

his home state, and Missouri, a traditional political
bellwether—on Super Tuesday, February 5. No clear
front-runner for the nomination emerged, however, as
Clinton won many states with large populations, such as
California and New York. Obama produced an impressive
string of victories later in the month, handily winning the
11 primaries and caucuses that immediately followed
Super Tuesday, which gave him a signi cant lead in
pledged delegates. His momentum slowed in early
March when Clinton won signi cant victories in Ohio and
Texas. Though still maintaining his edge in delegates,
Obama lost the key Pennsylvania primary on April 22.
Obama, Barack
Two weeks later he lost a close contest in Indiana but
Barack Obama.
won the North Carolina primary by a large margin,
Courtesy of the Office of U.S. Senator
widening his delegate lead over Clinton. She initially had
Barack Obama
a big lead in so-called superdelegates (Democratic Party
of cials allocated votes at the convention that were
unaf liated with state primary results), but, with Obama
winning more states and actual delegates, many peeled
away from her and went to Obama. On June 3, following
the nal primaries in Montana and South Dakota, the
number of delegates pledged to Obama surpassed the
total necessary to claim the Democratic nomination.
On August 27 Obama became the rst African American

to be nominated for the presidency by either major party
and went on to challenge Republican Sen. John McCain
for the country’s highest of ce. McCain criticized Obama,
still a rst-term senator, as being too inexperienced for
the job. To counter, Obama selected Joe Biden, a veteran
senator from Delaware who had a long resume of
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the
foreign policy expertise, to be his vice presidential
cover of Newsweek, Dec. 25, 2006–Jan. 1,
2007.
running mate. Obama and McCain waged a erce and
PRNewsFoto/Newsweek/AP Images expensive contest. Obama, still bolstered by a fever of
popular support, eschewed federal nancing of his
campaign and raised hundreds of millions of dollars,
much of it coming in small donations and over the
Internet from a record number of donors. Obama’s fund-
raising advantage helped him buy massive amounts of

television advertising and organize deep grassroots
organizations in key battleground states and in states
that had voted Republican in previous presidential
cycles.
The two candidates offered a stark ideological choice for

voters. Obama called for a swift withdrawal of most
Barack Obama, 2006.
Scott Olson/Getty Images combat forces from Iraq and a restructuring of tax policy
that would bring more relief to lower- and middle-class
voters, while McCain said the United States must wait for
full victory in Iraq and charged that Obama’s rhetoric was
long on eloquence but short on substance. Just weeks
before election day, Obama’s campaign seized on the
economic meltdown that had resulted from the
catastrophic failure of U.S. banks and nancial
institutions in September, calling it a result of the
Republican free-market-driven policies of the eight-year
administration of George W. Bush.
Obama won the election, capturing nearly 53 percent of

the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. Not only did he
hold all the states that John Kerry had won in the 2004
election, but he also captured a number of states (e.g.,
Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia) that the
Memorabilia from Barack Obama's
presidential campaign.
Republicans had carried in the previous two presidential
Obama for America elections. On election night tens of thousands gathered
in Chicago’s Grant Park to see Obama claim victory. (See
primary source document: 2008 Victory Speech.) Shortly
after his win, Obama resigned from the Senate. On
January 20, 2009, hundreds of thousands turned out in
Washington, D.C., to witness Obama taking the oath of
of ce as president. (See primary source document:
Inaugural Address.)
Michelle and Barack Obama (couple at left) David Mendell

and Jill and Joe Biden at Invesco Field on
the final night of the Democratic National Presidency
Convention in Denver, Aug. 28, 2008.
The Nobel Peace Prize and partisanship
Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress, In an effort to improve the image of the United States
Washington, D.C.
abroad—which many believed had been much damaged
during the Bush administration—Obama took a number
of steps that indicated a signi cant shift in tone. He
signed an executive order that banned excessive
interrogation techniques; ordered the closing of the
controversial military detention facility in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, within a year (a deadline that was not met);
proposed a “fresh start” to strained relations with Russia;
and traveled to Cairo in June 2009 to deliver a historic
Results of the American presidential
speech in which he reached out to the Muslim world.
election, 2008.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Largely as a result of these efforts, Obama was awarded
the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Yet some left-wing critics
complained that he actually had adopted and even
escalated most of the war and national security policies
of his predecessor. Indeed, when Obama accepted the
Nobel Prize in December, he said, “Evil does exist in the
world” and “there will be times when nations—acting
individually or in concert—will nd the use of force not
only necessary but morally justi ed.” Notwithstanding
President-elect Barack Obama at an
that tough talk, there were others who criticized Obama
election-night rally in Chicago's Grant Park,
for issuing only a mild condemnation of the Iranian
Nov. 4, 2008. With him are (from left) his
daughters, Sasha and Malia, and his wife, government’s crackdown on pro-democracy dissidents
Michelle. following a disputed election in June 2009. Moreover, the
© Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com
Obama administration’s handling of national security
was questioned by some when a Nigerian terrorist
trained in Yemen was thwarted in an attempt to bomb
an airliner headed for Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.
After enjoying soaring popularity early in his term,

Obama became the target of increasing criticism, largely
due to the slow pace of economic recovery and
continued high unemployment rates but also because of
Barack and Michelle Obama with their
widespread opposition to Democratic efforts to reform
daughters, Sasha (in white dress) and Malia,
in the Green Room of the White House,
health care insurance policy, the signature issue of the
Washington, D.C., 2009; photograph by Obama presidential campaign. Obama had entered
Annie Leibovitz. of ce promising to bring an end to partisan squabbling
Photo by Annie Leibovitz/Official White
and legislative gridlock, yet, in the wake of the failure to
House Photo
obtain any real bipartisan cooperation, congressional
Democrats, according to Republicans, had settled into

governing without substantive Republican involvement.
Republicans, on the other hand, according to Democrats,
had become the “Party of No,” seeking to obstruct
Democratic legislative initiatives without offering real
alternative proposals. It was in this highly polarized
environment that Obama and the Democrats attempted
Obama, Barack: inauguration
to enact health care insurance reform.
Barack Obama being inaugurated as the
44th president of the United States, Passage of health care reform
Washington D.C., January 20, 2009.
Architect of the Capitol Health care reform, popular with Americans during the
election, became less so as legislators presented the
proposed changes to their constituents in town hall meetings in summer 2009 that
sometimes erupted into shouting matches between those with opposing viewpoints. It was
at this time that the populist Tea Party movement, comprising libertarian-minded
conservatives, emerged in opposition to the Democratic health care proposals but more
generally in opposition to what they saw as excessive taxes and government involvement in
the private sector. Republicans across the board complained that Democratic proposals
constituted a “government takeover” of health care that would prove too costly and
mortgage the future of generations to come. Their opposition to the Democratic plans was
virtually lockstep.
In many respects the president left the initiative for health care reform in the hands of
congressional leaders. House Democrats responded in November 2009 by passing a bill that
called for sweeping reform, including the creation of a “public option,” a lower-cost
government-run program that would act as competition for private insurance companies.
The Senate was more deliberate in its consideration. Obama seemed to let conservative
Democrat Sen. Max Baucus take the lead in that body at the head of the “Group of Six,”
comprising three Republican and three Democratic senators. The resulting bill that was
passed by the Senate—holding the allegiance of all 58 Democrats plus independents Bernie
Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, it barely survived a libuster attempt
by Republicans—proved to provide far fewer changes than its House counterpart, most
notably leaving out the public option. Before a compromise could be reached on the two
bills, the triumph of Republican Scott Brown in a special election for the seat formerly held by
Sen. Ted Kennedy destroyed the Democrats’ libuster-proof majority. Many Democrats
believed this meant that they would have to start over, as Republicans had been demanding.
Obama and other Democratic leaders, especially Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, thought
otherwise and continued to push for passage. Obama went on the offensive, skillfully
moderating a nationally telecast summit of Republicans and Democrats at which the pros
and cons of the Democratic proposals were debated. He also took his case outside the
Beltway, in speech after speech, emphasizing the message that health care was a right and
not a privilege and increasingly sharpening his criticism of the insurance industry. In March
2010, in an attempt to win the support of Democrats in the House who opposed the
legislation because they felt it would weaken limitations on abortion funding, Obama
promised to sign an executive order guaranteeing that it would not. With that crucial group
on board, Pelosi con dently brought the Senate bill to the House oor for a special vote on
Sunday night March 21. The bill passed 219–212 (34 Democrats and all the Republicans voted
against it) and was followed by passage of a second bill that proposed “ xes” for the Senate
bill. Democrats planned to employ the relatively infrequently used procedure known as
reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority for passage, to get these xes through
the Senate. Speaking on television shortly after the House vote, Obama told the country,
“This is what change looks like.”
On March 23 Obama signed the bill into law. Senate

Republican efforts to force another House vote on the bill
of proposed xes included the introduction of more than
40 amendments that were voted down along party lines.
Ultimately, on March 25, the Senate voted 56–43 to pass
the bill, which, because of procedural violations in some
of its language, had to be returned to the House, where it
passed again by a vote of 220–207. No Republicans in
Pres. Barack Obama (centre left) and Vice
either house voted for the bill.
Pres. Joe Biden (centre right) reacting after
the U.S. House of Representatives passed
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care The legislation would, once all its elements had taken
Act, March 21, 2010. effect over the next four years, prohibit denial of
Pete Souza—Official White House Photo coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions and
extend health care to some 30 million previously
uninsured Americans. The bill made the attainment of
health care insurance mandatory for all citizens, but it
also called for a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans
that would largely bankroll subsidies for premium
payments for families earning less than $88,000 per year.
Moreover, the bill promised a tax credit to small
businesses that provide coverage for their employees. In
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama (seated centre) some corners the bill was considered an unconstitutional
signing into law the Patient Protection and “government takeover” of an industry representing one-
Affordable Care Act, 2010. sixth of the economy, and in others it was hailed as
Mandel Ngan—AFP/Getty Images
legislation as monumental as that which had come out

of the civil rights movement.
Economic challenges
Responding to the economic crisis that had emerged in 2008 and prompted a rescue of the
nancial industry with up to $700 billion in government funds (see Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act of 2008), Obama—aided by large Democratic majorities in both the Senate
and the House of Representatives—pushed through Congress a $787 billion stimulus
package. By the third quarter of 2009 the plan had succeeded in reversing the dramatic
decline in GDP, resulting in 2.2 percent positive growth on a per annum basis.
Unemployment, however, had also risen, from 7.2 percent when Obama entered of ce to
about 10 percent. And Republicans complained that the stimulus package cost too much,
having swelled the federal de cit to $1.42 trillion. Still, it appeared that the U.S. economy was
recovering, albeit slowly. The president could proudly point to the dramatic turnaround of
General Motors: in June 2009 GM had lapsed into bankruptcy, necessitating a $60 billion
government rescue and takeover of about three- fths of its stock, but by May 2010 the auto
manufacturer, employing a new business plan, had shown its rst pro t in three years.
Obama looked forward to “Recovery Summer,” anticipating the payoff of the massive federal
investment in infrastructure-improvement programs aimed at creating jobs and stimulating
the economy. But as the summer of 2010 progressed, the prospects for the economy seemed
to dim as unemployment stagnated (partly because of the demise of temporary jobs tied to
the decennial census). Some economists feared that a second recessionary trough was
approaching, while others argued that the stimulus package had been insuf cient.
Obama was able to claim another major legislative

victory, however, in July, when Congress passed (60–39 in
the Senate and 237–192 in the House) the most sweeping
nancial regulation since the New Deal. Among other
statutes, the bill established a nancial consumer-
protection bureau within the Federal Reserve,
empowered the government to take over and shut down
Obama, Barack: cabinet
large troubled nancial rms, created a council of federal
Pres. Barack Obama meeting with members regulators to monitor the nancial system, and
of his cabinet in the Cabinet Room at the
subjected derivatives—the complex nancial
White House, 2009.
instruments that were partly responsible for the nancial
Photograph by Pete Souza/The White
House crisis—to government oversight.
Deepwater Horizon oil spill
The spring and summer of 2010 would be remembered more, though, for a massive oil spill
that dragged on for months in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest marine oil spill in history (see
Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010). The disaster began with an explosion and re that killed
11 workers and led to the collapse and sinking on April 22 of the Deepwater Horizon drilling
platform some 40 miles (60 km) off the coast of Louisiana. The resulting oil spill endangered
marine life, fouled beaches, and brought a halt to shing in a huge area. The Obama
administration’s efforts to address the spill were criticized by some as ineffectual, as most
Americans felt helpless in the face of the largely futile ongoing efforts by BP, the well’s owner,
to staunch the spill. Ironically, in a policy shift just weeks before the spill, the president had
proposed ending a long-standing ban on offshore oil exploration from northern Delaware to
central Florida as well as in some other locations. In the spill’s wake, however, the Interior
Department instituted a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling that included
halting operations at more than 30 existing exploratory wells. Before the Deepwater Horizon
oil spill was nally contained and the well capped in July 2010, it was estimated that some 4.9
million barrels of oil had been released into the water.
In happier news for the president, August 2010 marked

the Senate con rmation of his second Supreme Court
nominee, Elena Kagan. Associate Justice Sonia
Sotomayor had been con rmed in July 2009.
Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Obama,

For all of Obama’s efforts at rapprochement with much
Barack of the world, he—like George W. Bush—was a wartime
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama inspecting a tar

president. With the situation in Iraq continuing to
ball from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill improve and the target date for ending U.S. combat
during a visit to the Gulf Coast, Fourchon operations there approaching, in February 2009 Obama
Beach, Port Fourchon, La., May 28, 2010.
increased the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan to
Official White House Photo by Chuck
Kennedy
68,000 troops. Throughout his presidential campaign he
had argued that the focus of U.S. military efforts should
be in Afghanistan rather than Iraq, and, with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan,
the military requested that Obama deploy an additional 40,000 troops there. After carefully
weighing the situation for three months, Obama choose to send an additional 30,000 troops,
a decision that was criticized by many in his party.
In June 2010, as the Afghanistan War rivaled the Vietnam

War as the longest in U.S. history and as American war
deaths there topped the 1,000 mark, the president was
faced with another challenge when Gen. Stanley
McChrystal, commander of NATO-U.S. forces in

Afghanistan, and members of his staff made derisive
comments about top Obama administration of cials to a
reporter from Rolling Stone magazine. Obama relieved
McChrystal of command, replacing him with Gen. David
Petraeus, who had been responsible for the surge
strategy in Iraq. In August, on schedule, the U.S. combat
Barack Obama speaking to military mission in Iraq came to a close; though 50,000 American
personnel at Camp Victory in Baghdad, April troops remained, the majority of U.S. forces had been
7, 2009.
withdrawn. In a televised national address marking the
Charles Dharapak/AP
end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Obama stressed the
importance of American and NATO efforts in
Afghanistan even as corruption continued to undermine the faith of the Afghan people in
their government.
Many columnists and political cartoonists were quick to

see parallels between the potential pitfalls prolonged
involvement in Afghanistan held for Obama’s ambitious
plans for social legislation and the way in which the
Vietnam War had undermined Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s
efforts to build the Great Society. With the prospect of
double-dip recession looming in summer 2010, some
Stanley McChrystal (right) and U.S. Pres. said Obama had been too preoccupied with the wars to
Barack Obama, 2009. give the economy the needed attention.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza
In the run-up to the fall’s midterm congressional

election, Obama found himself snagged in controversy over whether an Islamic centre and
mosque should be built in New York City near the site of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Initially the president reacted by strongly supporting the constitutional right of Muslim
Americans to freedom of religious expression, but then he seemed to waf e regarding the
location of the mosque. All this came at a time when polling showed that nearly one- fth of
Americans incorrectly believed that Obama was Muslim, up from about one-tenth a year
earlier.
The midterm congressional election and its aftermath
As Americans headed into the midterm election of 2010, much of the electorate was
characterized as angry and pessimistic. The struggling economy and a persistent high level
of unemployment were the central issues in an election that was widely viewed as a
referendum on the rst two years of Obama’s presidency. In the weeks before the election,
Obama campaigned hard for Democratic candidates and sought to convince voters of the
importance of his administration’s accomplishments, including staving off what some
economists believed was a potential economic depression. He also emphasized that the
change he had promised as a presidential candidate, as well as the Democratic Congress’s
efforts to stimulate the economy, would take time. In the event, many of the independents
who had supported Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 election swung back to the
Republicans, and voters returned control of the House to the Republicans, who gained some
60 seats (the biggest swing since 1948). Although the Democrats held on to control of the
Senate, their majority was severely reduced. Chastened but unbowed by the election results,
Obama approached the second half of his term and the challenges of divided government
with a renewed call for bipartisanship.
With only weeks remaining in the congressional term,

Obama and the administration aggressively courted
Republicans with compromise proposals that resulted in
a urry of signi cant legislation that marked the lame-
duck Congress as one of the most productive bodies in
recent memory and that brought a rebound to the
president’s popularity. Breaking a campaign pledge,
U.S. President Barack Obama signing the Obama agreed to extend to all Americans (including the
repeal of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell,” December wealthiest) for another two years the tax cuts that had
22, 2010.
been enacted under the Bush administration. In return
Chuck Kennedy—Official White House
Republicans voted to extend unemployment bene ts. In
Photo
addition Congress rescinded the military’s “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell” policy to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces (ful lling one
of Obama’s campaign promises). Congress passed legislation that increased the number of
children served by the school lunch program and improved the quality of food to be
provided. And Congress extended medical bene ts and compensation for the rescue
workers who had responded to the September 11 attacks. Moreover, the Senate rati ed a new
Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaty with Russia—one of the administration’s top
foreign policy goals. On the other hand, a Republican libuster in the Senate stalled the
Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have
granted eventual citizenship to aliens brought to the United States when they were age 16 or
younger.
But even as gridlock was at least temporarily dislodged and partisanship eased during the
season of legislative success, the debate over the vehemence of political polarization was
quickly again at the centre of the national conversation when, on January 8, 2011, a gunman
killed six people and critically wounded Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the U.S. House of
Representatives, as she met with constituents in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords, a moderate

Democrat who had voted to support the health care bill, had already had her of ce
vandalized and had experienced an aggressive challenge to her seat from a Republican
candidate who was backed by Tea Party supporters. She survived the gunman’s attack. In a
well-received speech at a memorial for the victims in Tucson, Obama called for civility in
American politics and public discourse and for discussions that heal instead of harm. “Rather
than pointing ngers or assigning blame,” he said, “let us use this occasion to expand our
moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for
empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”
Upheaval in the Middle East
The year 2011 brought a series of world-shaking changes to the Middle East, where popular
political uprisings resulted in abrupt ends to longtime authoritarian regimes in Tunisia (see
Jasmine Revolution) and Egypt (see Egypt Uprising of 2011) and widespread demonstrations
and con ict in other countries in the region. The Obama administration sought to carefully
articulate its support for the demonstrators’ democratic aspirations, balancing past
commitments to some of the threatened regimes with the U.S. advocacy of free
representative government. Moreover, Obama attempted to take a role in world leadership
without direct intervention in the affairs of other countries.
In Libya, where the political revolt against the four-decade rule of Muammar al-Qadda
transformed effectively into a civil war (see Libya Revolt of 2011), however, Obama felt U.S.
intervention was necessary to prevent a humanitarian disaster as Qadda employed his
overwhelming military advantage in a brutal attempt to expunge opposition. On March 19,
U.S. and European forces with warplanes and cruise missiles began attacking targets in Libya
in an effort to disable Libya’s air force and air defense systems. After initially taking a leading
role in these operations, the Obama administration relinquished command to the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization on March 27.
On April 4, Obama of cially announced that he would

seek reelection. Less than a month later, on May 1, the
president made a dramatic late-night Sunday television
address to inform the world that U.S. special forces had
killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a re ght in a
compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, not far from the
Pakistani capital of Islamabad. (U.S. forces took custody
Pres. Barack Obama (seated second from of the body, which they buried at sea, and con rmed bin
left) and various government officials— Laden’s identity through DNA testing.) “Justice has been
including Vice Pres. Joe Biden (seated left),
done,” Obama said. “Americans understand the costs of
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security
(seated right), and Secretary of State Hillary
being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people
Clinton (seated second from right)—
receiving updates in the Situation Room of
have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our
the White House during the Osama bin citizens and our friends and allies.”
Laden mission, May 2011.
Pete Souza—Official White House Photo Budget battles
Partisan squabbling intensi ed as members of both parties dug in their heels during the
impassioned debate and hard-nosed negotiations over the passage of the federal budget for
the remainder of scal year 2010. Beginning in October 2010, Congress passed a series of
stopgap measures that kept the federal government operating as negotiations continued. As
the April 8, 2011, funding deadline for another of these stopgap budgets approached, the new
Republican majority in the House threatened to vote against further short-term funding,
forcing the shutdown of the federal government if deep budget cuts were not enacted. The
administration and the Democratic-controlled Senate, while acknowledging the need for
budget reductions, remained adamant in their defense of a range of entitlement programs
the Republicans sought to reduce or eliminate. With only hours remaining before the
government shutdown, the two sides reached agreement on a budget that included some
$38 billion in funding cuts.
The concern over the increasing de cit that was at the

heart of the budget battle intensi ed as spring turned to
summer and as government borrowing approached the
congressionally mandated national debt ceiling of $14.29
trillion. In mid-May the government reached this limit,
but, by shifting funds, the Treasury Department was able
Pres. Barack Obama delivering the State of to forestall the anticipated deadline for default on the
the Union address, January 27, 2010. public debt until August 2. When the closed-door
Charles Dharapak/AP
negotiations among congressional leaders overseen by
Biden stalled in late June, Obama began taking a more
active role. The Republican leadership, much in uenced by the Tea Party faction, continued
to seek a large reduction in the de cit through deep spending cuts (indeed, the Republican-
controlled House passed a bill that prohibited an increase in the debt ceiling unless
accompanied by commensurate spending cuts). The president and Democrats also
proposed spending cuts but sought to prevent a drastic overhaul of Medicare and Medicaid
and called for tax increases for the wealthiest Americans and for the repeal of tax breaks for
some corporations, especially those in the oil industry.
Against a backdrop of escalating partisan posturing, Obama and Republican Speaker of the
House John A. Boehner began meeting privately in early July and nearly hammered out a
“grand bargain” that would have included trillions in spending cuts, changes to Medicare and
Social Security, and tax reform. Increases in tax revenue were pivotal to the “balanced
approach” advocated by the president, who wanted the burden of de cit reduction to be
shared by everyone, including the wealthiest Americans who had bene ted from the Bush-
era tax cuts. The deal foundered toward the end of the month, however, on the level of
proposed tax-revenue increases. Media reports indicated that Boehner had agreed to $800
billion in increased tax revenue but pulled out of the deal when the president asked for an
additional $400 billion. It was widely believed, though, that Boehner would have had trouble
winning suf cient Republican support for the agreement in any case.
As the threat of default and the possibility of a downgrading of the U.S. government’s credit
rating grew more imminent, there was an increasing consensus across party lines on the
need to raise the debt ceiling. Absent a broader agreement, compromise appeared to hinge
largely on the issue of whether the ceiling would be increased in two steps or one, the latter
of which would push it beyond the 2012 election. On July 31, just two days before the
deadline, an agreement was reached by the president and congressional leaders of both
parties whereby the ceiling would be raised in two main stages by some $2.4 trillion, with
equivalent cuts to the de cit to be achieved over a 10-year period. The deal called for a $900-
billion short-term increase in the debt ceiling ($400 billion of which would be immediate) to
be offset by an immediate cap on domestic and defense spending that would yield some
$917 billion in de cit reduction. The agreement also stipulated the establishment of a
congressional “super committee” charged with making recommendations by the end of
November 2011 that would reduce the de cit by an additional $1.2 to $1.5 trillion to allow for a
commensurate increase in the debt ceiling. The agreement did not include any tax increases,
and neither did it provide for major changes to Medicare or Social Security. It did, however,
mandate that if the bipartisan committee failed to reach a consensus or if Congress failed to
pass the committee’s proposals in December 2012, automatic across-the-board cuts of up to
$1.2 trillion would be implemented, evenly divided between defense and nondefense
spending. The deal also required that both the House and the Senate vote on an
amendment to the Constitution mandating a balanced budget. The nal bill was passed by
the House by a vote of 269–161 and by the Senate by a vote of 74–26.
Although he effectively had been campaigning for weeks, Obama of cially kicked off his
reelection bid with speeches in Ohio and Virginia on May 5, 2012. Just a few days later, on May
9, he made headlines again when he revealed a change in his stance on same-sex marriage,
saying during a television news interview, “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me
personally, it is important for me to go ahead and af rm that I think same-sex couples should
be able to get married.” Earlier in the week Vice President Biden had expressed strong
support for same-sex marriage in another television appearance.
The economy continued to recover—but slowly and unevenly, so that in April 2012 Time
magazine characterized the rebound as “The 97-lb. Recovery” (alluding to bodybuilder
Charles Atlas’s 97-pound weakling). Pro ts were up again for many corporations, big banks
had returned to solid footing, and the stock market had bounced back from the dark days of
the Great Recession of December 2007 to June 2009, but wages remained largely stagnant,
foreclosures were still commonplace as the housing market continued its struggle to regain
its balance, and, though unemployment had generally decreased, it remained high at 8.2
percent in May. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, a former
governor of Massachusetts, focused much of his campaign on a critique of Obama’s
stewardship of the economy. On the other hand, some observers noted that the U.S.
economy was considerably more robust than that of Europe, which remained deeply mired
in the euro-zone debt crisis. More than a few attributed the relative health of the American
economy to the government’s stimulus efforts and to the successes of the Troubled Asset
Relief Program (authorized under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act), which had
come to the rescue of foundering American nancial institutions.
In June, responding largely to the Senate’s earlier failure to pass the DREAM Act, the Obama
administration made an important policy change, generally ending the immediate
deportation of illegal immigrants who had come to the United States as children. Although
the policy did not embrace the “pathway to citizenship” promised by the DREAM Act, it
granted a two-year reprieve from deportation and the opportunity to seek a work permit to
those age 30 and under who had immigrated before age 16, had been in the country at least
ve years, did not have a criminal record or pose a security threat, and were either students
or high-school graduates or had served in the military.
Immigration was in the headlines again later in the month when the Supreme Court struck
down three provisions of Arizona’s controversial 2010 immigration law but upheld its
centrepiece “Show me your papers” provision, which required police to check the legal status
of anyone they stop for another law-enforcement concern if they reasonably suspect that the
person is in the country illegally. Obama applauded the court’s rejection of three other
provisions of the law, including one that had made it a crime for illegal immigrants to seek
work, but he expressed concern that the upheld provision could result in racial pro ling.
As important as that ruling was, the Supreme Court announced another decision on the nal
day of its session (June 28) in a case that many hailed as the most important heard by the
court in more than a decade: it upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (see
Affordable Care Act cases). That decision provided the president with a huge victory by
preserving the signature legislative achievement of his administration. Pivotal to the 5–4
ruling was the court’s decision not to strike down the act’s “individual mandate” provision,
which would nancially penalize Americans for not obtaining health insurance, a
requirement many Republican politicians argued was unconstitutional.
The 2012 election
At the beginning of September 2012, at its national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina,
the Democratic Party of cially nominated Obama and Biden as its candidates for president
and vice president of the United States. On the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks,
Obama’s attention and that of the world was directed to Banghāzī, Libya, where an attack on
the U.S. diplomatic post resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three
other Americans. Initially, it was thought that the attack had been a spontaneous outgrowth
of rioting occurring outside the post in response to an anti-Islam lm that had been
produced in the United States. Angry demonstrations against the lm had occurred
elsewhere, most notably at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. In the following days and weeks,
however, it became increasingly certain that the assault had been a premeditated terrorist
attack. Obama promised to get to the bottom of the matter, but both he and Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton acknowledged their ultimate responsibility in the situation. The issue
persisted as a point of criticism of Obama by Romney and the right in general.
Obama maintained a signi cant lead over Romney in September in the national opinion
polls, partly a result of a “convention bounce” and partly because of negative perceptions
some held of his Republican challenger. Those perceptions were deepened by the release of
secretly shot footage at a private fund-raiser at which Romney said, “There are 47 percent of
the people who will vote for the president no matter what…who believe that they are victims”
and whom he would never be able to convince that “they should take personal responsibility
and care for their lives.” In the heated aftermath, Romney stood by his remarks, though he
said that they had not been “elegantly stated.”
Both campaigns were spending fortunes in what was projected to be the most expensive
presidential campaign in history, the rst since the creation of the public nancing system in
which neither candidate accepted public funds and the spending limitations that went with
them. Romney and the Republican Party, as well as Obama and the Democrats, each raised
about $1 billion in donations, totals that did not include the tens of millions spent by “super
PACs,” the political action committees that—as a result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision
in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—were allowed to accept unlimited
donations from wealthy individuals, corporations, and unions, provided that the PACs
operated independently of the candidate’s campaign.
Obama and Romney both presented themselves as champions of the middle class and those
who aspired to join it. While the president offered a vision of American prosperity that spread
centrifugally from the middle, his Republican challenger believed that economic well-being
was initiated at the top by “job creators” and owed down, an approach that Obama claimed
had been tried in the past and failed. In highlighting the importance of tackling the de cit,
Obama emphasized the need for spending cuts but proposed returning tax levels on the
wealthiest Americans to those that were in place during the Bill Clinton administration.
Romney advocated maintaining the Bush-era tax cuts, including those for people at the top
of the economic pyramid, as well as providing additional cuts, while promising to reduce the
de cit with spending cuts and the elimination of tax loopholes. He accused Obama of being
unsympathetic to business while citing his own success as an entrepreneur as a prime
quali cation for the job of setting the economy right as president. Much of Romney’s
campaign was grounded in a criticism of the handling of the economy by Obama, whom
Romney blamed for the slowness of the recovery and the consequent hardships endured by
the middle class, especially those who were among the long-term unemployed. Obama was
quick to acknowledge the suffering of many Americans brought about by the Great
Recession and the gradualness of recovery, but he was equally quick (too quick according to
many Republicans) to point to the “bad hand” he had been dealt by the Bush administration.
Some of the president’s supporters believed that he had not been adamant enough in
emphasizing how his own policies had helped forestall much-greater economic calamity.
Romney also promised to revoke the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which he
referred to derisively as “Obamacare,” a term the president proudly owned as he trumpeted
the bene ts of the act on the campaign trail. Reversing the advantage Republicans
traditionally had enjoyed on defense and security issues, Obama repeatedly noted the
elimination of Osama bin Laden on his watch. He also highlighted his successful removal of
American forces from Iraq and his promise to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014.
Despite his earlier political missteps, Romney stole

Obama’s momentum and reenergized his campaign on
October 3 with a commanding performance in the rst
presidential debate, in which he showed himself to be
the president’s equal in terms of stature and presence. To
some ears, Obama’s plea for patience with his policies
sounded apologetic, and his performance was generally
2012 Romney-Obama presidential debate agreed to have been lacklustre. Biden breathed new life
Republican challenger Mitt Romney (centre) into the Democratic effort by taking the offensive in his
and U.S. Pres. Barack Obama (right) debate with the Republican vice presidential nominee,
debating during the 2012 presidential
Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a key spokesman for some of
election.
Robert Duyos—Sun-Sentinel/ZUMA the most conservative elements within his party. Obama
Press/Alamy regained his stride in the second, town hall-style debate
by engaging more forcefully with Romney, as he would
again in the third and nal presidential debate. Despite those strong performances, however,
Obama seemingly had, at best, pulled even with Romney nationally. In the nal weeks of the
campaign, the candidates primarily focused on a handful of “battleground” states, whose
electoral votes, it was believed, would determine the outcome of a razor-close election in the
electoral college.
In the last week of October, Sandy, a hurricane-turned-superstorm that had ravaged parts of
the Caribbean, brought widespread destruction to the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic states.
New York City and New Jersey were particularly hard hit, and the image of Obama and New
Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie—up to that point one of the president’s most vocal
critics—touring devastated areas in his state and bringing promises of rapid aid was a
remarkable demonstration of bipartisan leadership by both men.
On November 6, 2012, Obama won a narrow victory in

the national popular vote but triumphed in almost all the
battleground states to win a second term, garnering 332
electoral votes to Romney’s 206. “Democracy in a nation
of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated,”
he said in his election-night victory speech, adding that
“we are not as divided as our politics suggest. We’re not
Obama, Barack: touring Superstorm
as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the
Sandy damage
sum of our individual ambitions.”
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama comforting a
victim of Superstorm Sandy during a tour of
After the election, Obama and Boehner entered into
storm damage in Brigantine, New Jersey,
negotiations to try to avoid the so-called scal cliff, which
October 31, 2012.
Pete Souza—Official White House Photo involved either the expiration or enforcement of a series
of economic measures set to transpire at the turn of the
new year. They included the expiration of the Bush-era
tax cuts, temporary payroll tax cuts initiated by the
Obama administration, and some tax breaks for
businesses, along with the automatic application of
across-the-board spending cuts to the military and
nonmilitary programs required by the Budget Control
Act of 2011, which came to be known as sequestration.
Although the president and the speaker of the House
Obama, Barack; voting
were unable to reach a workable compromise, Biden and
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama voting in the 2012
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cobbled
general election.
together a last-minute agreement that passed the
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
Senate 89–8 and House 257–167 (with 85 Republican
votes in the lower chamber) on January 1, 2013. The bill

preserved the Bush-era income tax cuts for individuals
earning $400,000 or less annually and couples earning
$450,000 or less (Obama had campaigned on setting
those limits at $200,000 and $250,000, respectively) but
raised taxes on those earning more than that from 35
percent to 39.6 percent, the rst federal tax increase in
Obama, Barack; Obama, Michelle;
two decades. While it also raised taxes on dividends and
inauguration ball
inheritance for some, it did not extend the payroll tax cut.
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama dancing with his
Obama signed the bill on January 2.
wife, Michelle Obama, as singer Jennifer
Hudson performs at a ball celebrating his
second inauguration, January 21, 2013.
The gun-control debate and
Pete Souza—Official White House Photo sequestration
At the top of the president’s agenda in 2013 was the

introduction of gun-control legislation, an issue that again had taken centre stage in the
aftermath of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December
14, 2012, which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 6 adults. (The shooter also killed
himself and his mother that day.) Obama called upon Congress to enact legislation that
would institute universal background checks for gun purchases, ban the sales of assault
weapons and high-capacity (more than 10-round) magazines, provide for greater protection
in schools, and place a renewed focus on treating mental illness. He also took the issue to the
public, passionately advocating legislation in a series of campaign-style events at the same
time that supporters of gun rights (most notably the National Ri e Association [NRA])
vehemently opposed his proposals. Despite polls that showed overwhelming public support
for universal background checks, a bill focusing on a measure that would have greatly
expanded background checks failed to receive suf cient support when it was considered by
the Senate in April 2013. Conscious of the threat of libuster, both parties had agreed that a
supermajority of 60 votes would be required to move the bill or any amendments to it
(including a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines) to a formal vote on
passage. Although some Republicans (whose party generally opposed the legislation) voted
for the measure calling for expanded background checks, some Democrats (whose party
generally supported the legislation) voted against it, and it failed (54–46), as did all other
proposed amendments, prompting withdrawal of the bill. As the NRA and other supporters
of gun rights celebrated, Obama said the bill’s withdrawal marked “a pretty shameful day for
Washington.”
January’s budget compromise had delayed automatic

cuts on military and social spending for two months, but,
when the new March 1, 2013, deadline passed without

Democrats and Republicans reaching an agreement on
an alternative approach to de cit reduction,
sequestration began. It took a while for most Americans
to feel the effects of the across-the-board cuts. However,
as spring progressed, air-traf c delays ballooned as a
result of short-staf ng caused by forced furloughs of air-
Newtown shootings vigil traf c controllers. Congress quickly allowed the Federal
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama attending an Aviation Administration to shift funds earmarked for
interfaith vigil in Newtown, Connecticut,
facility improvement to salaries. At the same time, Air
December 16, 2012, following the Newtown
Force of cials bemoaned a lack of preparedness that
shootings.
Pete Souza—Official White House Photo they felt was a consequence of reductions in ight
practice and maintenance necessitated by the sequester
cuts to military spending, and of cials from a wide range of government-funded programs
and agencies—from the Meals on Wheels program for seniors to the National Park Service—
began to warn of looming problems.
Spring scandals and summer challenges
In May 2013 the Obama administration found itself much embattled, as new controversies
arose to take their place alongside ongoing attempts by some Republicans—in particular,
Rep. Darrell Issa of California in his role as chairman of the House Oversight Committee—not
only to nd further fault with the State Department and the administration regarding the
2012 attack on the diplomatic post in Banghāzī but also to allege that there had been a
cover-up in the aftermath of the attack.
At the centre of the renewed efforts to prove that the administration had misled the public
were recently revealed e-mails that indicated State Department and other administration
of cials had asked that references to the al-Qaeda-linked group Anṣār al-Sharīʿah and prior
warnings of danger be stricken from the talking points to be used by UN Ambassador Susan
Rice when she appeared on television news programs several days after the attack.
Republican critics alleged that these changes showed that the administration had
“scrubbed” Rice’s remarks in order not to tarnish Obama’s record on security during the run-
up to the presidential election. The Obama administration dismissed the claims of a cover-up
as politically motivated and contended that the process of developing the talking points was
concerned not with politics but with differences between individuals in the State
Department and Central Intelligence Agency regarding the yet-to-be-understood nature of
the attack. (The focus of much Republican criticism regarding the attack was Hillary Clinton,
who had resigned as secretary of state in February—to be replaced by John Kerry—but who
was a potential candidate for the 2016 presidential election.)
The administration found itself on the defensive when employees of the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) were accused of having used excessive scrutiny to delay approval of tax-exempt
status for some conservative political groups. Obama condemned this “misconduct” by the
IRS as “inexcusable,” requested and received the resignation of the acting commissioner of
the IRS, and promised that the Treasury Department would establish safeguards to ensure
that such behaviour would not recur.
Also troubling for the president were revelations that in spring 2012 the Justice Department
had subpoenaed access to the records of some 20 phone lines used by reporters and editors
who worked in several of ces of the Associated Press without notifying that organization.
This action had been taken as part of a widespread investigation into a national-security
news leak related to a terrorist plot, hatched and foiled in Yemen, to blow up a U.S.-bound
plane. Learning in May 2013 that the Justice Department had subpoenaed access to these
phone records without having noti ed them, representatives of the Associated Press, as well
as some legislators from both parties, said that they were deeply disturbed by what they saw
as an egregious violation of the freedom of the press. Attorney General Eric Holder (who had
earlier recused himself from involvement with the investigation because he had been
questioned as part of it) characterized the investigation as involving one of the “most serious
leaks” he had ever encountered. The Obama administration responded in part by calling for
renewed pursuit of legislation that would create a federal “shield” law to provide the same
sort of protection that many state laws provided for the con dentiality of journalists’ sources
and communications. All three scandals became the focus of congressional investigations.
June brought a new set of problems for the administration when it was forced to respond to
the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) had compelled a telecommunications
company to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of
its subscribers. This secret information was leaked to The Guardian newspaper by American
intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who also disclosed the existence of a program that
mined data from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Internet-related companies for the
NSA, the FBI, and a British agency. Snowden, who was charged with espionage, ended up in
Russia, where he was granted temporary refugee status, further straining relations between
that country and the United States, which were already at loggerheads over developments in
the Syrian Civil War.
Russia’s continued support of its ally Syria (as well as that of China) prevented the UN
Security Council from responding forcefully to the war. Obama, seemingly seeking to avoid
open-ended involvement in another Middle Eastern con ict, had been cautious in his
response to the situation in Syria, prompting some critics to label him the “avoider-in-chief.”
As the death count in Syria rose and reports surfaced of the use of chemical weapons by the
forces of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad, the engagement of the U.S. government increased.
Food and nancial aid from the U.S. were extended to the Syrian opposition in February 2013,
and the beginning of military aid was promised in June. Obama had said in May 2012 that
what he called his “calculus” for U.S. involvement in Syria would change if “we start seeing a
whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” That “red line”
appeared to have been crossed when hundreds of people died allegedly as a result of Syrian
government forces’ use chemical weapons in suburban Damascus on August 21, 2013.
On August 30 U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States had “high
certainty” that chemical weapons had been used in the incident and that government forces
had carried out the attack. He also reported a death toll (more than 1,400) that was
considerably higher than earlier estimates. The Syrian government continued to deny its use
of chemical weapons and blamed the opposition. Although the British Parliament had voted
against endorsing Prime Minister David Cameron’s call for military intervention in principle,
Obama indicated that a U.S. military response would be forthcoming, even without British
involvement. French Pres. François Hollande, on the other hand, continued to express
support for French involvement in a military response. On August 31 Obama shifted gears
and asked for congressional authorization for military action while awaiting the ndings of
UN weapons inspectors who had returned from Damascus after inspecting the site of the
attack. Released on September 16, their report indicated that there was “clear and convincing
evidence” that surface-to-surface rockets had delivered the nerve agent sarin in the attack.
The report did not indicate blame for the attack. In the meantime, on September 14, Russia
and the United States brokered a framework agreement under which the Syrian
government would accede to the international Chemical Weapons Convention and submit
to the controls of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, release a
comprehensive listing of its chemical weapons arsenal within a week, destroy all of its
chemical mixing and lling equipment by November, and eliminate all of its chemical
weapons by mid-2014. While the Obama administration indicated that the framework
included an appeal to the UN Security Council to authorize the use of force should Syria not
ful ll the terms of the agreement, the Russian government said it had not agreed to that
condition.
The Obama administration’s foreign policy in the region was also being tested by events in
Egypt, where the military had removed Pres. Mohammed Morsi from power in July. Because
the U.S. government was legally prohibited from providing nancial aid (which amounted to
more that $1 billion annually for Egypt) to countries whose leadership changed as the result
of a coup, the administration hesitated to label the change in power a coup. However,
Obama was adamant in urging a swift return to civilian rule, and the stakes went up when
hundreds of Morsi’s supporters were killed by government forces in separate incidents in July
and August.
Obamacare remained a thorn in the side of Republicans, particularly those associated with
the Tea Party movement, who led an attempt to include a one-year delay of funding of the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in a continuing resolution to fund the federal
budget that faced an October 1 deadline. The president, for his part, promised to veto the
resolution if it contained defunding of Obamacare. After the House Republican majority
refused to give up its requirement of a funding delay for Obamacare and the Senate
Democratic majority refused to endorse a continuing resolution that included that
requirement, the federal government partially shut down for the rst time in 17 years,
furloughing hundreds of thousands of employees and closing government of ces. Obama
was adamant that any discussion on the budget would be contingent upon fully reopening
the government, and he maintained that stance as the October 17 deadline for extending the
national debt ceiling approached and with it the threat of default. On October 16, moderate
Republicans voted with Democrats in both houses of Congress to pass a bill forged by Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that ended the
partial shutdown by funding government agencies and of ces through January 15, 2014,
extended the government’s borrowing power through February 7, and tasked a negotiating
committee with coming up with long-term budgetary solutions. By the end of 2013 the
House and the Senate had passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, based on a compromise
that replaced the bulk of the automatic spending cuts required by sequestration with
targeted cuts and raised discretionary spending (divided evenly between military and
nonmilitary funding). The resulting budget was intended to last through the 2014 scal year.
Taking heat and taking the lead
With the temporary resolution of the budget battle,

public attention shifted to the troubled rollout of
Obamacare in early October 2013 and to the initially
miserable performance of HealthCare.gov, the Web site
that acted as a marketplace for insurance plans and the
Clinton, Bill; Obama, Barack; Carter, place for those in 36 states to apply for health coverage.
Jimmy Republicans lambasted the Web site, which was often
Democrats Pres. Barack Obama (centre) slow and erratic or simply inoperable. Far fewer users
and former presidents Bill Clinton (left) and were able to access the site and apply for insurance than
Jimmy Carter (right) conversing, 2013.
had been hoped, prompting the administration to order
Pete Souza/Official White House Photo
a “tech surge” in late October. Progress in overcoming
the glitches was slow, but as HealthCare.gov’s performance improved, Obama went on the
offensive, encouraging Americans to sign up for coverage. At the beginning of April 2014,
after the end of the rst open enrollment period, he announced that 7.1 million Americans
had signed up for private insurance plans through the marketplace, meeting the
administration’s target. “The debate over repealing this law is over. The Affordable Care Act is
here to stay,” Obama declared, yet criticism of Obamacare and calls for its removal remained
a rallying cry for Republicans as they prepared for the 2014 midterm congressional election.
Events in the Middle East continued to make that region an important focus of Obama’s
foreign policy in 2014. However, the president’s attention dramatically shifted early in the year
to a developing crisis in Ukraine. After widespread protests led to the impeachment and then
the end of the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych (who called his dismissal a coup d’état),
elements within the predominantly ethnically Russian autonomous republic of Crimea,
supported by Russian troops, engineered Crimea’s self-declared separation from Ukraine and
annexation by Russia (con rmed by the Russian parliament in March). Obama joined a host
of Western leaders in condemning Russia’s aggressive actions and sought to isolate it by
suspending it from the Group of Eight and imposing sanctions on a number of individual
Russian leaders. Moreover, in a show of support for Ukraine, Obama met with its newly
elected president, Petro Poroshenko, in early June.
At the end of May, ve Taliban leaders who been prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention
camp were exchanged by the Obama administration for Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. Army
sergeant who had been a captive of the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2009. The exchange was
initially hailed as a victory for the administration, but it quickly became controversial. Some
Republicans argued that the administration had given up too much for Bergdahl, and
politicians from both sides of the aisle criticized the president for failing to consult Congress
prior to the exchange (law required the administration to give Congress notice 30 days
before releasing Guantánamo Bay detainees; the White House cited evidence of Bergdahl’s
failing health and other factors that necessitated urgent action). The matter became further
clouded by the ambiguous circumstances of Bergdahl’s capture, including allegations that
he had attempted to desert.
Meanwhile, in early summer 2014, nearly three years after the removal of the nal U.S. troops
from Iraq, Obama found himself forced to again respond to events there, when the
controversial U.S.-supported regime of Prime Minister Nūrī al-Mālikī was threatened by the
takeover of several cities (including the country’s second largest, Mosul) by a rapidly
spreading Sunni insurgency spearheaded by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL;
also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS] and as the Islamic State), a group that
emerged in April 2013. Some critics sought to blame Obama for this new instability in Iraq,
accusing him of having removed U.S. troops too soon. The president remained reluctant to
put “boots on the ground,” even as he dispatched some 300 U.S. Special Operations troops in
mid-June to train, advise, and support Iraqi security forces, and he called on the Iraqi
government to resolve the situation. Mālikī’s State of Law coalition had won the largest
number of seats in parliamentary elections in April 2014, paving the way for Mālikī to claim a
third term as prime minister, but in response to pressure from former supporters both inside
and outside Iraq, he stepped aside in favour of a less-divisive gure from the State of Law
coalition, Haider al-Abadi, who was nominated to form a new cabinet in early August.
On August 8 the United States began to launch air strikes against ISIL in Iraq to prevent it
from advancing farther into Kurdish territory. In September Obama responded even more
aggressively to ISIL’s advances in both Iraq and Syria, as well as to a growing sense of the
terrorist threat posed by ISIL elsewhere (brought home to Americans through videos
released by ISIL depicting the beheadings of two U.S. journalists held hostage by the group).
In a televised address on September 10, Obama announced that he had initiated a signi cant
escalation of the campaign against ISIL, including the authorization of air strikes inside Syria
for the rst time and an increase of those in Iraq. Although he continued to pledge that he
would not return U.S. combat troops to the region, Obama asked Congress to approve some
$500 million for the training and arming of “moderate” Syrians. In the following weeks, as
U.S.-led attacks increased, Obama championed an effort to grow the coalition of countries
that had committed to confronting ISIL. By the end of September, some 20 countries were
contributing air support or military equipment to the coalition effort, including France,
Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, and Bahrain. Dozens of other
countries provided humanitarian aid.
An effort to expand that coalition and to de ne the necessity of combating ISIL’s “network of
death” was central to Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on
September 24. Also in that address he echoed his September 10 speech in denouncing
Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and he called on the world to come together to respond to global
warming and to help contain the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Africa. A number of political
observers praised the president for putting the United States at the forefront of these efforts
after having been, in their eyes, recently indecisive in his foreign policy.
Executive action and the 2014 midterm election
On the domestic front, Obama continued to use the power of executive action to address
issues that remained bogged down in Congress. In February 2014 Obama, unable to
persuade Congress to raise the federal minimum wage, signed an executive order raising the
hourly minimum wage of federal contract workers to $10.10. In June he took on climate
change, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to instate new rules calling for
power plants to signi cantly reduce their carbon emissions by 2030. Speaker of the House
Boehner responded to Obama’s use of executive action by accusing the president of having
“repeatedly run an end-around on the American people and their elected legislators” and by
threatening to bring a lawsuit against him for misusing his executive powers. “So sue me,” a
combative Obama said in early July, his remark aimed at House Republicans. “As long as
they’re doing nothing,” he continued, “I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something.”
Immigration reform—an issue that Obama had attempted to address in June 2012 with
executive action that deferred for two years deportations of immigrants who had come to
the United States illegally as children—was back in the spotlight in 2014 as a crisis arose
along the country’s border with Mexico. From October 2013 to mid-June 2014 some 50,000
unaccompanied children from Central America were apprehended attempting to enter the
U.S. illegally. In July the administration sought $3.7 billion from Congress to confront the
crisis.
In early August 2014 Obama carefully sought not to take sides when the fatal shooting of
Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, by a white police of cer resulted in
days of civil unrest and protests fueled by tensions between the predominantly black
population of Ferguson, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb, and its predominantly white
government and police department. The president did, however, cite the incident in his
September speech to the UN as an example of “our own racial and ethnic tensions” while
pointing to the failure of Americans at times “to live up to our ideals.” On September 19 there
was a scare at the White House when, only minutes after the rst family had left the
residence, a man leapt the surrounding fence and made his way into the White House. The
security breach spurred a congressional hearing that addressed other recent lapses by the
Secret Service, and soon afterward its director, Julia Pierson, resigned.
With Obama’s approval rating bobbing at about 40

percent, Republicans framed the midterm congressional
elections in November 2014 as a referendum on his
presidency. The electorate—seemingly unhappy with the
president’s response to the Ebola crisis, the advances of
ISIL in Iraq and Syria, congressional gridlock, and a range
of other issues, as well as being disappointed with the
Ferguson, Missouri; protest
pace and nature of the economic recovery—handed the
Police confronting a crowd while attempting Democrats a crushing defeat. In gaining 12 seats,
to break up a demonstration in Ferguson,
Republicans were in a position to match the largest
Missouri, on August 9, 2014.
David Carson—St. Louis Post- majority that they had enjoyed in the House since 1947,
Dispatch/MCT/Landov and, moreover, they retook control of the Senate, gaining
9 seats to reach a total of 54, after the results were in for the December runoff election in
Louisiana (a Republican victory).
On November 20 Obama once again employed an executive order in an attempt to

overcome legislative gridlock when he announced reform of U.S. immigration policy that
would grant work permits and temporary legal status to more than four million illegal
immigrants. The action would delay deportation and allow parents of children who were
legal residents or U.S. citizens to apply for three-year work permits, provided that they had
been in the country for ve years or more. The order also removed the age limitation from
the president’s 2012 executive order regarding immigrants who had been brought to the
United States as children and changed the year by which they were required to have
immigrated from 2007 to 2010. Vowing to counteract the order, Republicans accused Obama
of skirting Congress and engaging in an imperial presidency.
In December 2013, at a memorial for South African leader Nelson Mandela, Obama and
Cuban leader Raúl Castro had shared a handshake that seemed to offer symbolic new hope
for improved Cuban-U.S. relations. On December 17, 2014, after some 18 months of secret
negotiations fostered by Canada and the Vatican, that handshake bore fruit as Obama and
Castro simultaneously addressed national television audiences to announce the
normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba that had been suspended in
January 1961. “We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our
interests,” Obama said. At the beginning of his administration, he had hoped to restart
relations, but that initiative had been undermined by the incarceration of Alan Gross, a
subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who had been held
in Cuba since 2009 after being convicted of importing illegal technology and attempting to
establish secret Internet service for Cuban Jews. The announcement of renewed diplomatic
relations was accompanied by the release of Gross and a prisoner exchange of three Cuban
intelligence agents who had been jailed in the United States since 1998 for a U.S. intelligence
agent who had been captive in Cuba for nearly 20 years.
Because the more-than- ve-decade embargo on trade

with Cuba was codi ed in U.S. law, rescinding it was
beyond the scope of Obama’s executive authority and
would require congressional action, which was anything
but assured, given the widespread opposition among
Republicans to normalizing relations. Nevertheless,
Obama, Barack; Castro, Raúl
Obama was able to mandate the establishment of an
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama shaking hands embassy in Havana, a review of Cuba’s status as a state
with Cuban Pres. Raúl Castro at a memorial
sponsor of terrorism, and the easing of some travel and
service for former South African president nancial restrictions (including an increase in the
Nelson Mandela, December 17, 2014.
amount of money expatriates were allowed to remit to
SABC Pool/AP Images
Cuba).
In December Obama’s response to police violence was again questioned after a grand jury
failed to indict a New York City policeman for his responsibility in the death of Eric Garner, an
unarmed African American man who died after having a choke hold applied to him during
his arrest on Staten Island in July. The president and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio
established a task force charged with improving relations between minority communities
and police, but many of those around the country who had taken to the streets to proclaim
that “black lives matter” felt that Obama was not doing enough.
Baltimore riot, Charleston shooting, Supreme Court approval of

same-sex marriage, and agreement with Iran
The rst half of 2015 was a roller-coaster ride of low and high points for the president: on one
hand, the country continued to experience a rash of deeply troubling incidents of race-
related violence, while, on the other hand, the Supreme Court ruled as the administration
had hoped it would in a pair of landmark cases.
In an episode reminiscent of the events in Ferguson and Staten Island, on April 19 a young
African American man in Baltimore died a week after incurring a severe spinal-cord injury
while in police custody. Rioting erupted in Baltimore on the day of his funeral, April 27. As
troubling as the incidents of police violence and the issues of police accountability were, the
country was even more stunned and saddened when, on June 17, nine African Americans
were shot and killed, allegedly by a young white man, in a hate crime in a historic black
church in Charleston, South Carolina. In his eulogy for one of the shooting’s victims—the Rev.
Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator—Obama addressed gun control, race
relations, and the symbolic impact of the Confederate ag, which he said represented more
than just “ancestral pride” because for many it was a “reminder of systemic oppression and
racial subjugation.” (In the wake of the shooting, the ying of the Confederate ag at the
state capitol in South Carolina was the object of renewed criticism, and on July 10, in
response to legislative action by South Carolina lawmakers, the ag was removed
permanently from the capitol grounds.)
Perhaps this tragedy causes…us to examine what

we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate.
Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young
men…caught up in the criminal justice system and
leads us to make sure that that system is not
infected with bias; that we embrace changes in

how we train and equip our police so that the
bonds of trust between law enforcement and the
communities they serve make us all safer and more
secure.
Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect

Baltimore riots us even when we don’t realize it, so that we’re
guarding against not just racial slurs, but we’re also
A man throwing a brick at police in Baltimore
on April 27, 2015, following the funeral of guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny
Freddie Gray. back for a job interview but not Jamal.
Patrick Semansky/AP Images
Obama’s hopes for the removal of discrimination

received a huge boost on June 26 when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges
that state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same-sex marriages performed in
other jurisdictions are unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses
of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling thereby legalized the practice of same-sex
marriage throughout the country. One day earlier, in King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court
further solidi ed the legality of Obamacare by upholding that part of the legislation that
allowed the government to provide subsidies to poor and middle-class citizens in order to
help them purchase health care. Lifted by those successes, Obama’s approval rating climbed
over 50 percent for the rst time in more than two years.
July brought yet another policy success for the president

when a nal agreement was reached between Iran and
the P5+1 (the United States and the other permanent
members of the UN Security Council [China, France,
Russia, and the United Kingdom], along with Germany)
that placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange
for the reduction of sanctions against the country. The
agreement came after more than a decade of
Patient Protection and Affordable Care

negotiations over Iran’s nuclear research program, which
Act many observers suspected was aimed at developing
Supporters of the Patient Protection and nuclear weapons, though Iran maintained that it was
Affordable Care Act cheering after the intended for peaceful purposes. An interim agreement
Supreme Court ruled on June 25, 2015, that had been reached in November 2013, and the nal
Obamacare tax credits can go to purchasers
agreement largely followed the terms of the framework
of health insurance on the federal insurance
exchange.
document that was accepted by all parties in April 2015.
Jim Lo Scalzo—EPA/Landov Under the terms of the agreement, Iran would greatly
reduce its nuclear stockpile over a 10-year period and give inspectors from the International
Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear facilities in exchange for the gradual removal of
sanctions. In praising the agreement, Obama said that “every pathway to a nuclear weapon”
for Iran had been cut off, but many Republicans were quick to denounce the accord, which
Congress had 60 days to consider with the options of accepting, rejecting, or taking no
action on it. On September 10 the Republican-led effort to reject the treaty was stalled in its
tracks when opponents of the agreement in the Senate were unable to secure enough votes
to overcome a Democratic libuster that had blocked the passage of a measure aimed at
repealing the treaty. Yet another major policy goal had been achieved by Obama without the
aid of a single Republican vote.
More executive action
In that vein, on August 3, 2015, the president announced new climate regulations requiring
U.S. power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by
the year 2030. The new rules also required that 28 percent of electrical generation be fueled
by renewable energy by the same deadline. In February 2016, however, a lawsuit brought
against the action was granted a stay request by the Supreme Court even before the
regulation had been reviewed by a federal appeals court, an unprecedented step that critics
described as judicial activism. The stay was to remain in place as the lawsuit made its way
through the courts, with a nal decision possibly not coming until 2017.
Environmentalists were able to claim a victory in November 2015 when Obama, having
completed a seven-year review, announced that he had rejected the proposal to build the
Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Supporters of the pipeline had
argued that construction of the pipeline would create jobs and promote economic growth,
while opponents countered that extracting the petroleum from tar sands in Alberta would
contribute signi cantly to global warming.
The August 14 ag raising presided over by Secretary Kerry at the reopened U.S. embassy in
Havana provided a foreign policy milestone for the Obama administration, after the U.S. and
Cuba had of cially opened their embassies in each other’s capital on July 20. At the end of
July, Obama had become the rst sitting U.S. president to visit Ethiopia as well as the rst
U.S. chief executive to address the African Union at its headquarters in Addis Ababa. In early
October, after some eight years of negotiations, another of the president’s principal foreign
policy objectives appeared within reach with the signing in Atlanta of the Trans-Paci c
Partnership agreement, a regional trade deal between 12 Paci c Rim countries (the U.S.,
Japan, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and
Vietnam). Congressional rati cation of the treaty, however, was far from a certainty.
In the last half of the year, Obama again focused on the

gun violence that continued to occur throughout the
country. Following the mass shooting at a community
college in Roseburg, Oregon, on October 1, 2015, the
president renewed his calls for action. At the end of
November there was an uproar in Chicago following the
court-ordered release of a video showing a policeman
Kerry, John; Cuba shooting and killing an African American teenager in
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arriving October 2014. Days later a gunman attacked a Planned
at the José Martí International Airport in
Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing
Havana, Cuba, on August 14, 2015.
three and wounding nine. On December 2 the country
U.S. Department of State
was further shocked when a husband and wife attacked
a holiday party at a social services centre in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and
injuring another 22. Initially, Obama reacted to that incident as another example of the mass
violence that can result from what he saw as too-lenient gun laws. However, after it became
clear that the assailants had militant Islamist sympathies, the president made a rare national
television address on December 6, in which he characterized the San Bernardino shootings
as a terrorist attack and attempted to calm the fears of jittery Americans and reassure
doubters that his administration took the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously and that it
would be “overcome.”
Republicans and some members of his own party continued to criticize Obama’s response to
ISIL as insuf cient and awed. Having admitted in June 2015 that the administration still did
not have a “complete strategy” to confront ISIL (and still suffering for his 2014
characterization of ISIL as the “junior varsity” in comparison with al-Qaeda), Obama, at the
end of October 2015, authorized the deployment of several dozen special-operations troops in
Syria to help coordinate local ground forces in the north of the country and undertake other
open-ended missions there—an action that seemed to violate his long-standing promise to
not “put boots on the ground” in Syria. The measure came at a time when Russia had
become directly involved in the Syrian Civil War, and the deployment was framed as part of
an evolving policy that included a signi cant diplomatic effort to begin talks aimed at
effecting a political transition in Syria.
At the beginning of the new year, Obama returned again to the matter of gun violence. Long
frustrated by congressional gridlock that prevented the passage of gun-related legislation,
on January 5, 2016, he announced executive actions aimed at expanding background checks
for gun purchasers and recodifying the de nition of a regulated gun dealer. Mindful of the
kind of Republican accusations of presidential overreach that had landed earlier executive
actions in the courts, Obama was careful to undertake action that he described as “well
within” his legal authority. The rede nition of regulated gun dealing targeted online sales of
guns and sales of weapons at gun shows that had not been subject to background checks. In
his announcement of the executive action, Obama, re ecting on the tragedy of the 2012
Newtown shootings that had deeply affected him, wiped tears from his cheeks as he said,
“Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad. And by the way, it [gun violence]
happens on the streets of Chicago every day.” Several days later, at a special televised town
meeting at George Mason University, Obama discussed his executive action with both
supporters and opponents of gun-control reform.
When Obama came before a joint session of Congress on January 12 to deliver his nal State
of the Union message, there was an empty seat in the gallery next to Michelle Obama to
symbolize the loss of life brought about by gun violence. The president struck a positive tone
in his address, countering fears of Islamist terrorism by calling the United States “the most
powerful nation on Earth” and characterizing gloomy Republican assessments of the
country’s economic decline as “ ction” while saying that the U.S. has “the strongest, most
durable economy in the world.” Rather than recite a litany of policy initiatives, Obama,
echoing former president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms” address, focused
on four pivotal questions that were summarized on the White House’s Web site:
How do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in the new economy?
How do we make technology work for us, and not against us, as we solve our biggest
challenges?
How do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?
How can we make our politics re ect the best in us, and not the worst?
Having come into of ce determined to end partisan gridlock, Obama lamented his failure to
do so: “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency—that the rancor and suspicion between
the parties has gotten worse instead of better.”
Historic trips and more shootings
The death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in early February provided Obama with the
opportunity to replace one of the Supreme Court’s staunchest judicial conservatives. In
March the president nominated the highly regarded moderate Merrick Garland, the chief
judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as Scalia’s replacement,
but Senate Republicans had already vowed not to hold con rmation hearings for any new
justice until after the 2016 presidential election.
Returning to an issue that he had rst tackled early in his presidency, on February 23, 2016,
Obama announced that the Department of Defense had submitted to Congress a new plan
for closing the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He called the camp a stain
on the U.S. record of upholding the rule of law and said that its continued operation was
“counterproductive to our ght against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their
efforts to recruit.” Ongoing Republican opposition had frustrated attempts by Obama to
have some of the detainees transferred to the United States, but throughout his presidency
he had overseen the transfer of detainees to countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates, Oman, Georgia, Senegal, Bosnia, Slovakia, and Uruguay, with more than 180
detainees having left Guantánamo under Obama’s watch while several dozen detainees
remained.
In March Obama welcomed a state visit by Canada’s youthful new prime minister, Justin
Trudeau, whose presence created the kind of excitement that had always seemed to attend
the charismatic Obama at the beginning of his own tenure in of ce. The amiability between
Obama and Trudeau was a far cry from Obama’s chilly relationship with Canada’s former
leader, Conservative Stephen Harper.
Obama made a trio of historic state visits himself in 2016.

In mid-March he became the rst sitting U.S. president
to visit Cuba in more than 80 years and in May the rst
sitting U.S. chief executive to visit Hiroshima, Japan, the
site of the world’s rst nuclear strike, where the United
States had dropped an atomic bomb toward the end of
World War II that resulted in the deaths of more than
Trudeau, Justin; state visit 100,000 people. In his speech at the Hiroshima Peace
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, First Lady

Memorial Park, Obama pointedly did not apologize for
Michelle Obama, Canadian Prime Minister the bombing or call into question U.S. Pres. Harry S.
Justin Trudeau, and his wife, Sophie Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons. Instead, he
Grégoire-Trudeau, waving during an arrival
sought to emphasize the importance of a future without
ceremony on the South Lawn of the White
House, March 10, 2016.
nuclear weapons “in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are
Andrew Harnik/AP Images known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the
start of our own moral awakening.” Obama’s solemn
appearance in Hiroshima came at the end of a roughly
weeklong trip to Asia that had begun with a visit to
another former wartime adversary of the United States,
Vietnam. In Hanoi Obama announced an end to the
more-than-50-year embargo on sales of U.S.-made
weapons to Vietnam.
Obama, Barack; Obama, Michelle
(Centre) U.S. Pres. Barack Obama and First The Obama administration’s advocacy of civil rights took
Lady Michelle Obama walking in Old
a variety of forms in 2016. In early May Interior Secretary
Havana, Cuba, March 20, 2016.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Images Sally Jewell and National Park Service Director Jonathan
Jarvis met with local of cials to discuss the creation of a
national monument commemorating the gay rights
movement at the Stonewall Inn, the historic Greenwich
Village bar where police and gay rights activists had
clashed in 1969. Later that month U.S. Attorney General
Loretta Lynch announced the Department of Justice’s
ling of suit in federal district court in support of the
transgender community to block the enforcement of a
recently adopted North Carolina state law that required
Obama, Barack; Abe Shinzo
public agencies to limit the use of restrooms, locker
U.S. Pres. Barack Obama (right) and
rooms, and changing rooms to persons whose biological
Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo at the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in sex (as indicated on their birth certi cates) corresponds
Hiroshima, Japan, May 27, 2016. to the sex for which the facility is intended.
Carolyn Kaster/Ap Images
Gun violence continued to shake the country. In June

Obama and Vice President Biden traveled to Orlando, Florida, to meet with survivors and
families of victims of the mass shooting earlier that month at the Pulse nightclub, the
deadliest such event in modern U.S. history. Forty-nine people were killed and 50 others were
wounded in the attack by a lone gunman on the vibrant centre for lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social life. Less than a month later, on July 7, in downtown
Dallas, as a peaceful protest against the shootings earlier in the week of African American
men by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, was winding to a
close, a sniper who was upset by those shootings shot and killed four police of cers, along
with a rapid transit of cer, and wounded several others. Speaking at a memorial for the slain
of cers, Obama said:
Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be
bridged. We wonder if an African-American community that feels unfairly
targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing
their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience.…I’m here to say we must
reject such despair. I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem.…
Because with an open heart, we can learn to stand in each other’s shoes and look
at the world through each other’s eyes, so that maybe the police of cer sees his
own son in that teenager with a hoodie who’s kind of goo ng off but not
dangerous—and the teenager—maybe the teenager will see in the police of cer
the same words and values and authority of his parents.…We can decide to come
together and make our country re ect the good inside us, the hopes and simple
dreams we share.
At the end of July, as one of the keynote speakers at the Democratic National Convention in
Philadelphia, Obama eloquently praised Hillary Clinton, the party’s nominee to replace him in
the Oval Of ce, but, arguably, the convention’s most-rousing speech had been delivered a
few days earlier by the rst lady, Michelle Obama. The president campaigned actively in
support of Clinton, whose Republican opponent, real-estate developer and reality television
star Donald Trump, had vowed to undo many of Obama’s policy and legislative
achievements. Upending the predictions of polls and pundits, Trump won the election,
capturing key battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to triumph
in the Electoral College with 304 electoral votes to 227 for Clinton, though she won the
popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes.
In closing his Farewell Address at Chicago’s McCormick Place on January 10, 2017, Obama
said
…I’m asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change—but in yours.
I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents;
that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and
homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaf rmed by those
who planted ags from foreign battle elds to the surface of the moon; a creed at
the core of every American whose story is not yet written: Yes, we can.
Life after the presidency
Having chosen to become the rst president since Woodrow Wilson to remain in the capital
after the end of his term, Obama purchased a nine-bedroom home in the Kalorama
neighbourhood with the intention of staying for two years so that his younger daughter,
Sasha, could complete high school in Washington. Although he indicated at his nal press
conference that he did not intend to be actively involved in politics, he outlined several
developments that could reverse that decision, including “systematic discrimination being
rati ed in some fashion,” the creation of obstacles to voting, and efforts to silence the press
or dissent.
The former president and former rst lady received a joint $65 million advance from Penguin
Random House’s Crown Publishing Group for their respective memoirs. Obama also began
undertaking high-paid speaking engagements, including addresses to Wall Street nancial
rms, which earned him as much as $400,000 an outing as well criticism from some corners
for his acceptance of extravagant fees. Supporters countered that those high fees
contributed to making it possible for Obama to donate some $2 million to job-training
programs for low-income residents in the Chicago area.
Jackson Park, on Chicago’s South Side, was chosen by the Obama Foundation (founded in
January 2014) as the location for the Obama Presidential Center. Intended as an economic
engine for the South Side, nestled in parkland, and dedicated to informing and inspiring
future leaders, the centre was designed to include a library, museum, athletic facility, and
forum for public meetings. It also was planned to serve as the headquarters for the Obama
Foundation and the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, the organization Obama founded in 2014
to provide opportunities for boys and young men of colour. The former president also
indicated his support for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, an organization
led by former attorney general Eric Holder that was focused on executing a comprehensive
redistricting strategy to counter what it saw as the abuses of Republican gerrymandering.
Even as the Trump administration rolled out a succession of policy initiatives seemingly
aimed at eradicating Obama’s achievements in the realms of health care, climate change,
immigration, and nancial regulation, Obama for the most part honoured the unwritten
tradition of former presidents’ refraining from criticism of their successor’s actions. On
occasion, though, Obama did take issue with some of Trump’s policies and the direction in
which Trump was taking the country. Notably, Obama was critical of Trump’s decisions to
withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change and from the 2015 agreement with
Iran on nuclear development, as well as Trump’s order to terminate the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals program.
Jeff Wallenfeldt
President Obama’s cabinet
The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of Pres. Barack Obama.
Cabinet of President Barack Obama

January 20, 2009–January 20, 2013 (Term 1)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner
Robert M. Gates
Secretary of Defense
Leon Panetta (from July 1, 2011)
1
The post was vacant from the resignation of John Bryson in June 2012 until the swearing in
of Penny Pritzker in June 2013.

Attorney General Eric Holder
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
Gary Locke
Secretary of Commerce John Bryson (from October 21, 2011, to June 21,
1
2012)
Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius
Secretary of Housing and Urban
Shaun Donovan
Development
Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano
Hillary Clinton
Secretary of State
John Kerry (from February 1, 2013)
Tim Geithner
Secretary of the Treasury
Jack Lew (from February 28, 2013)
Leon Panetta
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel (from February 27, 2013)
Ashton Carter (from February 17, 2015)
Eric Holder
Attorney General
Loretta Lynch (from April 27, 2015)
Ken Salazar
Secretary of the Interior
Sally Jewell (from April 12, 2013)
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack
Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker (from June 26, 2013)
Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis
1

Thomas E. Perez (from July 23, 2013)
Kathleen Sebelius
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Sylvia Mathews Burwell (from June 9, 2014)
Secretary of Housing and Urban Shaun Donovan

Development Julián Castro (from July 28, 2014)
Ray LaHood
Secretary of Transportation
Anthony Foxx (from July 2, 2013)
Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy
Ernest Moniz (from May 21, 2013)
Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
John B. King, Jr. (from March 14, 2016)
Eric Shinseki
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Robert A. McDonald (from July 30, 2014)
Janet Napolitano
Secretary of Homeland Security
Jeh Johnson (from December 23, 2013)
1
CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Barack Obama
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 15 May 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Barack-Obama
ACCESS DATE: June 08, 2019

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6/9/2019 Barack Obama -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage

When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at

Politics and ascent to the presidency

In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois Senate, where, most

campaign nance regulations, expanded health care to

Obama’s personal charisma, stirring oratory, and his

Obama won more than a dozen states—including Illinois,

On August 27 Obama became the rst African American

raising advantage helped him buy massive amounts of

The two candidates offered a stark ideological choice for

Obama won the election, capturing nearly 53 percent of

Michelle and Barack Obama (couple at left) David Mendell

After enjoying soaring popularity early in his term,

Democrats, according to Republicans, had settled into

On March 23 Obama signed the bill into law. Senate

legislation as monumental as that which had come out

Obama was able to claim another major legislative

Deepwater Horizon oil spill

In happier news for the president, August 2010 marked

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Obama,

U.S. Pres. Barack Obama inspecting a tar

In June 2010, as the Afghanistan War rivaled the Vietnam

McChrystal, commander of NATO-U.S. forces in

Many columnists and political cartoonists were quick to

In the run-up to the fall’s midterm congressional

The midterm congressional election and its aftermath

With only weeks remaining in the congressional term,

Representatives, as she met with constituents in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords, a moderate

Upheaval in the Middle East

On April 4, Obama of cially announced that he would

The concern over the increasing de cit that was at the

The 2012 election

Despite his earlier political missteps, Romney stole

On November 6, 2012, Obama won a narrow victory in

votes in the lower chamber) on January 1, 2013. The bill

At the top of the president’s agenda in 2013 was the

January’s budget compromise had delayed automatic

when the new March 1, 2013, deadline passed without

Spring scandals and summer challenges

Taking heat and taking the lead

With the temporary resolution of the budget battle,

Executive action and the 2014 midterm election

With Obama’s approval rating bobbing at about 40

On November 20 Obama once again employed an executive order in an attempt to

Because the more-than- ve-decade embargo on trade

Baltimore riot, Charleston shooting, Supreme Court approval of

Perhaps this tragedy causes…us to examine what

infected with bias; that we embrace changes in

Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect

Obama’s hopes for the removal of discrimination

July brought yet another policy success for the president

Patient Protection and Affordable Care

More executive action

In the last half of the year, Obama again focused on the

Historic trips and more shootings

Obama made a trio of historic state visits himself in 2016.

U.S. Pres. Barack Obama, First Lady

Obama, Barack; Obama, Michelle

Gun violence continued to shake the country. In June

Life after the presidency

President Obama’s cabinet

Cabinet of President Barack Obama