When sworn in as a US senator on January 4, 2005, Obama was the fifth African American senator in the American history and the third to have been popularly elected. Now that he is the presidential nominee of the Democratic party in the 2008 United States presidential election he is the first African American to be nominated by a major political party for president.
A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he worked as community organiser and practiced as civil rights attorney. Thereafter he served three terms in the Illinoise senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds.
He made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel.
Following the his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama emphasized withdrawing American troops from Iraq. He listed as his national priorities; energy independence, decreasing the influence of lobbyists and promoting universal health care.
Barak Obama was born on 4 August 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barak Obama, Sr, a black Kenyan and Ann Dunham a White American from Kansas. Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. After divorce Dunham married Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, where the family moved soon after.
He attended local schools in Jakarta till he was ten years old and then moved to Honolulu and stayed with his grand parents untill his high school graduation in 1979. After that he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College. After two years he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in Political Science with a specialization in International Relations. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then worked for a year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.
After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he was hired as director of Developing Communities Project (DCP), a churchbased community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side, and worked there for three years from June 1985 to May 1988.
During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. At the end of his first year, he was selected, based on his grades and a writing competition, as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In February 1990, in his second year, he was elected president of the Law Review, a fulltime volunteer position functioning as editorinchief and supervising the Law Review's staff of eighty editors.
Obama held assignments on the Senate Committees for Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works and Veterans' Affairs through December 2006.In January 2007, he left the Environment and Public Works committee and took additional assignments with Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
He also became Chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama has made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. On February 10, 2007 Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois.
The choice of the announcement site was symbolic since it was also where Abraham Lincoln in 1858 delivered his historic "House Divided" speech. Throughout the campaign Obama has emphasized the issues of ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care, at one point identifying these as his top three priorities.
On June 19, Obama became the first majorparty presidential candidate to turn down public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1976, reversing his earlier intention to accept it. It was On October 2, 2002, the day President Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War,that Obama addressed the first highprofile Chicago antiIraq War rally in Federal Plaza, speaking out against the war.
On March 16, 2003, the day President Bush issued his 48hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Obama addressed an antiIraq War rally and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.