Henrik palmgren biography of barack obama

Sworn into office on January 3, , Obama partnered with Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia. Then, with Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, he created a website to track all federal spending. He was locked in a tight battle with then-U.

He campaigned on an ambitious agenda of financial reform, alternative energy, and reinventing education and health care—all while bringing down the national debt. Because these issues were intertwined with the economic well-being of the nation, he believed all would have to be undertaken simultaneously. When he took office at age 47, Obama inherited a global economic recession, two ongoing foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lowest-ever international favorability rating for the United States.

They are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met. President First Days and Nobel Peace Prize Obama coaxed Congress to expand health care insurance for children and provide legal protection for women seeking equal pay. Housing and credit markets were put on life support, with a market-based plan to buy U.

The government made loans to the auto industry, and new regulations were proposed for Wall Street.

Henrik palmgren biography of barack obama

Obama cut taxes for working families, small businesses, and first-time home buyers. He reached out to improve relations with Europe, China, and Russia and to open dialogue with Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. He lobbied allies to support a global economic stimulus package. He committed an additional 21, troops to Afghanistan and set an August date for withdrawal of nearly all U.

Obama was an early opponent of President George W. He signed an executive order banning excessive interrogation techniques and ordered the closing of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba within a year—a deadline that ultimately would not be met. Related Story 4 U. The new law prohibited the denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions, allowed citizens under 26 years old to be insured under parental plans, provided for free health screenings for certain citizens, and expanded insurance coverage and access to medical care to millions of Americans.

In October , a dispute over the federal budget and Republican desires to defund or derail the Affordable Care Act caused a day shutdown of the federal government. The rollout of the reforms were initially bumpy. October saw the failed launch of HealthCare. Extra technical support was brought in to work on the troubled website, which was plagued with glitches for weeks.

The health care law was also blamed for some Americans losing their existing insurance policies, despite repeated assurances from Obama that such cancellations would not occur. The legislation has faced numerous challenges in court and wound up at the U. Supreme Court three times. In the summer of , the Supreme Court upheld part of the Act regarding health care tax subsidies.

Without these tax credits, buying medical insurance might have become too costly for millions of people. The latest Supreme Court decision about the Affordable Care Act began in when Congressional Republicans dropped the individual mandate tax penalty to zero. Texas and 17 other Republican states quickly sued to strike down the Affordable Care Act, mainly based on their opposition to its individual mandate.

A Texas federal judge ruled in favor of the suit, saying that because there was no longer a tax, the law was unconstitutional. The case was sent to an appeals court. A final ruling came in June when the U. Supreme Court voted , , to uphold the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the objecting states were not required to pay anything under the mandate provision and thus had no standing to bring the challenge to court.

As of January , nearly On May 2, an elite team of U. There were no American casualties, and the team was able to collect invaluable intelligence about the workings of al-Qaeda. Armed Forces. He became the first president to voice support for same-sex marriage in May Second Term as U. President Reelection and Second Term Priorities As he did in , during his campaign for a second presidential term, Obama focused on grassroots initiatives.

Representative Paul Ryan. On November 6, , Obama won a second term as president, capturing more than 60 percent of the Electoral College. Obama officially began his second term on January 21, , when U. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office. In his second inaugural address, Obama called the nation to action on such issues as climate change, health care, the federal deficit, and marriage equality.

Obama stated that the program had helped stop roughly 50 threats. However, the president suffered a significant drop in his approval ratings, to 45 percent, partially due to the revelations. In August , Obama ordered the first airstrikes against the Islamic State on targets in Syria, though the president pledged to keep combat troops out of the conflict.

Several Arab countries joined the airstrikes against the extremist group. However, U. As of December , more than 1, people have died, according to military officials. Outside watchdog organizations, like Airwars, estimate the number of casualties could be as many as several thousand. He spoke with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the phone, which marked the first direct contact between the leaders of the two countries in more than 30 years.

This groundbreaking move by Obama was seen by many as a sign of thawing in the relationship between the United States and Iran. In July , Obama announced that, after lengthy negotiations, the United States and five world powers had reached an agreement with Iran. The deal allowed inspectors entry into Iran to make sure the country kept its pledge to limit its nuclear program and enrich uranium at a much lower level than would be needed for a nuclear weapon.

In return, the United States and its partners removed the tough sanctions imposed on Iran and allowed the country to ramp up sales of oil and access frozen bank accounts. That year, Obama also traveled to India and reached a civilian nuclear agreement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi that opened the door to U. Elsewhere, Obama moved to reestablish diplomatic ties with Cuba in December He and Cuban President Raul Castro announced the normalizing of diplomatic relations between the countries for the first time since The policy change came after the exchange of American citizen Alan Gross and another unnamed American intelligence agent for three Cuban spies.

However, the long-standing U. Kennedy , remained in effect. On March 20, , Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Cuba since , as part of his larger program to establish greater cooperation between the two countries. Just prior to the trip, on March 10, , Obama met at the White House with newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the first official visit by a Canadian leader in nearly 20 years.

Ultimately, the plan never took effect after facing backlash and lawsuits from business groups, companies, 27 states, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell , who was then the Republican minority leader. Contrary to claims later made by his political opponents, however, he did not attend an Islamic madrassa. He was enrolled, first, in a Roman Catholic elementary school and then in the state-run Basuki school, which taught children of all faiths—Christians, Buddhists, and Confucians, as well as Muslims.

The language of instruction was Indonesian. Dunham briefly moved back to Hawaii with her daughter with Lolo , Maya, to live with Obama and her parents, before returning to Indonesia to pursue an anthropology degree on peasant blacksmithing in Java. She later worked with development organizations in Pakistan and Indonesia to set up microfinance programs to help women in remote villages gain access to credit.

He outlines this process in Dreams from My Father with great honesty and, although it was clearly a time of much anxiety, not a little wit. Barry Obama was, after all, a teenager growing up in the s with black skin, a white mother; a half-Caucasian, half-Indonesian half-sister in Java; and an absent, unknown African father in Kenya.

But at the end of his process of self-discovery, and notwithstanding his love for his white mother and grandparents, the physiological fact of his black skin proved to be the most important element in his psychological understanding of self. Yet, while appreciating their genius, the teenage Obama despaired that, despite W. One of the first critics to discuss jazz as a political as much as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, jazz exemplified to Davis a distinctive black, working-class challenge to white claims of racial superiority.

His poetry and criticism would have a significant influence on the Black Arts Movement of the s. Davis, a Kansas native, moved to Hawaii in the late s on the advice of Paul Robeson and worked as a journalist on a newspaper for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, one of the most powerful unions on the islands. Eighteen-year-old Barry Obama remained unsure, exactly, what college was for when he arrived at Occidental College, a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles in At both Occidental and Columbia, Obama was active in student politics, notably in antiapartheid protests, where he first discovered the power of his own oratory.

As his interest in basketball, drinking, partying, and recreational drugs waned, his devotion to academic study waxed. At Columbia he lived a monk-like existence in small, uncluttered apartments, and absorbed himself in books on political theory, philosophy, international politics, and literature. During that time he also began to write fiction and keep a journal, developing some of the ideas and themes that later appear in Dreams from My Father.

Obama graduated from Columbia in with a BA in political science, having developed a vague notion that he might become a community organizer, although he was not entirely sure just what it was that a community organizer did. He did, however, have a romantic image, perhaps in grainy blackand-white, picked up from his mother and his old poet friend Frank, and from books and documentaries of the civil rights struggle.

They were stoic, short-haired, neatly dressed black students sitting in at a segregated lunch counter. Or dungareewearing SNCC workers like Bob Moses or Stokely Carmichael, leaning on a dusty porch in Mississippi, trying to persuade sharecroppers to take a chance and register to vote. His fellow employees from that time have suggested, however, that Obama exaggerates the degree to which the company symbolized rapacious s capitalism, perhaps to portray his community organizing career as a more self-sacrificing choice than it actually was.

But it was the general atmosphere of Manhattan, rather than simply its corporate excesses that Obama rejected when he decided to leave the city in The progressive left of the s, Obama realized, was no less shallow than the capitalist right. Believing that easy sloganeering and posturing had replaced the certitude and rectitude of SNCC and CORE in the early s, Obama contemplated abandoning his goal of community organizing.

The mids heyday of Reaganism was a time of retrenchment in the American labor movement, when industrial firms in the North closed their gates and reopened in the nonunionized South or in Mexico. But it was also a time when such work was most desperately needed. He would find that community and sense of place in Chicago, and especially on its South Side, the largest, most populous collection of African American neighborhoods in the country.

Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton portrayed in a ground-breaking study by that title Chicago was also the home of people-centered, community-based organizing was born after World War II in the theories and programs of Saul Alinsky. In , a Wellesley senior named Hillary Rodham wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky. The Developing Communities Project, which employed Obama from to , followed the Alinsky principles that leaders listen, that change comes from the bottom up, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

During his first three years in Chicago, Obama achieved some modest success in mobilizing hundreds of residents in the South Side neighborhoods of Roseland and Altgeld Gardens. He also encouraged alliances among black, white, and Hispanic community organizations to stop plans that would have expanded a landfill into wetlands near residential neighborhoods.

Rush, have criticized him for taking too much credit for the asbestos removal victory at Altgeld Gardens and for ignoring the efforts of neighborhood residents who began a similar campaign before Obama arrived. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his experiences with black ministers who jealously guarded their prerogatives and congregations.

Man, these preachers in Chicago. You are not going to organize us. No, no, no. He knew his constituency; he truly enjoyed people. With ambitions of becoming a future Chicago mayor who might translate those principles into such an agenda, Obama applied to several law schools. In , he was accepted by Harvard Law. Vowing to return to Chicago and community organizing after graduation, he left for Massachusetts, choosing to live not in Cambridge itself, but instead in a basement apartment in the nearby working-class, multi-ethnic town of Somerville.

In his first year he worked as an editor on the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review, and impressed members of the faculty with his maturity and common sense as well as his breadth of knowledge. Obama was not the first African American to serve as president of a law review. That honor went to Clara Burrill Bruce, the daughter-in-law of former black U.

Bruce, who presided over the Boston University Law Review in Obama never hid his own political liberalism, however. He continued his active opposition to apartheid and support for affirmative action, and also spoke in favor of African American professor Derrick A. Bell Jr. Obama nonetheless earned the respect of political conservatives on the Law Review for acting as an honest broker between warring factions.

Indeed, he was more likely to be criticized by some on the left, including some of his fellow African American students, for not pursuing a more radical agenda. Such traits would serve him well in his future political career. After graduating from Harvard Law in , Obama turned down several offers of clerkships for federal judges, the typical next step for former editors of Ivy League law reviews.

Instead he returned, as promised, to Chicago. There he spearheaded voter registration efforts that helped secure the election of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Judson Miner had been an important white liberal ally of Harold Washington. From to , Obama also taught courses on constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

The couple had two daughters, Malia, born in , and Natasha, known as Sasha, born in As a bonus, Michelle Robinson gave Obama important political connections as well. Her family was well-known and regarded on the South Side, and she had attended school with Santita Jackson, daughter of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson and sister of U. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.

Shortly before he won election to that body, Obama published Dreams from My Father a memoir about his unique background as the child of an African father and a white mother from Kansas and his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia. The book also examines his student experiences and s work as a community organizer in the Chicago. Dreams from My Father has been reprinted many times and has sold over two million copies in hardcover and paperback.

In he won a seat representing the 13th district in the Illinois Senate. He had launched his bid for the legislature after the incumbent, Alice Palmer, had stepped down to pursue a seat in the U. When she failed in that effort and tried, with the support of established local black leaders, to reclaim the seat she had relinquished, Obama refused to back down.

He also demanded an investigation of questionable signatures on the petitions required for her candidacy, and succeeded in having enough struck off to keep Palmer off the ballot. Obama won the Democratic primary unopposed, which in the Republican-phobic South Side meant he would win the general election with ease. He helped craft a law that banned the personal use of campaign money by state legislators and banned lobbyists from giving gifts to lawmakers.

In short, he pursued a pragmatic progressive agenda, very much in line with the policies of the Clinton administration that was in office at the time. These veterans of the civil rights struggles of the s and s believed that the clearly ambitious Obama had not paid his dues, and needed to wait his turn. As at Harvard, Obama sought out the company of conservative Republicans and moderate downstate Democrats, and crafted harmonious working relationships with all shades of political opinion.

Thomas P. By late , at the age of thirty-eight, Obama had worked and lived in Chicago for fifteen years, even returning there to work during the summer recesses at Harvard Law School. While he enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of teaching constitutional law, and had begun to earn the sometimes grudging admiration of his colleagues in the state legislature, it had become increasingly evident that his political ambitions and the transformative social changes he sought would not be satisfied in Springfield.

Daley as deeply entrenched in the Second City in the s as his father Richard J. Late in , he launched a bid for the U. House seat held by Bobby L. Rush, a four-term incumbent and former Black Panther leader. The district included much of the South Side, was two-thirds black, and the winner of the Democratic Party primary was virtually assured of victory in the general election.

His weak performance in the sole televised debate summed up a disastrous campaign. On primary day, Obama won a majority of white voters, but Rush defeated him by thirty points overall. In American politics, especially in House races, incumbents rarely lose. And Obama clearly raised his profile during the course of the race: beginning with a name-recognition of 11 percent, he ended with 30 percent of the vote.

But the chances of victory, particularly against Jackson, were remote. House of Representatives—James A. Garfield—has ever been elected directly to the Presidency. All twentieth-century presidents except Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, had previously served either as governor, senator, or vice president.

Fortunately for Obama, Moseley Braun had won election to the U. Senate from Illinois in , blazing that particular trail in his home state. But that is only the first step. That left Obama as the leading African American challenger in the Illinois Democratic primary, in part because of shrewd political calculation and organization, as well as luck.

Following his defeat, Obama began to mend fences with fellow black politicians, including Senator Donne Trotter and others who had mistrusted his Hyde Park connections and questioned his African American bona fides. This Jones did by securing for Obama the chairmanship of the prominent Health and Human Services Committee, when others had more seniority.

Jones also encouraged Obama to take the lead in a bill requiring the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases legislation. Obama did so with support both from death penalty opponents and the police, a tricky balancing act that highlighted his developing political skills and ability to forge coalitions. Obama also secured the backing of a handful of white state senate colleagues and worked hard to secure an endorsement from established white political leaders, notably Newton N.

Kennedy , and from the wellrespected former Illinois U. But a first-class temperament! Axelrod, a successful political consultant with close ties to the Richard M. Senate bid. As a former journalist for the Tribune, Axelrod had deep ties to journalists and other media figures and professional politicians throughout the state. By getting Axelrod on board, Obama had shown his seriousness of purpose, but he still had an uphill climb in securing the Democratic nomination for U.

That he did so was a mixture of luck and courage. Luck came in the form of a crowded field in the Democratic primary, where he faced only one other African American candidate a relative newcomer with no institutional support and two white heavyweight candidates, Blair Hull, a multimillionaire stock trader who financed his own campaign, and Dan Hynes, a well-connected state comptroller favored by many party officials and several unions who would split the white vote.

Hull spent his way to an early lead in opinion polls, but shortly before polling day the release of court records alleging that he had abused his wife dealt a grave blow to his campaign. Ironically, Obama was also helped by his future presidential rival, U. As for courage, Obama was the only major candidate in the field who had opposed the Iraq War from its inception—and said so publicly.

The Iraq venture of George W. A rash war. The campaign was also a remarkably clean one, devoid of negative advertising. In the wake of the Osama bin Laden terrorist attacks of September 11, , Obama had feared that his surname might become less of a mild curiosity and more of a political liability. But none of his opponents made that charge, partly because they feared alienating black voters.

He would not be so fortunate four years later. Much to the surprise of the political world, Obama would in fact win a relatively easy primary victory with 53 percent of the vote, more than twice that of his closest rival, Dan Hynes. That weakness might have been exploited by a formidable Republican candidate, but the winner of the Republican primary in Illinois, businessman Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race following a sex scandal.

But Keyes had no tangible connection to Illinois, had never held elective office, and had won few votes in his run for the Republican presidential nomination in Even by the standards of the modern Republican Party, he was an ultraconservative fundamentalist Christian with little appeal to the suburbanites and moderate swing voters who were usually pivotal in Illinois elections.

And, as in his race for the U. Neither need have worried. Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan broke that color line in , and gave a speech ranked by scholars of rhetoric as the fifth-greatest American speech of the twentieth century bettered only by Martin Luther King Jr. The speech also launched many of the themes that would propel Barack Obama into the White House a little more than four years later.

Most significantly, his keynote established Obama as a profoundly American politician, and arguably as the most representative American candidate ever to seek the presidency. Its little more than 2, words are, therefore, worthy of some detailed analysis. He announced himself as the son of an immigrant father from Kenya, who grew up herding goats and went to school in a tin roof shack.

Washington and the Horatio Alger stories of yore. Bill, bought a house through FHA, and later moved west all the way to Hawaii in search of opportunity. The middle of his speech was somewhat more prosaic, though still compelling. A few lines were crafted to appeal to Illinois voters—he had an election to win after all. Thus Obama gave shout-outs to the voters in the collar counties around Chicago who did not want their tax money wasted by either welfare agencies or the Pentagon; recounted a conversation with a presumably Irish American patriotic G.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. Ultimately, he argued, the election came down to a simple question: Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope? Indeed, in his rising cadences, he began for the first time in his speech to adopt the soaring rhetoric that most Americans, black, white, and others, traditionally expect of black politicians.

The words, however, came from another Chicago pastor—his own—the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. On the evening of his speech, and with trademark self-confidence, he predicted to a Chicago journalist that he would deliver a slam-dunk. I can play on this level. I got game. That November, Obama won an easy victory, with 70 percent of the vote. The voters of Illinois had again elected an African American to the Senate, and that alone would have made him a figure of major national importance.

Supreme Court. In The Audacity of Hope Obama elaborated on the themes of hope and national unity that were central to his convention keynote address. Sales from the book and from a reissued Dreams from My Father enabled him to join the ranks of most of his Senate colleagues, who were millionaires. Because he was now involved in a national campaign, many of the issues about his name, identity, and blackness that Obama had dealt with in Chicago and Illinois politics were raised again in a national context.

The African American journalist and critic Debra J. Dickerson argued in Salon. There have historically been differences and tensions, too, between lighter- and darker-skinned blacks; between West Indian immigrants also the descendants of slaves and American blacks; and between northern and southern people of color. George Schuyler, an iconoclastic black journalist raised in Syracuse, New York, often remarked with pride that his family had never lived in the South and had never been slaves, but, as both he and Obama would both learn, such distinction mattered little to whites.

Or, as Obama once put it, New York cab drivers who ignore his efforts to hail a taxi somehow fail to recognize his white Kansan side. Black political gains in the s, s, and s were largely achieved by a generation of politicians who came of age in the southern civil rights movement, or in urban Democratic politics. House from Alabama. Congressman Harold Ford Jr.

Senate race in Tennessee the same year. All are generally progressive pragmatists and are less partisan than earlier generations of black politicians, although Ford, chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Artur Davis have been more willing to adopt socially as well as economically conservative positions in order to broaden their appeal as possible statewide candidates in the South.

His February announcement, outside the State Capitol building in Springfield, brought to mind the last Illinois native to win the presidency, Abraham Lincoln. But it was also a reminder that Obama had been a middle-ranking state legislator in Springfield a mere three years earlier. And that no successful presidential candidate since Lincoln had less executive or legislative experience.

In the U. The economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W. Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help struggling financial institutions. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops deployed in difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the first two years of his first term, President Obama was able to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to improve the economy, pass health-care reform legislation, and withdraw most US troops from Iraq.

After the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in , the president spent significant time and political effort negotiating, for the most part unsuccessfully, with congressional Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit. After winning reelection in , Obama began his second term focused on securing legislation on immigration reform and gun control, neither of which he was able to achieve.