Barack Obama: Remarks on Signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

About the Author

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, and spent most of his youth in Hawaii. His father, who came to the United States from Kenya, left the family when Obama was two years old and eventually returned to the country of his birth; Obama’s parents divorced in 1964. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, later married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian who was studying at the University of Hawaii. In 1967 the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, and Obama became familiar with the nation’s culture and society. For the first time, he saw widespread want and deprivation, as beggars “seemed to be everywhere, … some without arms, others without feet” (Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. 38). He later said that living in Indonesia made him “more mindful of … the ways that fate can determine the lives of young children, so that one ends up being fabulously wealthy and another ends up being extremely poor” (Mendell, p. 33). His mother supplemented his formal schooling with tutorials in African American history. She also made him get up at 4 AM five days a week to take English lessons before going to school.

In 1971 Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his maternal grandparents and attended the Punahou School, an elite private academy that allowed him, as he later explained, to make contacts that “would last a lifetime” (New York Times editors, p. 37). During the Christmas season, his mother and father joined him for an extended visit. This two-week family reunion provided Obama with his only memories of his father; Obama did not see his father again before an automobile accident in Kenya took his life in 1982.

Like many adolescents, Obama, who went by the name of “Barry,” engaged in what he called “a fitful interior struggle” to establish his own identity (Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. 76). Complicating his efforts were the permanent absence of his father and the return of his mother to Indonesia for several years to do fieldwork for her graduate degree in anthropology. Obama learned from friends, grandparents, and the books he read most evenings in his room. Yet the role models he discovered and the advice he received provided limited help, as he was the son of an African father and a white mother who was living in a state where most people were Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America,” Obama wrote, but “no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant” (Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. 76). Obama eventually wrote a candid and poignant account of his efforts to understand himself and the world around him, entitled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995).

Obama became politically active while he attended Occidental College, in Los Angeles. He participated in demonstrations against the South African practice of apartheid. He engaged in lengthy discussions with friends about politics, learned that he had a talent for public speaking, and became “Barack” instead of “Barry.” In 1981, after two years at Occidental, he transferred to Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1983.

After working for two years in New York, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago in 1985. He found that helping African American residents in the poor neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side on projects such as asbestos removal from apartment buildings or improving city services was “the best education I ever received” (Mendell, p. 68). As he later wrote, community organizing “deepened my resolve to lead a public life, … fortified my racial identity, and confirmed my belief in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things” (Obama, Audacity of Hope, p. 244).

Concluding that he needed additional training to do his work more effectively, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School. In 1990 he was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, becoming the first African American to hold that position. After graduating in 1991, Obama moved back to Chicago and, the following year, married Michelle Robinson, also a graduate of Harvard Law. He worked for a law firm that took on many civil rights cases, and he also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

In 1996 Obama won the first of two consecutive terms in the Illinois Senate, representing a district in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side. He suffered a defeat at the polls in 2000, when he challenged the incumbent Democrat Bobby Rush for a seat in the U.S. Congress. Obama regained his seat in the Illinois Senate in 2002. During that campaign, he spoke out against going to war with Iraq, maintaining that such a conflict would “fan the flames” of opposition to the United States in the Middle East and “strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda,” the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001. Obama announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate shortly after returning to the state senate. He won the Democratic nomination by a wide margin in the March 2004 Illinois primary, and his candidacy gained a boost when he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2004. In November, Obama won election to the Senate by the widest margin in Illinois history.

In the Senate, Obama served on the Foreign Relations Committee and sponsored ethics reform legislation, but he soon began considering a run for the presidency. He declared his candidacy on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, Illinois, conceding that there was “a certain presumptuousness—a certain audacity—to this announcement.” While he admitted that he had not “spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington,” he insisted that he had “been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.” During most of 2007 polls showed that Obama was far behind the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Obama, however, campaigned tirelessly, built an extensive and remarkably effective campaign organization, raised large amounts of money from small donors by relying on the Internet, and emphasized that he stood for “change,” especially the ending of the war in Iraq. Obama surged into the lead for the nomination with a victory in the Iowa caucuses in early January 2008 but then narrowly lost to Clinton in the first primary in New Hampshire. He regained the advantage in a cluster of primaries that all occurred on February 5, or “Super Tuesday.” At the end of the primaries and caucuses on June 3, Obama claimed that he had enough delegates to win the nomination. Clinton suspended her campaign four days later, ensuring that Obama would be the Democrats’ choice for president when the party held its national convention in Denver at the end of August.

Polls indicated that the race between Obama and the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, was close until mid-September, when McCain asserted, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong” (New York Times editors, p. 141). That statement was made as the financial difficulties that had troubled the U.S. economy for more than a year worsened so dramatically that President George W. Bush sought emergency legislation to provide $700 billion in aid to ailing banks and investment firms. As the economy weakened, Obama’s message of change resonated with more voters. On November 4, Obama was elected the nation’s forty-fourth president, winning overwhelmingly with 52.9 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes.