Barack Obama Essay

Universidad Latina de Costa Rica.

Sede de Cañas.

Elocution and Composition II

BIN-25.

Lectured by Juan Carlos Palma.

Barack H. Obama: Hope and Change for America.

2009 – 1.

In loving memory of my parents Jesus and Julia.

Thanks for your love and care from the heaven.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961.He is the 44th. and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from 2005 until he resigned following his election to the presidency. He was inaugurated as President on January 20, 2009.Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.

In a 2006 interview, Obama talked about the diversity of his extended family. He said:

"It's like a little mini-United Nations." he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." (1)

Obama has seven half-siblings from his Kenyan father's family, six of them living, and a half-sister with whom he was raised, Maya Soetoro-Ng, the daughter of his mother and her Indonesian second husband. Obama's mother was survived by her Kansas-born mother, Madelyn Dunham until her death on November 2, 2008, just before the presidential election. In Dreams from My Father, Obama ties his mother's family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, president of the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War. Obama's maternal and paternal grandfathers fought in World War II. Obama's great-uncle served in the 89th Division that overran Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops.

Besides his native English, Obama speaks Indonesian, at least on a colloquial level, which he learned during his four childhood years in Jakarta. After the APEC summit in November 2008, Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono related a telephone conversation with Obama in Indonesian to Indonesian media.

Obama was known as "Barry" in his youth, but asked to be addressed with his given name during his college years. He plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team. He disclosed that he used alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years during high school. However , Obama expressed about his drug use the following thought:

“I identified my high-school drug use as my greatest moral failure." (2)

In June 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson, whom he later married, when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Assigned for three months as Obama's adviser at the firm, Robinson joined him at group social functions, but declined his initial requests to date. They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992. The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998, followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), in 2001. Because of Michelle Obama's employment with the University of Chicago, the Obama daughters attended the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. When they moved to Washington, D.C., in January 2009, the girls started at the private Sidwell Friends School.

Applying the proceeds of a book deal, in 2005 the family moved from a Hyde Park, Chicago condominium to their current $1.6 million house in neighboring Kenwood. The purchase of the property was coordinated with Tony Rezko, a major political contributor to Obama, who later sold part of the adjacent lot to the Obamas. The transaction attracted media attention because of Rezko's later indictment and subsequent conviction on political corruption charges for unrelated activities. In December 2007, Money magazine estimated the Obama family's net worth at $1.3 million. Their 2007 tax return showed a household income of $4.2 million—up from about $1 million in 2006 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books, due to this fact Barack Obama is considered one of the greatest authors nowadays.

Obama is a Christian person whose religious views have evolved in his adult life. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote the following statement:

“I was not raised in a religious household.” (3).

He describes his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as "non-practicing Methodists and Baptists" to be detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known. And he describes his father as "raised a Muslim," but a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful." In the book, Obama explains how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change. He was baptized at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988 and was an active member there for two decades.

Besides Obama has been strongly influenced by ideas of equality of two leaders of civil rights for members of his race like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. They wrote different books and many articles during the segregation time. They wanted to be treated as equals in all fields such as the political, economic, and social success and the right for voting. They had a dream that become real in this current moment in America history. But , Will be Obama able to keep all these new acts, to give a better economy for America, to be the hope and change for the new America ?

Obama political career begun when he voted in favor of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and cosponsored the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act. In September 2006, Obama supported a related bill, the Secure Fence Act. Obama introduced two initiatives bearing his name: Lugar–Obama, which expanded the Nunn–Lugar cooperative threat reduction concept to conventional weapons, and the Coburn–Obama Transparency Act, which authorized the establishment of USAspending.goverment, a web search engine on federal spending. On June 3, 2008, Senator Obama, along with Senators Thomas R. Carper, Tom Coburn, and John McCain, introduced follow-up legislation: Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008. He also sponsored legislation that would have required nuclear plant owners to notify state and local authorities of radioactive leaks, but the bill failed to pass in the full Senate after being heavily modified in committee. Obama is not hostile to tort reform and voted for the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 which grants immunity from civil liability to telecommunications companies complicit with NSA warrant less wiretapping operations. In December 2006, President Bush signed into law the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act, marking the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor. In January 2007, Obama and Senator Feingold introduced a corporate jet provision to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which was signed into law in September 2007. Obama also introduced Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections]and the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007, neither of which have been signed into law.

Later in 2007, Obama sponsored an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act adding safeguards for personality disorder military discharges. This amendment passed the full Senate in the spring of 2008. He sponsored the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act supporting divestment of state pension funds from Iran's oil and gas industry, which has not passed committee, and co-sponsored legislation to reduce risks of nuclear terrorism. Obama also sponsored a Senate amendment to the State Children's Health Insurance Program providing one year of job protection for family members caring for soldiers with combat-related injuries.

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District, which then spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park-Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn. Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws. He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.

Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah

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