Barack Obama

Updated: Jan. 28, 2010

OVERVIEW

Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2009. The son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, he is the first African-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.

In his campaign, Mr. Obama called himself "a skinny kid with a funny name" and made "change" the theme. He arrived at the White House with a résumé that appeared short by presidential standards: eight years in the Illinois State Senate, four years as a senator in Washington. He had managed to wrest the Democratic nomination from a field of far more experienced competitors, most notably Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he outlasted in what became an epic primary battle. And he defeated Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona, by an electoral margin of 365 to 173, while outpolling him by more than eight million votes.

Mr. Obama's first year in office was been remarkably crowded, with major decisions on conflicts winding down in Iraq, and stepping up in Afghanistan with the addition of thousands of new troops. At home, the Obama administration's early months in office were dominated by a single issue: the economy. In fact, the economy's seemingly relentless slide in late 2008 began reshaping the Obama team's plans long before Inauguration Day, as first the candidate and then the president-elect was pulled in to discussions over whether to bail out the financial system, and then into the raging debate over whether and how to keep General Motors and Chrysler from going under. The General Motors and Chrysler efforts succeeded, and as the economy seemed to begin to improve later in the year, Mr. Obama's efforts appeared to be bearing fruit. Nonetheless, his approval ratings continued to fall from their post-inauguration highs, amid criticism from the right that he was an ultra-liberal and from the left that he wasn't liberal enough.

Mr. Obama's first major initiative was a gigantic stimulus package to pump money into an economy in something close to free fall. He introduced the outlines of a plan before taking office, and spent much of his first weeks engaged in negotiations with Congress that led to the passage of a $787 billion bill. Republicans derided the bill as unaffordable and wasteful. Not a single Republican in the House voted for the package, and only three Republican senators did -- just enough for Mr. Obama to avert a filibuster.

The vote seemed to presage the reception of the health care reform efforts Mr. Obama put at the top of his agenda. As bills made their way through Congress over the summer and fall, there was practically no bipartisan support. Conservative anger boiled over during Congress's August recess, and it took a televised address to a joint session of the House and Senate by Mr. Obama in September to stop the slide of his own popularity and that of the health plans. In November, the House passed a bill with a single Republican vote. In the Senate, the most controversial provision of the bill -- a government-run insurance plan -- was stripped out to win the support of conservative members of the Democratic caucus, as the votes of 60 members were needed to avoid a Republican filibuster.

The Senate passed its bill on Christmas Eve, and negotiations to blend it with the House version were underway in January when a stunning Republican victory in the race to fill the Senate seat for Massachusetts that had been held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for decades upended the political landscape. It deprived the Democrats of the 60th vote they needed in the Senate, and was widely taken as a referendum on the health care bill and, Republicans argued, Mr. Obama's policies in general.

In his first State of the Union address, delivered Jan. 27, 2010, Mr. Obama promised to focus intently on the issue of most immediate concern to the nation, jobs. He vowed not to give up on his ambitious legislative agenda, chastising Republicans for working in lock-step against him and warning Democrats to stiffen their political spines.

THE PRESIDENCY OF BARACK OBAMA

THE ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE