Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th president of the United States elected in 2009. And he is the first African-American to ascend to this highest post in US.

During his campaign, Mr. Obama called himself "a skinny kid" and made "change" the theme. Before arriving at the White House he was a senator in Illinois for eight years and in Washington for four years. He had managed the Democratic nomination by competing with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. After that he defeated Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona, by outpolling him by more than eight million votes.

Mr. Obama's first year in office was notably crowded, with major decisions on conflicts in Iraq, and stepping up in Afghanistan with new thousands of troops. But at home, the Obama administration's early months in office were shadowed by a single issue: The Economy. Indeed, the economy seemed relentless slide in late 2008 started reforming the Obama team's plans long before Inauguration Day. 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 maintain General Motors and Chrysler from going under. The General Motors and Chrysler efforts hit the target, and as the economy seemed to start improving later in the year, Mr. Obama's efforts appeared to be fruitful. Besides, 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. President's first major initiative was a massive stimulus program to pump money into an economy in something close to free fall. He introduced the 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 disparaged 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 appeared 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. In November, the House passed a bill with only one 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 fusion it with the House version were underway in January when a astonishing Republican victory in the race to fill the Senate seat for Massachusetts that had been held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for decades turned over the political landscape. It deprived the Democrats of the 60th vote they needed in the Senate. After weeks of strategizing, Democrats revised the bill to fit the requirements of budget settlement, a procedure under which bills cannot be filibustered. The critical vote came on March 21, 2010, when the House passed the revised bill, and Mr. Obama signed it into law soon afterwards.

President Obama won another legislative victory in July, when Congress passed a financial reform bill. But on the most crucial issue of the day -- the economy -- Republicans and conservative Democrats blocked all large-scale attempts to boost up job growth through federal spending. As the jobless rate hovered just under 10 percent and signs grew that the recovery was slowing, Mr. Obama's poll ratings continued to slip and Republicans became increasingly confident of major gains in the fall Congressional elections.