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Barack Obama is a Democratic politician from Illinois. He is currently running for the United States Senate, which would be the highest elected office he has held thus far. Obama would be only the third African-American Senator since Reconstruction. His opponent is Jack Ryan.

Biography

Obama's father is Kenyan; his mother is from Kansas. He himself was born in Hawaii, where his mother and father met at the University of Hawaii. Obama's father left his family early on, and Obama was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia by his mother. He attended college at Columbia University in New York City, majoring in political science; he then became a community organizer in Chicago. He attended law school at Harvard, and became the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review, a prestigious legal publication.

After leaving his post at the Law Review, Obama worked in Chicago on a voter registration drive in 1992, which claimed to have registered more than 100,000 voters. He then found work at a civil rights law firm, and became a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

In 1997, Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate, from the south side of Chicago. He was generally regarded as a liberal during his tenure in the State Senate, helping to author a state earned income tax credit providing benefits to the poor.

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