Microfilm reveals the Aug. 14, 1961, birth announcement in the Honolulu Star Bulletin that a son was born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama on Aug. 4, 1961. The image is seen in 2011 at the Hawaii State Library in Honolulu. | Marco Garcia/AP Photo Barack Obama born in Hawaii, Aug. 4, 1961

Barack Obama, the nation’s 44th president, serving from 2009 to 2017, was born on this day in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, two years after the territory was admitted to the union as the 50th state. He was born to a white mother and a black father whom he subsequently hardly knew. Reared largely in Hawaii by his maternal grandparents, Obama also spent one year of his childhood in Washington state and four years in Indonesia.

In 2006, as he prepared to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama said: “Americans … still believe in an America where anything’s possible — they just don't think their leaders do. These are Americans who still dream big dreams — they just sense their leaders have forgotten how.”


Obama served in the Illinois state Senate before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and then to the presidency four years after that. He took office amid the sharpest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In his first month in office, the Democratic-controlled Congress enacted a $787 billion tax relief and economic stimulus package. In the following year, Obama signed into law the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, widely known as Dodd-Frank, after its chief sponsors, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

During Obama's tenure, the federal budget deficit fell sharply while the federal debt nearly doubled to $19 trillion, which became an issue in the 2016 campaign.

As president, Obama honored an accord negotiated by George W. Bush, his Republican predecessor, to pull nearly all U.S. forces out of Iraq. He also increased troop levels in Afghanistan before withdrawing most of them. Nine months after his inauguration, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He accepted the award in Oslo, Norway, asserting he felt there were others “far more deserving of this honor than I.”

Obama’s singular piece of domestic legislation, the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, remains on the statute books. However, it has been attacked and eviscerated by Donald Trump, his Republican successor, and by the GOP-led Congress.

During Obama's second term, the United States joined Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China in making a deal with Iran that the six partners said would ensure that Tehran’s nuclear program progressed along peaceful lines. Trump subsequently withdrew American participation in the deal, which lacked the force of a treaty. Trump, however, has continued Obama’s policy of marginal military intervention in the long-running Syrian civil war.

In capturing a second term in 2012, Obama became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two presidential elections while amassing an absolute majority of the popular vote.

Since leaving office with a 60 percent approval rating, Obama and his wife, Michelle, have made their home in Washington, D.C., the first ex-president do to so since Woodrow Wilson in 1921.

SOURCE: “THIS DAY IN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY,” BY PAUL BRANDUS

