abstract
| - Barack Obama is currently the president of the United States of America. He will take office January 20th 2009. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 3, 2005 until his resignation on November 16, 2008. He is be the 44th President of the USA. Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School. As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, Obama helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for U.S. military personnel returning from combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Of his early childhood, Obama has recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind." In his 1995 memoir, he described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He wrote that he used alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind". At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his high-school drug use as his "greatest moral failure."
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