research paper on barack obama

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Barack Obama

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 19, 2022 | Original: November 9, 2009

Barack Obama , the 44th president of the United States and the first African American president, was elected over Senator John McCain of Arizona on November 4, 2008. Obama, a former senator from Illinois whose campaign’s slogan was “Change we can believe in” and “Yes we can,” was subsequently elected to a second term over Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. 

A winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Obama’s presidency was marked by the landmark passage of the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare”; the killing of Osama bin Laden by Seal Team Six; the Iran Nuclear Deal and the legalization of gay marriage by the Supreme Court.

Barack Obama’s Early Life

Obama’s father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, grew up in a small village in Nyanza Province, Kenya, as a member of the Luo ethnicity. He won a scholarship to study economics at the University of Hawaii, where he met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from Wichita, Kansas , whose father had worked on oil rigs during the Great Depression and fought with the U.S. Army in World War II before moving his family to Hawaii in 1959. Barack and Ann’s son, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Did you know? Not only was Obama the first African American president, he was also the first to be born outside the continental United States. Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.

Obama’s parents later separated, and Barack Sr. went back to Kenya. He would see his son only once more before dying in a car accident in 1982. Ann remarried in 1965. She and her new husband, an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro, moved with her young son to Jakarta in the late 1960s, where Ann worked at the U.S. embassy. Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in Jakarta in 1970.

Barack Obama’s Education

At age 10, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. He attended the Punahou School, an elite private school where, as he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father , he first began to understand the tensions inherent in his mixed racial background. After two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, from which he graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science.

He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1991. While at Harvard, he became the first Black editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama, Community Organizer and Attorney

After a two-year stint working in corporate research and at the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago , where he took a job as a community organizer with a church-based group, the Developing Communities Project. For the next several years, he worked with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the city’s largely Black South Side. Obama would later call the experience “the best education I ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” the prestigious institution he entered in 1988.

Obama met his future wife—Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School grad—while working as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. He married Michelle Obama at the Trinity United Church of Christ on October 3, 1992.

Obama went on to teach at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2003.

Senator Barack Obama

In 1996, Obama officially launched his own political career, winning election to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat from the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park. Despite tight Republican control during his years in the state senate, Obama was able to build support among both Democrats and Republicans in drafting legislation on ethics and health care reform. He helped create a state earned-income tax credit that benefited the working poor, promoted subsidies for early childhood education programs and worked with law enforcement officials to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.

Re-elected in 1998 and again in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Democratic primary for the U. S. House of Representatives seat held by the popular four-term incumbent Bobby Rush. As a state senator, Obama notably went on record as an early opponent of President George W. Bush’s push to war with Iraq . 

During a rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza in October 2002, he spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars…I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U. S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

The Obama Years: A Nine-Part Oral History

The former president and 24 other members of his administration weigh in on their proudest moments, their regrets and the belief that they left it all on the field.

Barack Obama’s Speech At the 2004 Democratic National Convention

When Republican Peter Fitzgerald announced that he would vacate his U.S. Senate seat in 2004 after only one term, Obama decided to run. He won 52 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. After his original Republican opponent in the general election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race, the former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in. That July, Obama gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, shooting to national prominence with his eloquent call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. It put the relatively unknown, young senator in the national spotlight.

 In November 2004, Illinois delivered 70 percent of its votes to Obama (versus Keyes’ 27 percent), sending him to Washington as only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction .

During his tenure, Obama notably focused on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and the health threat posed by avian flu. With Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma , he created a website that tracks all federal spending, aimed at rebuilding citizens’ trust in government. He partnered with another Republican, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana , on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia. In August 2006, Obama traveled to Kenya, where thousands of people lined the streets to welcome him. He published his second book, The Audacity of Hope , in October 2006.

2008 Presidential Campaign

On February 10, 2007, Obama formally announced his candidacy for president of the United States. A victory in the Iowa primary made him a viable challenger to the early frontrunner, the former first lady and current New York Senator Hillary Clinton , whom he outlasted in a grueling primary campaign to claim the Democratic nomination in early June 2008. 

Obama chose Joseph R. Biden Jr. as his running mate. Biden had been a U.S. senator from Delaware since 1972, was a one-time Democratic candidate for president and served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s opponent was long-time Arizona Senator John S. McCain , a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war who chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. If elected, Palin would have been the nation’s first-ever female vice-president.

As in the primaries, Obama’s campaign worked to build support at the grassroots level and used what supporters saw as the candidate’s natural charisma, unusual life story and inspiring message of hope and change to draw impressive crowds to Obama’s public appearances, both in the U.S. and on a campaign trip abroad. They worked to bring new voters—many of them young or Black, both demographics they believed favored Obama—to become involved in the election.

A crushing financial crisis in the months leading up to the election shifted the nation’s focus to economic issues, and both Obama and McCain worked to show they had the best plan for economic improvement. With several weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Sadly, Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died after a battle with cancer on November 3, the day before voters went to the polls. She had been a tremendously influential force in her grandson’s life and had diligently followed his historic run for office from her home in Honolulu.

On November 4, lines at polling stations around the nation heralded a historic turnout and resulted in a Democratic victory, with Obama capturing some Republican strongholds ( Virginia , Indiana) and key battleground states ( Florida , Ohio ) that had been won by Republicans in recent elections. Taking the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters, Malia Obama and Sasha Obama, he acknowledged the historic nature of his win while reflecting on the serious challenges that lay ahead. “The road ahead will be long, our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

Barack Obama’s First Term as President

Barack Obama was sworn in as the first Black president of the United States on January 20, 2009. Obama’s inauguration set an attendance record, with 1.8 million people gathering in the cold to witness it. Obama was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. with the same Bible President Abraham Lincoln used at his first inaugural.

One of Obama’s first acts in office was the signing of The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which he signed just nine days into office, giving legal protection in the fight for equal pay for women. To address the financial crisis he inherited, he passed a stimulus bill, bailed out the struggling auto industry and Wall Street, and gave working families a tax cut.

In the foreign policy arena, Obama opened up talks with Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela and set a withdrawal date for American troops in Iraq. He was recognized with a 2009 Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” and for his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as universal healthcare or “ Obamacare .” Its goal was to give every American access to affordable healthcare by requiring everyone to have health insurance, but then providing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions (a group that was previously often denied coverage) and requiring health insurance companies to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on providing actual medical services. 

On May 2, 2011,  Osama bin Laden , the mastermind of the September 11 Attacks , was captured and killed by Seal Team Six. No Americans were lost in the operation, which gathered evidence about Al-Qaeda .

Barack Obama’s Second Term as President

Barack Obama was re-elected for a second term in 2012, beating out Republican Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan. The 2014 midterm elections proved challenging, as Republicans gained a majority in both houses of Congress.

His second term was marked by several international events. In 2013, Obama came out strongly against the use of chemical weapons on civilians by Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, avoiding a direct strike on Syria when al-Assad agreed to accept a Russian proposal that it relinquish its chemical weapons.

Perhaps the defining moment of his international diplomacy was his work on the Iran Nuclear Deal , which allowed inspectors into Iran to ensure it was under the pledged limit of enriched uranium in return for lifting economic sanctions. (Obama’s successor, Donald Trump , withdrew from the deal in 2018.)

Another defining moment of Obama’s presidency came when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage on June 26, 2015. Obama remarked on that day: “We are big and vast and diverse; a nation of people with different backgrounds and beliefs, different experiences and stories, but bound by our shared ideal that no matter who you are or what you look like, how you started off, or how and who you love, America is a place where you can write your own destiny .” 

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Presidential Leadership, Then and Now: Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama

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Pietro s. nivola pietro s. nivola former brookings expert.

January 5, 2012

Every presidency develops a leadership style, which has bearing on presidential accomplishments. Historical comparisons shed light on the matter. The following paper compares Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson in their respective early years.

The narratives of these two presidents share certain elements. Both men were progressive agents of change, who would try to adjust the balance of public and private power in society. Both men took office following back-to-back wave elections, resulting in clear Democratic congressional majorities. Both compiled impressive legislative scorecards. (In the rear-view mirror of history, Wilson’s legacy, which included achievements like establishing the Federal Reserve, would acquire indisputable legendary status.) Each president faced an economic crisis while pursuing his agenda.

For all the parallels, however, key contrasts stand out. President Wilson had more wind at his back since, albeit within important limits, the political climate was more receptive to reform during the Progressive era, and he confronted a less-solid opposition party in Congress. Also, parliamentary rules differed a century ago. Filibustering in the Senate was not the same as it is today. The electoral campaigns of the two presidents differed. And, Wilson was far more predisposed to govern through his party’s legislative majority, rather than bet on bipartisan agreements, and he managed relations with the legislature differently.

There may be lessons here. For instance, could it be that Wilsonian “party government”—however difficult in contemporary politics—still offers a serviceable model during periods of unified party control of the executive and legislative branches, one that at times befits the reality of today’s political polarization more than does a frustrating quest for post-partisanship?

A caveat: This essay does not purport to offer more than a partial, and tentative, comparative assessment. The bookends of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency have been in place for nearly a century, whereas Obama’s record remains very much a work in progress. Observations drawn at the mid-point of a president’s first term can be suggestive, but their limitations are evident. Much of what is observed now may well be overtaken by events. This paper only focuses on domestic issues, not the conduct of foreign policy. As we know, in Wilson’s case international setbacks were ultimately a principal source of his undoing. We have yet to see how world affairs will inform the rest of the Obama years.

Campaigns & Elections Presidency

Governance Studies

Richard Lempert

April 24, 2024

Elaine Kamarck, Jordan Muchnick

April 19, 2024

Elaine Kamarck

April 17, 2024

Looking Back on President Barack Obama’s Legacy pp 1–24 Cite as

Introduction: Barack Obama and the Transformational Impulse

• Wilbur C. Rich 2  
• First Online: 12 December 2018

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When President Barack Hussein Obama left office on January 20, 2017, he left a fascinating legacy. The Obama presidency will remain an intriguing part of our nation’s political history, and we can now say that there were unexpected achievements and failures. His tenure was both historical and complex, and will inevitably be compared with his predecessors and successors. The chapters in this volume are a serious assessment of President Obama’s tenure written by a diverse team that includes political scientists, sociologists, historians, and economists. They provide critical insights into the man and his policies and, more importantly, are written in a manner that makes them available to laypersons, journalists, students, and scholars.

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Thomas E. Cronin and Michael A. Genovese, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) p. 1.

“President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” January 21, 2009. www.Obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

See Barack Obama The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three River Press, 2006) Chapter 5.

For an interpretation of the election, see Michael Tesler and David O. Sears Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and Dreams of a Post Racial Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

See Robert Kuttner Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2008).

Stephen Skowronek The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993).

Wilbur C. Rich “The Lincoln and Obama Legacies: The perils of channeling” unpublished paper delivered at UI Springfield).

Ta-Nehisi Coates “My President Was Black” The Atlantic (January/February, 2017) p. 52.

Coates, op.cit p. 60.

Fred Greenstein, “The Qualities of Effective Presidents: An Overview from FDR to Bill Clinton,” Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 1 (March, 2000). pp. 178–185.

Ibid., 180.

Ibid., 181.

James P. Pfiffner “Decision Making in the Obama White House” Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 41, No. 2 (June, 2011), p. 260.

See Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

See Richard Neustadt Presidential Power (Free Press, New York, 1991).

Former Massachusetts Governor Romney had signed a similar health care reform bill in his state that made his criticisms of Obamacare hollow. During his time in Massachusetts Romney had a reputation of being a moderate and therefore he had to appeal to very conservative party base. He spent a lot of time and energy reassuring the base he was a serious conservative. He also made an insensitive remark about 47% of Americans. He claimed that they pay no income taxes and that he was not worrying about these people.

Neustadt, p. 183.

Ibid., p. 184.

“Inaugural Address by President Obama” January 21, 2013. www.Obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

See Wilbur C. Rich, “Presidential Leadership and the Politics of Race: Stereotypes, Symbols and Scholarship,” in Wilbur C. Rich ed. African American Perspective on Political Science , (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), pp. 232–250.

See Wilbur C. Rich, “Making Race Go Away: President Obama and the Promise of a Post-Racial Society,” in Andrew J. Dowdle, Dirk C. Van Raemdonck and Robert Maranto, ed. The Obama Presidency: Change and Continuity, (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 17–29.

James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), and Joseph Perschek “The Obama Presidency and the Recession: Political Economy, Ideology, and Policy” New Political Science , Vol. 33, No. 4 (December, 2011) pp. 429–444.

See Michael A. Genovese and Todd L. Belt The Post-Heroic Presidency: Leveraged Leadership in an Age of Limits (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016).

Ibid., p. 196.

Ibid., p. 197.

Quoted in “Explaining the Riddle” Economist (August 23, 2008) p. 20.

Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1976). p. 294.

See Benjamin Ginsberg Presidential Government (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2016).

Charles O. Jones The Presidency in a Separated System (Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005).

Carlos Lazada “The Self-Referential Presidency of Barack Obama” Washington Post (December 15, 2016) Lozada, Carlos. “Essay: The self-referential presidency of Barack Obama.” Washington Post , 15 Dec. 2016. Science In Context , http://link.galegroup.com.librarylink.uncc.edu/apps/doc/A473994620/SCIC?u=char69915&sid=SCIC&xid=3cdd9030 . Accessed 15 June 2018.

“Remarks by the President in Farewell Address.” January 10, 2017. http://Obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/

See Wilbur C. Rich, The Post-Racial Society is Here (New York: Routledge, 2013).

See Michael A. Genovese and Todd Belt, op cit, p. 219.

See Victor Thompson, Modern Organization, (New York: Knopf, 1961).

Ta-Nehisi Coates “My President Was Black” The Atlantic (January/February, 2017).

Ian Reifowitz. Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of National Identity, (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2012).

John Kenneth White Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family, and Religion ended the Reagan Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) p. 152.

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Rich, W.C. (2019). Introduction: Barack Obama and the Transformational Impulse. In: Rich, W. (eds) Looking Back on President Barack Obama’s Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01545-9_1

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The Leadership Style of Barack Obama: An Early Assessment

• Fred I. Greenstein

This article presents a highly distilled account of the formative experiences and political rise of Barack Obama. It draws on the sources that were available at the time of his inauguration. The article concludes by examining Obama's leadership qualities in the realms of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. The article went into production one month after Obama entered the White House.

©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

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• Published: 26 September 2012

US science: The Obama experiment

• Jeff Tollefson  

Nature volume  489 ,  pages 488–492 ( 2012 ) Cite this article

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Nearly four years after US President Barack Obama pledged to put science in its rightful place, Nature asks if he kept his word.

On 15 December 2008, president-elect Barack Obama made clear to the world that science would have a central seat in his administration. At a press conference in Chicago, Obama introduced Nobel laureate Steven Chu as the next secretary of the energy department and the person who would help to wean the country off its addiction to climate-warming fossil fuels. “His appointment should send a signal to all, that my administration will value science,” Obama said.

Within days, he announced other members of his future staff, who would make up a star-studded science team (see ‘The science dream team’): marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco would head the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington DC and physicist John Holdren would be Obama’s science adviser and head the Office of Science and Technology Policy, also in Washington DC. They joined Lisa Jackson, a respected chemical engineer with political experience, who had been named to run the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington DC. After taking office, the president completed the team by appointing geneticist Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and geophysicist Marcia McNutt at the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. Never before had a president assembled such a strong crop of researchers to lead his science agencies.

“The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s about protecting free and open inquiry,” Obama proclaimed as he made the initial appointments. “It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient.”

Scientists and environmentalists swooned; they had spent 8 years complaining that the administration of President George W. Bush had overly politicized science. Climate researchers in government had charged that they were being muzzled and that their data were being manipulated. Pollution regulations were blocked or watered down. With Obama’s election, scientists would finally have a president who not only said the right things but actually appointed the right people. Even journalists drooled. “Science Born Again in the White House, and Not a Moment Too Soon,” read a headline in Wired magazine, endorsing Obama’s appointments with a swipe at Bush’s reputation as a born-again Christian.

The love affair would soon cool, however, as the Obama administration started to hit a number of obstacles while trying to govern a politically fractured nation in the midst of the worst economic crisis in 70 years. The president has not fulfilled some of his top science-related promises, such as passing climate legislation to reduce the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases. He has paid relatively little attention to NASA and the NIH, and got into bruising budget wars with Congress that sapped support for some science agencies. And his vaunted team stumbled in its response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which damaged the administration’s credibility with some researchers.

But as Obama and his science team round out their first term in office and make a bid for a second, they can point to substantial achievements, some of them little noticed. Even in fiscally tight times, Obama has invested heavily in science education and research, particularly in energy. His administration has also made headway in tackling pollution, in part by introducing the country’s first greenhouse-gas regulations. And by driving the creation of integrity policies that seek to protect scientists from political interference (see ‘Integrity test’), his team has sent positive signals to agencies that had become demoralized during the Bush years.

“The president never let up in his consistent support for science, and actually he got a lot done in spite of the Republican resistance,” says Neal Lane, who was science adviser to former President Bill Clinton and is now a professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Stimulating science

Within a week of the election in November 2008, and with the economy in free fall, Obama’s advisers started working with the scientific community to survey ‘shovel-ready’ projects for potential inclusion in a stimulus package intended to boost construction and get people back to work. They initially aimed for US$5 billion in initiatives, but House Democrats doubled that in a draft of the stimulus bill released on 15 January 2009, five days before Obama’s inauguration. And the role of science and innovation continued to grow.

On 17 February, exactly 4 weeks into office, Obama signed a $787-billion stimulus bill that contained at least $53 billion for science. The bill made good on Obama’s promises to advance basic and applied research and development aimed at the major problems of the day, including clean energy and global warming. It boosted research funding by $2 billion at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, and by $8.2 billion at the NIH. As he signed the bill at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in Colorado, Obama called it the biggest increase in the history of basic-research funding.

“You would have to go back to the 1940s, when Harry Truman became president, to find an administration that was receptive to doing something really significant onscientific research straight out of the box,” says Michael Lubell, who handles government affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC and was one of a trio of scientists who helped to compile the initial suggestions for the science stimulus package. “And I think part of it has to do with Obama himself. This guy likes science.”

In those early months, the science agenda continued to ride high. In April, Obama visited the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC and proposed a long-term expansion of funding for basic and applied research and development. When he submitted his budget for 2010, Obama fulfilled that promise by including full funding for the America COMPETES Act, a stalled 2007 initiative that called for a doubling of the federal budget for physical sciences. He also increased funding for science and mathematics education.

Bigger budgets were not the only things that were fuelling optimism. In March, Obama overturned Bush’s restrictions on using federal funds to support research into human embryonic stem cells, and other early moves by the administration thrilled energy and climate researchers. On 19 May 2009, the president invited the chief executives of ten of the world’s largest car manufacturers to the White House Rose Garden to announce a historic agreement to establish the first greenhouse-gas standards for US vehicles. For two decades, the companies had been fighting against attempts to make cars more efficient, but the economic crisis and new regulatory authority had given Obama some leverage over the industry. Tough regulations in California had also helped to make car makers more receptive to higher standards. Obama’s team later brokered a pact with the automobile industry to nearly double the average fuel efficiency of cars by 2025, to around 23 kilometres per litre.

“A lot of the credit goes to the president, who really persevered and insisted that this was going to be part of the package,” says Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “He believed that technology was the key to saving the industry.”

The deal was part of a broader push by the White House to reduce emissions. In 2007, the Supreme Court had given the EPA the power to regulate greenhouse gases, but the Bush administration had declined to do so. When Jackson came in, she immediately went to work building up the regulatory system.

This new-found authority extended beyond vehicles; in theory, the EPA could regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from any source, but neither the president nor Congress preferred that route for cutting emissions. Instead, there were high hopes that Congress would act. In June, the House of Representatives took the first step and passed comprehensive climate legislation seeking to reduce US greenhouse-gas emissions by roughly 80% below 2005 levels by 2050, leaving the Senate as the next big hurdle.

The president never let up in his consistent support for science, and actually he got a lot done.

But then the climate bill had to wait. Obama and his team wanted first to push a health-care overhaul through Congress that would tame rising costs and expand insurance to millions of Americans. The plan was to deal with health care before Congress took its August break and then shepherd climate legislation through the Senate in time for Obama to take something concrete to the United Nations’ global-warming summit in Copenhagen in December. But the health-care initiative proved divisive and time-consuming.

Obama ended up flying into Copenhagen empty-handed. He pledged that the United States would reduce its emissions; but without the backing of law-makers at home, he could make no binding commitments.

On Christmas Eve of 2009, the Senate finally passed the health-care legislation. It was a historic achievement, decades in the making, but it would come at a heavy political price.

An oily mess

If the health-care bill demonstrated the administration’s skills with Congress, then the way it handled NASA in early 2010 revealed how easily relations could sour. When the president rolled out his budget request in February, it held a bitter surprise for congressional supporters of the space agency. On the list of projects to be eliminated was Constellation, a programme to develop massive rockets to return humans to the Moon.

“ This was a major policy pronouncement but it was revealed in a budget release,” says Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC.Normally, an administration prepares Congress for such a change — but Obama’s sudden move led to what Pace calls a “bruising, year-long fight” with lawmakers in both parties. Eventually, several parts of the Constellation programme were reinstated. But by then, NASA had become an agency adrift, left to the mercy of parochial interests in Congress.

Human space flight and many other elements of NASA’s mission were never priorities of the Obama administration. In the 2013 budget request, the agency’s astrophysics and planetary-science programmes lost 8% of their funding compared with 2008. Obama was more interested in fixing problems with his home planet, and boosted funding for NASA’s Earth-sciences programmes by 44% over the same period.

With health care finally out of the way, in early 2010, Obama’s team set out to build a coalition for the president’s climate and energy policies. Obama started on 31 March by announcing a plan to open up large swathes of the US coast, including the eastern Gulf of Mexico and parts of the east coast, to offshore drilling. The decision was enormously controversial, with environmentalists and many lawmakers in his own party, who had opposed such plans for years, arguing that accidents were inevitable. But Obama saw the offshore-drilling expansion as part of a broader strategy to move the US economy from foreign to domestic sources. By increasing oil production, the president also aimed to soften opposition to a comprehensive climate policy that would require cuts in carbon emissions.

But any lingering hopes for a climate agreement disappeared in a plume of smoke above the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April.

The crisis began with an explosion that killed 11 crewmen on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Two days later, the rig sank, leaving untold quantities of oil and gas spewing into the gulf at a daunting depth of some 1,500 metres. British energy giant BP would not succeed in capping the well until 15 July, and the clean-up efforts continued for months. This was Obama’s Hurricane Katrina, and the incident raised questions about the president’s commitment to scientific integrity. Critics charged that administration officials were downplaying the risks by publicizing extremely low estimates of the amount of oil spilling into the gulf and by misstating what was known about the fate of the oil. The administration was also accused of misrepresenting scientists when it said — incorrectly — that they had recommended a temporary drilling moratorium, imposed in late May.

But the political ramifications went well beyond the crisis in the gulf. The administration’s response kept top officials from several agencies working around the clock for weeks on end, leaving little time or energy for a simultaneous effort to push the climate bill. Worse, the disaster ruptured the shaky coalition that Obama had been trying to build over climate and energy. Most visibly, when his administration responded by placing a moratorium on drilling in the gulf, Republicans argued that the Obama administration was harming US industry through excessive regulations at a time when the economy was still deep in recession.

In the run-up to congressional elections in November 2010, Tea Party candidates pushed the idea that the administration was overspending, overregulating and overreaching by exerting government control over issues such as health care. The Republican party swept the Congressional elections, and many ultra-conservative politicians went to Washington DC promising that they would block Obama’s initiatives.

Within weeks of arriving, the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a spending bill for 2011 that took aim at Obama’s energy and environment agendas. The measure slashed the budgets of key science agencies by nearly $6.7 billion as part of a broad reduction in federal spending. But Obama and the Democrats in the Senate fought back, and the final budget trimmed core science activities by just $1.2 billion. A similar story would play out during negotiations over the fiscal 2012 budget, and few doubt that Obama will try to protect science this year, which is shaping up to be his biggest budgetary showdown with conservatives yet.

The administration deserves credit for recognizing that science is a priority even when times are tough, says Norman Augustine, former chief executive of aerospace and defence firm Lockheed Martin in Bethesda, and the Republican who chaired the 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm , which made the case for greater federal investment in science. Augustine says that in terms of the science budget over the past few years, “things are not as bad as they might have been”.

Modest goals

In late February 2011, just as the new Republican majority was flexing its muscles in the budget battle, energy secretary Chu threw a party to celebrate one of his newest projects: the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stole the show with a rousing speech calling on Democrats and Republicans to advance the clean-energy research agenda in the name of public health, national security and economic competitiveness, if not global warming. He ended his pep talk quoting one of the film characters he had played, Conan the Barbarian. “Conan was not big on philosophical arguments, or navel gazing or complaining,” said Schwarzenegger. “He believed in action.”

Obama would not have chosen the same source of inspiration, but his team shared the sentiment. During the second half of Obama’s term, the administration scaled back some of its grand goals and instead advanced the science agenda through smaller actions.

For Chu, ARPA-E was one of the success stories, part of his effort to shake up the Department of Energy and create a more nimble agency that could tackle complex research challenges. Initiated with $400 million in stimulus money, ARPA-E provides grants for the type of high-risk energy research that industry tends to avoid. Obama and Chu managed to build lasting bipartisan support by convincing Congress that such blue-sky research was key to establishing US leadership in new energy technologies. Even in this year’s tight budget, ARPA-E received $275 million. Chu also battled to create a series of ‘energy innovation hubs’ to bring together scientists from different disciplines in institutes reminiscent of the defunct Bell Labs, where Chu had done some of his seminal work. The five hubs focus on simulations for nuclear reactors; fuels from sunlight; energy-efficient buildings; energy storage; and critical materials. “Have the energy hubs worked?” asks the American Physical Society’s Lubell. “It’s too soon to tell, but I give him credit for trying.”

There’s the disappointment of not getting legislation. But we didn’t just sit on our hands.

Chu paid a political price for his energy agenda when a US solar manufacturer that had received $535 million in federal loan guarantees as part of the stimulus went belly-up in September 2011, in part because competition with Chinese manufacturers had driven down prices for solar cells. Applied research and development has always been a harder sell among conservatives, who fear that the government will ‘pick winners and losers’, and in this case, Republicans were all too happy to run advertisements pointing out that the government had chosen a loser. Chu was sanguine during congressional testimony in November 2011. “When it comes to the clean energy race, America faces a simple choice: compete or accept defeat,” Chu told lawmakers. “I believe we can and must compete.”

And even though the climate legislation has stalled, the president’s policies have helped to change the landscape. According to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the capacity for generating electricity from renewable sources has nearly doubled since Obama took office. A boom in natural-gas production and tightened air-quality regulations have led many utilities to switch from coal to gas, helping to reduce US carbon emissions in the electricity sector. And rising oil production in the United States has cut imports substantially. Obama cannot take credit for all this, but his broad energy policies supported those trends.

Roger Pielke Jr, a science-policy expert at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that the administration swerved politically toward the centre on energy and environmental issues after realizing that its climate objectives were unachievable on Capitol Hill. In the end, Pielke says, Obama proved himself to be a policy pragmatist who is more interested in achieving modest goals than in shooting for the Moon.

At the NIH, however, Collins did not rein in his big ambitions. In December 2011, he and a few dozen colleagues gathered for beers at the Rock Bottom brewery in Bethesda to cele­brate one of the biggest changes at the agency in a generation. Collins and his team had succeeded in creating the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), providing the administration with another victory in applied research.

Collins had proposed NCATS a year earlier, to catalyse the ailing process of drug development by attacking bottlenecks in clinical trials, toxicology research and other areas. Although his plan hit some resistance in the NIH, in industry and on Capitol Hill, Collins managed to convince key members of Congress to support the shifting of funds within the NIH to create the $575-million centre, and it opened in the final days of 2011.

Some critics question the centre’s mission. At a congressional hearing in March, Roy Vagelos, former chief executive of drug-maker Merck, asked whether anyone believed that NCATS would be able to solve problems that are stumping the pharmaceutical industry. “If you believe that, you believe in fairies,” he said.

In May, Collins announced the first fruits of the centre. Standing with the research chiefs of three top pharmaceutical companies, he unveiled a $20-million effort to resurrect drugs that had passed safety trials but had been shelved by industry for business reasons or because they did not work for specific conditions. Under the agreement, the companies gave NIH-funded scientists a stab at repurposing those compounds. “The Obama administration is all about innovation,” says Collins. “And that’s very much what NCATS means to do.”

As the election nears, Obama’s science team is racing to finish up its work. On 28 August, the EPA and the transportation department finalized the changes in vehicle standards that Obama initiated in the rose garden with car makers more than three years ago. In the intervening years, the EPA has moved forward with its Supreme Court authority and begun to lay the groundwork for a broad array of climate regulations. In March, it proposed a rule that would set emissions standards for new power plants and effectively ban coal plants unless they capture and bury carbon dioxide.

Looking back over the past four years, Holdren says that “President Obama has made an unprecedented commitment to science, technology and innovation. … He promised on inauguration day to ‘restore science to its rightful place’ — a promise he has kept in spades.”

But even his supporters acknowledge that the president did not achieve some of his biggest science-related goals. Carol Browner served as Obama’s climate and energy adviser during the first two years and led the administration’s push to pass climate legislation. “There’s the disappointment of not getting legislation,” she says. “But we didn’t just sit on our hands.”

In his speech to the Democratic Convention on 6 September, Obama laid out some of his energy goals, should the country extend his stay in the White House. He talked about further reducing oil imports and advancing natural-gas production. He discussed improving energy efficiency and advancing clean, renewable energies. “And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet because climate change is not a hoax,” he said. But in sharp contrast to the soaring rhetoric and bold plans of 2008, he didn’t make any big promises.

Graphic: the highs and lows for Obama’s scientists.

Click here to download a PDF of the dream team, or click the image to expand

Integrity test

Two months into his new job, President Barack Obama gathered a group of scientists at the White House to sign a memorandum on scientific integrity that declared “Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration”. The 2009 statement promised that “political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions”. For US researchers, the agreement came as a welcome change from the administration of George W. Bush, which had frequently been accused of infringing on science.

Watchdog groups that track scientific integrity say that Obama’s administration has generally kept those promises — with some notable exceptions. Government scientists are reporting less political interference and more freedom to speak publicly than they experienced under the previous administration. “Agencies change slowly, but if they can change slowly into this culture of transparency, then we can win,” says Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has spent time working with staff at federal agencies to develop integrity policies.

Even so, the transition has taken much longer than anticipated. Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, was supposed to issue guidelines for agencies within 120 days of Obama signing the memo, but it took nearly two years. Now, however, all US government agencies have either final or draft policies on scientific integrity, says Rick Weiss, chief of communications for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which Holdren heads. Many of the policies that have been released explicitly forbid agency leadership from tampering with scientific results.

Still, there have been lapses, charge critics. In December 2011, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded that the morning-after contraceptive pill, Plan B One Step (levonorgestrel), should be made available to girls under the age of 17 without a prescription. But that decision was overruled by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Obama said that he supported Sebelius’ decision and that “her judgement was that there was not enough evidence” that the youngest adolescents would be able to use the pill properly. Margaret Hamburg, the FDA commissioner, disputed that decision and stood up for agency scientists, who had determined there was sufficient evidence that younger teens were able to use the medication correctly and safely.

Sebelius’s intervention was “deeply disturbing”, said Susan Wood, a health-policy expert at George Washington University in Washington DC and a former assistant commissioner for women's health at the FDA. “Once again the scientific and medical expertise has been overruled.” The FDA faced controversy again two months ago when agency managers were found to have spied on the e-mails of five staff scientists.

The April 2010 oil spill from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico also raised concerns about integrity. In May 2010, Marcia McNutt, director of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, wrote in an e-mail to scientists working to estimate the size of the spill that the White House was trying to understate the numbers. That e-mail was obtained and released by the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, based in Washington DC. McNutt’s comments echoed the concerns of many scientists, who had argued that government estimates of the oil spill were much too low.

Grifo says that a major problem with translating policies on scientific integrity into action has been a lack of commitment by agency leadership. But that is not the case across the board. Wood says, for instance, that Hamburg took a remarkable public stance by backing her agency’s scientists, even though she was overruled. “Her Plan B decision was a clear stand-up for both science and public health in the face of controversy. Good for her. You don’t often see that in senior political appointees,” she says. E.S.R., J.T., M.W.

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A second wind for the president 2012-Sep-26

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The NIH faces up to hard times 2012-Sep-26

Cuts loom for US science 2012-Jul-24

Obama shoots for science increase 2012-Feb-14

US translational-science centre gets under way 2012-Jan-10

Last-minute wins for US science 2011-Dec-21

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Tollefson, J. US science: The Obama experiment. Nature 489 , 488–492 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/489488a

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The Obama Presidential Library That Isn’t

By Jennifer Schuessler

• Feb. 20, 2019

The Obama Presidential Center promises to be a presidential library like no other.

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.

But the center, which will cost an estimated $500 million, will also differ from the complexes built by Barack Obama’s predecessors in another way: It won’t actually be a presidential library.

In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.

And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

The plan was revealed, with little fanfare, in May 2017. Few details of the digitization were made public until Tuesday, when the foundation and the archives unexpectedly released a legal agreement outlining procedures for creating what is being billed as “first digital archives for the first digital president,” which they say will democratize access.

But as awareness of the plan has spread, some historians see a threat to future scholarship on the Obama administration — and to the presidential library system itself.

Without a dedicated repository, they argue, the rich constellations of related material found at the other libraries — papers donated by family members, cabinet members and aides, as well as pre-presidential and personal papers — could end up scattered, or even uncollected. And without help from specialized archivists, the promised digital democratization could just as easily turn into a hard-to-navigate data dump.

More broadly, there’s concern that the creation of a privately run presidential museum undermines the ideal of nonpartisan public history.

Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon library, where he is credited with overhauling museum exhibits to give a more honest accounting of Watergate, called the decision “a huge mistake.”

“It was astounding to me that a good presidency would do this,” Mr. Naftali said.

“It opens the door,” he added, “to a truly terrible Trump library.”

‘An Act of Faith’

The current system had its origins in 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt donated his papers to the federal government and began building a library to hold them near his home in Hyde Park, N.Y. (Before the Presidential Records Act of 1978, a president’s papers were considered his private property.)

“It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith,” Roosevelt said at the opening in 1941 , standing on the porch of the modest Dutch colonial-style structure, which also housed a small display of artifacts.

The library, paid for with private funds, was donated to the National Archives. Since then, the federal system has grown to include all 13 presidents going back to Hoover, whose library was created retroactively.

Today, the museums may draw the crowds, but it’s in the research libraries where historians piece together a more accurate view of a presidency. White House records and other collections at the libraries have, for example, overturned the idea of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a genial, golf-playing figurehead, and revealed the depth of internal debate in Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House over the escalation of the Vietnam War.

“Presidential libraries have opened windows onto how our democracy worked — or failed — at the highest levels,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a historian at Princeton who has done research in eight libraries.

But “America’s pyramids,” as the historian Robert Caro has called them, have also been subject to withering criticism. Over time what were intended as impartial repositories have ballooned into grandiose shrines where former presidents and their foundations wield influence not only at the museums (whose exhibits they pay for) but even, some have charged, in the research reading rooms themselves.

Anthony Clark, the author of “The Last Campaign,” a recent book about presidential libraries, called the Obama Foundation’s break with the existing model “an unambiguous good for the American taxpayer.”

The National Archives “will not be saddled, as it is at the federal presidential libraries of Mr. Obama’s 13 immediate predecessors, with the expense and embarrassment of hosting troublingly politicized exhibits, speakers, events and educational programs,” he said.

Just how the Obama Foundation’s decision to opt out of the current system took shape remains unclear. In Jonathan Alter’s 2010 book “The Promise, ” the newly elected President Obama was quoted musing that maybe his future presidential library should be “an online library.”

The idea was certainly in tune with the increasingly digital nature of the presidential paper trail. In addition to millions of pages of paper, the Obama presidential records include some 300 million emails, as well as Snapchat posts, tweets and other born-digital records.

It is also in line with trends at the National Archives, which faces stagnant budgets and an exploding number of records to care for. The agency’s current strategic plan calls for digitizing all its holdings, which it estimates at amounting to some 12.5 billion pages.

Still, all indications initially pointed to a traditional Obama presidential library in Chicago. In late 2016, military convoys began shipping some 30 million pages of paper documents and 30,000 artifacts to a former furniture store in suburban Hoffman Estates, Ill.

In May 2017, when President Obama appeared in Chicago to unveil the design for the center, renderings included a 50,000-square-foot “Library Building.” But the research facility and archives most people had assumed would be inside it had disappeared.

The decision to break with the National Archives model “was not disclosed” at the unveiling, according to The Chicago Tribune . It was not noted in the foundation’s main news release describing the center, but was instead outlined in a separate, terse release .

Some observers are dismayed at what they see as the lack of transparency, and the slow trickle of information from both the foundation and the National Archives.

“They are creating a fog and confusing the public and the broader historical community about what this thing actually is,” Bob Clark, a former director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, said in an interview.

“Everybody is still calling it a presidential library, but it’s not,” said Mr. Clark, who published a highly critical article about the Obama decision in the journal The Public Historian. “It’s a museum and a headquarters for a foundation that is funding the National Archives’ goal of digitizing all its documents.”

The Digital Future, or ‘Bait and Switch’?

The decision to forgo an on-site partnership with the National Archives could be a problem for the center, which has yet to break ground. A lawsuit currently in federal court is challenging the legality of building it in a public park, calling the abrupt transformation of what had been pitched as a federal “presidential library” into a privately run center an “institutional bait and switch.” (On Tuesday, the judge denied the city’s motion to dismiss the suit and allowed it to proceed.)

Robbin Cohen, the executive director of the Obama Foundation, said in an interview that digitization had been part of the vision from the beginning. “The main goal,” she said, is making the Obama White House records “as accessible and available to the public as possible.”

She declined to be specific about when the decision to forgo a physical library altogether, and to opt out of any National Archives presence in Chicago at all, was made, saying it resulted from an “evolving discussion.”

Ms. Cohen emphasized that the center, while privately run, would have public partnerships. Under an agreement reached last May, it will include a 5,000-square-foot branch of the Chicago Public Library. (The center’s buildings will have an estimated 325,000 gross square feet.)

And it will work with the National Archives to borrow documents and artifacts for display in the museum, which is headed by Louise Bernard, a former director of exhibitions at the New York Public Library.

Ms. Cohen said that “financial requirements” — including a new law requiring that the foundation pay the National Archives 60 percent of the construction costs of federally run portions, as an endowment to cover future maintenance — were a factor. For previous libraries, the figure was only 20 percent.

But the decision, she said, was driven just as much by the logic of digitization. Under National Archives policy researchers are not given access to paper originals when electronic versions are available.

“Even if we were to build a physical library at the center, the records would still be largely accessed digitally,” she said.

As they are released, the documents will be available through both the National Archives Catalog and a dedicated Barack Obama Presidential Library website . As for research support, a spokeswoman for the National Archives said it would have “the same dedicated kinds of staff” for the Obama materials as it has at existing presidential libraries, but would not say where they would be located or provide further details.

Some scholars are alarmed by the decision. “The absence of a true Obama presidential library will have the effect of discouraging serious and potentially critical research into the Obama presidency,” said David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the author of “Rising Star,” a nearly 1,500-page biography of Mr. Obama.

Others take a cautiously sanguine view. Mr. Zelizer, the Princeton historian, said there was “enthusiasm for sure” about digital access, but uncertainty over whether the new model would improve or worsen the known frustrations of the current libraries, like huge backlogs in processing and protectiveness around politically sensitive documents .

Ultimately, some in the presidential library system say, the move to a digital model is the future, like it or not.

Meredith R. Evans, the director of the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, wrote in a response to Mr. Clark’s article in The Public Historian that she, too, would have liked a physical federal presence at the Obama center, “for the purposes of objectivity” and “stewardship.”

But the realities of money and technology “cannot be denied.”

“Let’s give the digital a try,” she wrote, “before giving in to dismay.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of buildings planned for the Obama Presidential Center. It is four, not three.

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The Relationship between Racial Identity and Perceived Significance of the Election of President Barack Obama among African American Mothers

Marisa franco.

Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Maryland, USA

Mia Smith-Bynum

Department of Family Science, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Maryland, USA

African American women’s racial identity is a major determinant for how they interpret the world around them, yet there is little research examining how specific aspects of racial identity are linked with attitudes about an event that has been highly significant for African-Americans: the election of President Barack Obama. The current study examined the relationship between African American mothers’ racial identity and their perceived significance of the election of President Barack Obama as an indicator of reduced systemic and actual racism for African Americans, using a sample of 110 African American mothers residing in a Northeastern metropolitan area. Results revealed that racial centrality and assimilation positively predicted perceived significance of President Obama’s election for diminishing racism. Implications and future directions are discussed.

The election of President Barack Obama is thought to have major implications for African Americans. At the time it occurred, some Americans viewed the election of the first African American president as signifying the end of racial inequality that has persisted for hundreds of years, allowing America to achieve a society that is “post-racial” ( Hero, Levy, & Radcliff, 2013 ). However, others argued that Obama’s election has little to no impact on realities of racism and discrimination aimed toward African Americans ( Doherty, 2013 ). With discourse surrounding Obama centering on the potential for his election to improve outcomes for African Americans, it seems particularly important to investigate whether African Americans, indeed, feel that his election signifies diminishing racial discrimination for their community and factors that might predict whether they may think so. One factor that may shed light on how African Americans interpreted the significance of this election is racial identity. Thus, the present study investigates the link between racial identity and perceived significance of the election of President Barack Obama as a signal of a reduction in racism towards the Black community.

We propose that racial identity might play a role in predicting whether African Americans perceived Obama’s election as racially significant. It may be particularly important to consider whether Obama’s election signified attenuated racism among African American mothers since the perceptions of the prevalence of prejudice among members of this demographic may carry a heavy psychological toll. African American mothers face the double jeopardy of being subject to racism, sexism, and also sexist racism in which the racism they experience is decidedly gendered, such as when Black women are assumed to take on the roll of the strong Black women, or the Black mammy ( Cole, 2009 ; Sesko & Biernat, 2009). Yet, also, they face the emotional burden of worrying about discrimination towards their children ( Brown-Manning, 2013 ; Bush, 2000 ). Black mothers report being in a constant state of fear regarding their sons’ safety due to racist social forces ( Brown-Manning, 2013 ). Indeed, addressing racism is so central to African American mothers’ parenting experiences that a large body of research exists on how they talk to their children about race and prepare them to deal with the discrimination they may face (see Hughes et al., 2006 for review). Thus, pervasive racism towards the Black community affects African American women directly, and also indirectly by affecting their kin, leaving layers of psychological vulnerability to the effects of systemic racism ( Peters & Massey, 1983 ). Because of the salience of racism for African American mothers, and the potential for the election of Obama to signify a reduction in racism, the current study focuses on whether African American mothers’ racial identity predicts their perception of the election of Obama as a significant indicator of a reduction in racism towards African Americans.

We adopt Harrell’s (2000) broad, multilevel theoretical definition of racism as the backdrop for framing perceptions of racism following Obama’s election because it encompasses systemic, structural, and symbolic forms of racism as well as actual race-based discriminatory acts aimed at African Americans and other people of color. Harrell defined racism as “[a] system of dominance, power, and privilege based on racial group designation; rooted in historical oppression of a group defined or perceived by dominant-group members as inferior, deviant, or undesirable” (p. 43), and is expressed through cultural and symbolic images of African Americans in the news media, entertainment, and literature and also, in American political discourse, policy, and practice. Harrell’s (2000) definition allows for an investigation of whether Obama’s election might signify decreased racism at a structural and symbolic level.

Because of the history of racism within America, many would argue that Obama’s position as leader of the world’s most powerful democracy has significant meaning for African Americans ( Marable, 2009 ). Moreover, African American mothers with specific racial identity attitudes may construe the influence of Obama’s election on racism in specific ways. To examine this, we focus on mothers’ racial centrality and ideology, two dimensions of the Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI; 1998). We posit that these dimensions are relevant for assessing African American mothers’ perceptions of Obama’s election as a signal of a reduction in systemic and actual racism.

One dimension of racial identity, centrality, represents the degree to which individuals see the world through the lens of being African American and predicts many aspects of psychological functioning among African Americans (e.g., Burrow & Ong, 2010 ; Sellers & Shelton, 2003 ). Little research exists that directly addresses the relationship between racial centrality and perceived significance of Obama for mitigating racism, yet some preliminary suppositions are forwarded based on racial centrality literature. Identity theory posits that individuals make choices, in part, based on how these choices relate to social identities ( Bobo, 1983 ; Bobo & Charles, 2009 ). Accordingly, individuals whose race is central to their self-concept are more attuned to race in the processing of events, and would subsequently place more significance on race-related issues (Burrow, & Ong, 2011). Generally, because of the importance of race to their self-concept, individuals with high centrality perceive discriminatory events more frequently and find them more distressing ( Burrow & Ong, 2010 ; Sellers & Shelton, 2003 ). Thus, it follows that they may be more attuned to uplifting racial events and perceive them as having a significant positive impact as well. Thus, individuals with higher racial centrality may be more likely to interpret Obama’s election as significant for reducing racism.

Racial ideology can also offer insight into how African American mothers viewed Obama’s election. Ideology is defined as perspectives on how African Americans should act in order to advance their social position ( Sellers, Smith, Shelton, Rowley, & Chavous, 1998 ). African Americans’ ideologies develop within the context of their experiences of oppression throughout American history ( Sellers et al., 1998 ). Ideologies influence the development of social relationships within and outside the race, as well as political and economic decisions ( Sellers et al., 1998 ). Because ideologies have relevance for perceptions of how African Americans may elevate their social position, it is thought to have relevance for whether Obama’s election signifies increased social capital amongst this group by way of diminished racism.

There are four dimensions of racial ideologies according to the MMRI: nationalist, assimilationist, oppressed minority, and humanist ideologies. Higher nationalism scores indicate an emphasis on the uniqueness of being African American and support for separatist Black institutions. Previous evidence indicated that individuals high in nationalism are less likely to support a leader of Biracial heritage ( Sullivan & Arbuthnot, 2009 ); specifically, they may view his heritage as making him an out-group member with no relevance for Black people. Contrastingly, high assimilation scores indicate an appreciation for the commonalities between African Americans and other groups, and as such, assimilation perspectives may be associated with likelihood of identifying with Obama’s racially inclusive political narrative and agenda, as he is representative of a mainstream institution, and is in a position to advance the African American community from within. High oppressed minority scores indicate an emphasis on the common plight between African Americans, other racial minorities, and other oppressed groups. Oppressed minority ideology may be related to viewing Obama’s election as significant because he is viewed as an ally of oppressed groups due to his political agenda and his status as a racial minority ( Augoustinos & De Garis, 2012 ). A humanist perspective emphasizes a common humanity that transcends racial difference in decisions about social relationships and politics. Research has indicated that individuals high in humanism tend to discount the importance of race, and racism, and, thus, they may be less attuned to structural or symbolic racism and the pervasiveness of racial discrimination, similar to colorblind perspectives ( Outten et al., 2010 ; Sellers & Shelton, 2003 ). As such, humanism may be related to views that Obama’s election indicates that American is moving towards a “post-racial society,” and that his election is a symbol that the U.S. has embraced humanism at a national scale.

In sum, the existing research points to several hypotheses regarding the relationship between Black mother’s racial identity and their perceived significance of President Obama’s 2008 election. First, we predicted that racial centrality would be positively associated with the perceived significance of Obama. With respect to the racial ideologies, it was predicted that assimilation, oppressed minority, and humanism perspectives would relate positively to the perceived significance of Obama’s election though the underlying rationale for each relationship differs for each ideology. It was predicted that nationalism would have the opposite relationship to the perceived significance of Obama’s election for diminishing symbolic and actual racism.

Participants

Participants were recruited through newspaper and magazine advertisements, and through the study’s Facebook page. Materials indicated selection criteria, how to enroll, and contact information. Participants contacted researchers via telephone or email. This study uses a subset of data collected as part of a larger study on parenting. A total of 110 African American mothers, residing in a Mid-Atlantic metropolitan area, participated in the study in 2010 and 2011. The average age was 44.2 ( SD = 6.55). There was a range of education levels: 6.4% completed some high school, 6.4% completed high school, 24.5% completed some college, 13.6% had an associate’s degree, 15.5% had a bachelors degree, 6.4% completed some graduate school, 15.5% had a master’s degree, 1.8% had a professional degree, and .9% had a doctoral degree. The median household income was $60,000 to $69,000. However, annual household income ranged from less than $5,000 to $100,000 or greater per year. Approximately one-third (31%) of the sample reported incomes of $100,000 or greater. Approximately 94% of the sample identified as African American, followed by 4% as Afro-Caribbean, and 2% as Biracial/Multiracial. Approximately 81% of the sample was employed. The sample was made up of women who were married (39%), never married (32%), divorced (21%), separated (3.6%), and widowed (3.6%).

A pair of trained research assistants completed two-hour home videos with African American mother-adolescent dyads, in which they were videotaped discussing a hypothetical instance of discrimination aimed at the adolescent. Each pair had at least one African American member and 86% of the team was African American. Following the video, participants completed paper-pencil copies of study measures. The study addressed several aspects of general parenting, racial socialization, racial identity, parent-child relationship quality as well as adolescent mental health. Additional details about the study method are reported elsewhere ( Smith-Bynum, Davis, Anderson, Franco, & English, in press ). These data draw on responses from the mothers in our sample. Families were compensated $50 for their participation.

Racial Identity

Racial identity was measured using selected subscales of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity-Revised (MIBI; for a full description, see Sellers et al., 1997 ): centrality (8 items), and nationalist (9), assimilationist (9), oppressed minority (9), and humanist (9) ideologies. Regarding ideologies, nationalism measures the degree to which an individual perceives being Black as unique and important. Assimilationist ideology measures the degree to which an individual perceives commonalities between African Americans and members of other racial groups. Oppressed minority refers to the degree to which individuals perceive commonalities between African Americans and other racial minority groups. Humanist refers to the degree to which an individual perceives commonalities between all humans and sees race as generally unimportant. Racial centrality measures the degree to which being Black is important to one’s self-concept. To score each of these subscales, values across subscale items were averaged, with scores ranging from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 7 ( strongly agree ). Reliability estimates for each subscale presented by Sellers et al. (1997) and in the current sample were: centrality (.77 in original publication; .76 in current study), assimilation (.73; .71), nationalism (.79; .66), oppressed minority (.76; .69) and humanism (.70; .65). The validity of the measure is supported by expected relationships between levels of centrality, nationalism, and likelihood of taking a Black studies class. Also, assimilationist, humanist, and oppressed minority ideology scores were higher for Black students at predominately White institutions than for those at historically Black universities, whereas nationalism scores were lower ( Sellers et al., 1997 ).

Significance of President Obama as a symbol for reduced racism

Five items, created for the present study, were used to measure the degree to which participants perceived the election of President Barack Obama as a symbol of reduced structural and symbolic racism towards African Americans (α = .83). Example items are “The election of President Barack Obama will break down new racial barriers for African Americans in my lifetime,” “American society has a more positive view of Black Americans because of Barack Obama,” and “The election of President Obama will not change my life in a meaningful way (reverse scored)”. Responses were measured on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 7 ( strongly agree ). An average score was used in analyses. Factor loadings ranged from .67–.83.

Demographic Questionnaire

The demographic questionnaire assessed mother’s age, educational background, employment, income, marital history, and race/ethnicity.

Descriptive statistics and bivariate relationships among the variables are presented in Table 1 . On average, the sample reported high levels of centrality, assimilationist, and humanist beliefs, whereas oppressed minority and nationalist beliefs were centered around the midpoint of the scale. Participants perceived Obama’s presidency as highly significant for diminishing racism towards African-Americans. At the correlational level, higher rates of centrality and assimilationist ideology were related to increased likelihood of perceiving Obama’s election as significant for diminishing structural and actual racism.

Means, standard deviations, and correlations among key variables (N =110)

To examine relationships between racial identity and significance of Obama, a hierarchical regression was run (see Table 2 ). Control variables, mother’s age, income, and education, were entered as the first step to partial out the influence of these variables. The racial identity predictor variables, including racial centrality, assimilation, nationalism, oppressed minority, and humanist ideologies were entered together in the second step. With all variables entered, racial centrality and racial assimilationist ideology scores uniquely and positively predicted perceived significance of Obama’s election, whereas the other ideologies had no effect. Thus, there was partial support for our hypotheses regarding the predicted role of mothers’ racial identity variables for the perceived significance of President Obama’s election.

Summary of hierarchical regression analysis of racial identity as a predictor of significance of President Barack Obama (N = 110)

Findings indicated that, as identity theory predicts, centrality is associated with African American mothers perceiving President Obama’s election as significant for diminishing structural and symbolic racism aimed at the Black community ( Bobo, 1983 ). High centrality scores might have predicted perceptions of Obama’s election as significant because individuals high in centrality may generally perceive race related events as significant and impactful ( Burrow & Ong, 2010 ; Sellers & Shelton, 2003 ), as race is an important aspect of their identity. Additionally, higher assimilationist scores related to increased likelihood of perceiving Obama’s election as a signal of reduced racism towards African Americans. High assimilationist scores indicate a desire to integrate into mainstream society, and Obama’s presidency may signify the ultimate integration of African Americans into the mainstream, and subsequently, a symbol of diminished barriers of discrimination that obstruct integration.

Non-significant relationships with ideologies and significance of Obama might underlie complex reactions to Obama as a racial in-group or out-group member within the African American community. If Obama were perceived as an in-group member, one would expect that African Americans would evaluate his election as significant for signaling reduced racial prejudice for the Black community, as they may perceive his election as a way to ameliorate negative stereotypes of being African American; if Obama was perceived as an out-group member then African Americans might feel that his election has no relevance for racial discrimination within the Black community. There seems to be a lack of consensus over whether Obama is perceived as an in-group or out-group member, and research has not yet clearly determined how racial identity may influence his categorization as either ( Sinyangwe, 2012 ). Obama’s clear roots in the African American community, his mobilization of African American voters, and his casting as the “Black” candidate might credit his Black identity, of which his mixed race heritage and inclusive political agenda might serve to discredit ( Bobo & Charles, 2009 ). Thus, initial exploratory hypotheses that nationalism might contribute to perspectives of Obama as an out-group member, and oppressed minority ideologies might work in the opposite way, might warrant further investigation to better explain non-significant relationships. As for humanism, this ideology may contribute to beliefs that Obama’s race is not important in the first place, or that Black people no longer have any significant racial barriers to overcome, and thus, Obama’s election has a neutral impact.

The perceived significance of the election as a symbol for reduced symbolic and actual racism aimed at African Americans may have a number of implications on African American mothers’ lives. The psychological toll of weariness and vigilance for racial discrimination for themselves and their children may be somewhat allayed (Clark, Anderson, Clark & Williams, 1997; Outten et al., 2010 ). African American mothers high in centrality or assimilation who were foregoing opportunities and environments because they expected prejudice may be more open to pursuing these opportunities. However, perceiving Obama’s election as a significant indicator of reduced symbolic racism may also have negative implications. Perceiving Obama’s election as forecasting changes in the American racial system may make African American mothers lower their guard in environments that continue to be racially unsafe for them and their children ( Brown & Tracy, 2012 ; Neblett, Rivas-Drake, & Umaña-Taylor, 2012 ). Mothers high in centrality or assimilation may have been less vigilant about racially socializing their children to navigate racist social environments, leaving Black families more vulnerable and unprepared for discriminatory experiences ( Lesane-Brown, 2006 ; Neblett et al., 2012 ).

The current study possessed some limitations. The sample was cross-sectional and directionality cannot be addressed. The sample included higher household income for African American women, compared to national averages, perhaps because many participants inhabited dual income households ( Economic Policy Institute, 2011 ). Findings cannot be generalized to childless African American women, or those of a lower socio-economic status. Consistent with past research, the reliability of the MIBI was somewhat low ( Sellers et al., 1997 ; Smalls, White, Chavous & Sellers, 2007 ). The outcome measure of interest, significance of Obama for decreasing racism, did not go through an instrument development process, and thus, may possess issues of validity. An additional limitation is that the lag time between Obama’s election and the data collection may have left the election less salient in people’s minds or else, tertiary events, happening in the interim, may have influenced participants’ appraisal of Obama’s election.

Considering Obama’s gender, future research might address implications of Obama’s election for perceptions of racism amongst childless Black women and men or amongst Black fathers given their role in racial socialization ( McHale, Crouter, Kim, Davis, & Dotterer, 2006 ). Furthermore, it would be interesting to investigate how Black people’s racial identity predicts perceptions of other events impacting the community, such as recent publicizing of instances of police brutality towards Black boys ( Goff, Jackson, Di Leone, Culotta & DiTomasso, 2014 ). Future studies could further unravel the complicated reactions to Barack Obama within the African American community and discern the degree to which he is perceived as a racial in-group or out-group member. Additionally, it would be worthwhile to investigate how gendered racial identities might predict appraisal of Obama, as an intersectional approach might better reflect participants’ lived realities ( Cole, 2009 ; Gay & Tate, 1998 ).

Contributor Information

Marisa Franco, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Maryland, USA.

Mia Smith-Bynum, Department of Family Science, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Maryland, USA.

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While Barack Obama may not have been formally campaigning for re-election, he was by far the leading newsmaker in the past five months. And the coverage of him during that period has been unrelentingly negative, worse than any of his potential Republican foes. He fared better, but only slightly, in the blogosphere.

Several factors were likely responsible for that critical tone. In many stories, Obama was the target of not only the whole roster of GOP presidential contenders. He was also being criticized in often harsh terms by Republicans in Congress. Added to that, members of his own party began criticizing him on both policy and strategy grounds, particularly as his poll numbers fell. And for much of this period, the president’s coverage reflected the biggest problem on his watch-a continual flow of bad news about the U.S. economy.

Quantity of Obama Coverage

From May to October, Obama generated about six times more coverage than the leading Republican newsmaker.

He was the top newsmaker in 16 of the 23 weeks examined in this study and he never registered lower than the second leading newsmaker in any of those weeks-and this is compared to all people in the news, not just other contenders for his job.

Much of the coverage of Obama stemmed from his role as the central figure in the biggest story over those months-the economy. From May 2 through Oct. 9, the economy filled one-fifth (21%) of the newshole studied by PEJ, compared with 9% for the 2012 presidential campaign. And nearly half (46%) of the stories in which Obama was the primary newsmaker in that period were directly related to the economy. 

His coverage built steadily through the summer, accelerating in July, when the media turned its focus to the bruising partisan debt ceiling negotiations. It reached its high point in September, when the president unveiled his $447 billion economic package, which triggered another Beltway battle.

And while he may have been unable to positively influence the tone of his coverage, Obama’s actions directly affected the level of coverage. Three of his biggest weeks of media attention during these five months occurred when he embarked on his mid-August jobs tour, when he delivered his September 8 speech on job creation and when he offered a September 19 deficit reduction proposal that included raising taxes on the wealthy.

Tone of Obama News Media Coverage

Several things are striking about the tone of Obama’s coverage during these months. Using the computer assisted analysis, only 9% of the coverage about Obama was positive while 34% was negative. The majority of the coverage (57%) was neutral or primarily factual in nature. Even the two Republican candidates with the most unflattering narrative-Pawlenty and Gingrich-had more positive treatment at 12% and 15% positive respectively.

Overall, Obama’s ratio of negative to positive coverage was nearly 4-1.

What also stands out is how static the coverage was. In the 23 weeks studied, his positive coverage ranged only between 8% and 10%.

Not only did the president’s positive coverage in any given week never exceed 10%, but it also only reached 10% in four weeks during those five months.

There were a number of forces that fueled Obama’s difficult media narrative and no event or dynamic changed the tone of the president’s coverage, not even briefly.

Even the week of May 2-8, immediately after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Obama’s coverage was overwhelmingly negative. One reason is that many of the references to his role in the hunt for bin Laden were matched by skepticism that he would receive any long term political benefit from it. Another was that the bin Laden news was tempered with news about the nation’s economy.

“A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the streets to wildly cheer President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decade-long manhunt,” stated a May 2 AP story. “The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his re-election campaign.”

The president’s coverage was often marked by combination of bad economic news and potential opponents eager to seize on that storyline. A CBS scene-setting story about the June 13 CNN debate was an example. “On the eve of the second Republican presidential debate of the season, President Barack Obama continues to see his poll numbers on the economy slipping, and those Republicans who want to be president are on the attack this weekend.”

The economy remained a theme that hurt Obama throughout the summer, even when he tried to change the narrative. As he began his August bus tour about jobs, an Associated Press story declared: “President Barack Obama launches a political counteroffensive this week, weighed down by a stunted economy, wilting support among some of his most ardent backers, and a daily bashing from the slew of Republicans campaigning for his job.”

Quantity and Tone of Obama in Blogs

Obama did fare a little better among bloggers, but not much. In all, 14% of the conversation about him was positive and 36% was negative during these 23 weeks, while 50% was neutral.

As was the case with news coverage, Barack Obama was far and away the top newsmaker on blogs, generating almost 1.3 million assertions in the five months studied, almost 10 times the amount of any of the Republicans. And the tone was only slightly better than his news coverage.

Much of the criticism aimed at Obama by bloggers centered on the economy, such as this June 2 post on Finance Geek: “As the president works on his golf game, the economy is coming apart again. Housing is taking another leg down, job gains seem to be tailing off and a fiscal iceberg lies just ahead. Will someone sound the alarm?”

Obama also took heat from the left in blogs as with this September 3 post on the greenreflection site taking issue with his move to ease off environmental regulation under the headline: “Not a good week for Barack Obama, or the environment.”

“The decision to kill the EPA’s new rules on smog is making a lot of supporters angry. Michael Tomasky calls Obama A President Adrift in the Daily Beast.”

Many bloggers are staunch foes of Obama and deeply suspicious. On September 29, the New Trommetter Times site warned that the president might try to “manufacture some crisis, and “October surprise,” just before the 2012 elections,” to ensure re-election. “But I’ve got a message for Barack, you’re no George Bush,” the post continued. “You’re certainly no Ronald Reagan. The only President you can be compared to is failed, one-term President Jimmy Carter.”

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The Early Life of Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama Sr. and S. Ann Dunham. In Barack's early life, he was educated in both public schools and religious private schools that instructed with catholic or Islamic principles. He began his college career at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He transferred and earned his Bachelor of Political Science at Columbia University in New York. The experience of pursuing his […]

Barack Obama: the 44th President of the United States of America

Name: Barack Hussein Obama II Place of Birth and Date: Born August 4, 1961 (age 57), in Honolulu, Hawaii. Family Background: Obama was raised by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and later by his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, alongside his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is the daughter of his mother and her second husband. Obama's parents divorced when he was two. After the divorce, his father, Barack Obama Sr., moved to Massachusetts and eventually returned to Kenya. Obama […]

Barrack Obama: a Great President

Throughout his Presidency, Barrack Obama proved to be a skilled policymaker than a politician, conventional wisdom aside. His accomplishments are numerous, impressive, and exceed what his supporters thought he could ever achieve. Although some critics complain that he did not do enough to transform the United States of America, he introduced remarkable policies and regulations in 2009 and 2010. These policies did a lot to shape the American public life and government and contributed to the development of a society […]

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney

On Tuesday, November 6th, 2012, the United States presidential election was held, alongside many federal elections, state, and local elections. The incumbent Barack Obama candidate for the Democratic Party has defeated the Republican Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts with 332-206 (Electoral College) and 51.38%- 48.61% (popular vote). In most cases, both candidates’ political positions were aligned as liberal and conservative ideologies. In the 2012 presidential election, both Obama and Romney spent over one billion dollars during their campaign. They have […]

The Election of Barack Obama

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African American president, being the 44th president in office. The picture I chose with Barack Obama, including the word "Hope" was his campaign poster in his 2008 presidential election. The poster is also seen with the words "Change" or "Progress" which all these words represented him in his campaign. When Barack Obama was elected as the first African American president, he raised the hopes of many Americans, especially the African American population, he […]

How Obama Impacted Society

Barack Hussein Obama II was born in state capital, Hawaii on August 04, 1961. His parents Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. were an interracial couple and they didn't last long. His parents divorced when Obama was just 2 years old and his parents both remarried and had children. Obama doesn't have any biological siblings but he does have 8 half-siblings. Although Obama's dad wasn't really around, the two still wrote to each other until the early 1980s when Barack […]

Barack Obama: his Life and Career

BARACK OBAMA Barack Obama was born in August 4, 1961,in Honolulu, Hawaii and later became the first African American president. Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, and the first African American to serve as the president of the United States of America. First elected to the presidency in 2008, He served two terms as the 44 President of the United States. Early Life. His mother, Ann Dunham, was born in Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during […]

Barack Obama’s Inaugural Speech

Barack Obama’s Inaugural speech of 2013, promoted equality for all Americans. In the United States Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president for the second time in history. Barack Obama led our nation to new developments and growth. He  united our nation, which drew strength and courage from younger people who denied their generations indifferences. In 2013, Barack Obama made his Inaugural Address speech to persuade the American people that he could form America into a  better place with […]

Biography of Barack Hussein Obama

Barack Hussein Obama is an american politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2008-2017. Obama was the first black president and him being sworn in as president is said to be  "the best thing to happen to america in a long time". Being the first black president was just the beginning of what would be an interesting presidential run for Obama. Like many people expected, Obama made some great changes that helped better the country. […]

Barack Obama History Paper

Barack Obama was born on August 8th, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to his mother, Ann Durham, and his father, Barack Sr., who met at the University of Hawaii Manoa campus. His father was from Kenya and was the first-ever student from an African country to attend this university. His mother was originally from Kansas, where her ancestors were antislavery activists. His parents' marriage was short—interracial marriages were very rare at that time and illegal in some states. His mother's family […]

Roots of Resilience: Unveiling the Story of Barack Obama Parents

The lineage of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, threads back to an intricate tapestry woven by his parents, each contributing an indelible mark to his extraordinary journey. Born to Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr., the President's story is intertwined with the resilience, diversity, and determination of his parents. Ann Dunham, an intrepid and spirited woman, hailed from Kansas and embodied the tenacity and curiosity that defined her son. Her boundless curiosity and passion for learning […]

President Barack Obama and Operation Geronimo to Assassinate Osama Bin Laden Discursive Essay

Operation Geronimo, a pivotal mission executed under the administration of President Barack Obama, marked a significant moment in the history of the United States' fight against terrorism. The operation, carried out on May 2, 2011, resulted in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the leader of the terrorist group al-Qaeda. This mission symbolized a major triumph in the War on Terror and a defining moment in Obama's presidency. The decision to carry […]

Barack Obama and Gay Marriage

Thesis sentenceI was raised in a Christian home like most American people, where we were taught by the church that being homosexual is a sin. I grew up believing this for most of my life until I met a dear friend who would change my views on the subject matter. I watched this person be humiliated and discriminated against because of her sexual orientation. This made me wonder how one sin would be worse than another. I know I have […]

Unforgettable Event that Changed my Life

Our lives are always shaped by events around us. This implies that human life is surrounded by everyday life decisions and choices which always bring about a result which may impact a closer or a far-off individual either positively or negatively. Despite the fact that we as low-level members of the society may not have had a hand in the decision made or we may not even have control over the outcome, it is upon us to synthesize the experience […]

The Presidency of Barack Obama: a First Historical Assessment

This content aims to critically review the book "The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment," by Julian E. Zelizer. He is a CNN political analyst based in the department of History and Public Affairs in Princeton University. Zelizer has authored a variety of books that have significant information on the occurrences and explanations of events in the United States. Zelizer also appears regularly as a news commentator on various platforms such as radio, television, and print. The book […]

Books about Barack Obama

Remnick David is both a writer and journalist born October 29 in New Jersey. In the year 1994, won the Publishers accolade for his novel the Lenin's Tombs: the last days of the Empire. He a graduate from Princeton University. Today Remnick is an editor with the New Yorker magazines. He has written several books including the bridge: the rise and life of Barrack Obama. This was his sixth book to be written by him. Current Rennick is married to […]

Influential Women – Ellen DeGeneres

I believe that Ellen Lee DeGeneres deserves more credit and ovation for what she has done in her life by inspiring men and women all the world. She was born in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Growing up she wanted to become a veterinarian but said she wasn't “book smart”. Ellen grew up a funny girl, she started doing stand-up comedy at a young age. In a article I read, the author stated “At the age of 23, […]

The Development of Cultural Racism Associated with American Politics

Abstract Politics in the United States have always been a heated issue, and never more so than now. The surprising election of Donald Trump has created a clear cultural divide on many levels that continues to cultivate hate, and gifts not just Americans but the entire world with cultural racism that we have not seen for a long time. The political divide in America affects every American, every day, so much so that you would be hard-pressed to find someone […]

“Dreams from my Father”: a Journey of Self-Discovery and Racial Identity

In the rich tapestry of memoirs written by American figures, Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father" holds a unique place. Crafted long before his presidency, the book offers a candid and introspective look into the early life of the 44th President of the United States. It chronicles Obama's personal journey to understand his racial identity, his heritage, and the intricate relationship he had with his absentee father. This deeply personal narrative is more than just an autobiography; it delves into […]

A Statistical Analysis and Graphic Data of the Affordable Care Act in America

The political support for the Affordable Care Act is something that is bound to vary throughout the country. Each state has an opinion on the new healthcare initiative enacted by Barack Obama, and it can easily be seen which states supported it. Looking at the information from the dataset health.csv, one can easily analyze and construct plots and tables that help to view correlations and lack thereof. One major correlation between two factors is that of percent_favorable_aca and Obama_share_12, which […]

Analysis of the Affordable Care Act and the Birth Control Pill

Obamacare was signed into law in March 2010. The law covers various types of health plans, benefits, and services. Just years ago millions of women were paying for or couldn't afford birth control. Now, "an estimated 27 million women are currently benefiting from Obamacare's no-cost services” (Ressler). Birth Control is an ongoing debate on whether the pill itself should be covered for by taxes due to peoples rights and beliefs about its use. Another issue about the contraception is who […]

Public Policy in Government Essay

Public policy is used by the government to create order or to look into the issues that are affecting the citizens of the United States. They are carried out through following guidelines that are indicated in the constitution. A policy is not a tangible thing but rather, public policy is used to describe a set of laws, regulations, and mandates. They are made through a political process. This legal process helps the government be able to create laws that serve […]

Why have Americans Lost Trust in the Government?

Throughout history Americans have viewed the government as the highest department to ever exist. Whenever there was a problem in the country we looked to the government and the officials within the government to solve the issues at hand. As we’ve evolved as a society or even more than that, a country, we’ve began to lose trust and respect for the government. Why might such a high departement lose the trust of their citizens? Looking deeper into the behaviors of […]

Barack Obama: a Historic Journey to Becoming America’s First Black President

When Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States in 2008, it was not just a political victory; it was a monumental chapter in the annals of American history. His election as the first black president marked a profound change in the nation's narrative, breaking centuries-old racial barriers and redefining the American dream. But the significance of this event goes beyond just a historical first; it's a story of societal evolution, a reflection of changing attitudes, […]

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How to Write an Essay About Barack Obama

Understanding barack obama's legacy.

Before writing an essay about Barack Obama, it is essential to understand his impact and legacy both as the 44th President of the United States and as a public figure. Obama's presidency marked a series of significant milestones and policies that left a lasting impact on American politics and society. Start your essay by providing a brief background about Obama, including his early life, education, and rise in politics. Discuss his historical significance as the first African American president and the context in which he was elected. Understanding Obama's key domestic and foreign policies, his leadership style, and his contributions to issues like healthcare, economic reform, and international diplomacy is crucial for a comprehensive analysis.

Developing a Thesis Statement

A strong essay about Barack Obama should be centered around a clear, concise thesis statement. This statement should present a specific viewpoint or argument about Obama's presidency, political ideology, or legacy. For instance, you might explore the impact of the Affordable Care Act, analyze Obama's approach to international relations, or discuss his influence on American political discourse. Your thesis will guide the direction of your essay and provide a structured approach to your topic.

Gathering Supporting Evidence

To support your thesis, gather evidence from various sources, including Obama's speeches, policy documents, biographies, and analyses by political experts. This might include statistical data on policy outcomes, excerpts from Obama’s memoirs, or commentary from political analysts. Use this evidence to support your thesis and build a persuasive argument. Be sure to consider different perspectives and address potential counterarguments.

Analyzing Obama's Presidency and Impact

Dedicate a section of your essay to analyzing key aspects of Obama's presidency and his broader impact. Discuss specific policies and initiatives, their implementation, and their short-term and long-term effects. Explore the challenges Obama faced, such as economic crises, political opposition, and global issues, and how he addressed them. Also, consider the social and cultural significance of his presidency in the context of American history.

Concluding the Essay

Conclude your essay by summarizing the main points of your discussion and restating your thesis in light of the evidence provided. Your conclusion should tie together your analysis and emphasize the significance of Barack Obama's contribution to American politics and society. You might also want to reflect on his ongoing influence after his presidency and his role in current political discussions.

Reviewing and Refining Your Essay

After completing your essay, review and refine it for clarity and coherence. Ensure that your arguments are well-structured and supported by evidence. Check for grammatical accuracy and ensure that your essay flows logically from one point to the next. Consider seeking feedback from peers, educators, or political analysts to further improve your essay. A well-written essay on Barack Obama will not only demonstrate your understanding of his presidency but also your ability to engage with complex political and historical topics.

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