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Barack Hussein Obama II ;( born August 4, 1961) at Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia University where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations and graduated with a B.A. in 1983,. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married on February 2, 1961, and Barack was born later that year. His parents separated when he was two years old and they divorced in 1964. His father died in an automobile accident in 1982.and his mother died in 1995 of ovarian cancer. Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents]
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Right-to-left: Barack Obama and half-sister Maya Soetoro, with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, in Hawaii (early 1970s)
Obama has written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind. At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his high-school drug use as his "greatest moral failure."
On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois.
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Obama delivers his presidential election victory speech in Grant Park.
A large number of candidates entered the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The field narrowed to a duel between Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton after early contests, with the race remaining close throughout the primary process but with Obama gaining a steady lead in pledged delegates due to better long-range planning, superior fundraising, dominant organizing in caucus states, and better exploitation of delegate...
