George W. Bush is part of a large family (he is the oldest of five siblings) with a long tradition of public service. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. His father, George H.W. Bush, was vice president (1981-1989) and U.S. President (1989-1993). His brother, Jeb Bush, was governor of Florida (1999-2007) and ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. George W. and Jeb were the first brothers to serve as governors at the same time since Winthrop and Nelson Rockefeller served in the late 1960s.

George W. Bush married Laura Welch in 1977, and by all accounts she was the perfect balance to him. Her reserved, thoughtful personality complimented Bush’s more outgoing approach to life. They had twin girls in 1981, named Jenna and Barbara after their grandmothers. During Bush’s time in the White House, his daughters were attending college, with Jenna at the University of Texas at Austin and Barbara at Yale University. Attending college while their father was President often brought the girls unwanted attention from the media but both worked on his 2004 reelection campaign. They started off answering telephones at the campaign headquarters but eventually became comfortable enough to begin independently giving surrogate speeches for their father.

Long before he began his own political career, Bush and his family spent time around political campaigns and in the White House as an adviser to his father. The Bush clan often gathered in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the family has a vacation house. George W. is more of a Texas man, however, and he bought a ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 1999 just before he ran for president. Known as the Western White House during his presidency, Bush often retreated to the ranch to bike, clear brush, and escape from the press. His daughter, Jenna, was married at the ranch in 2008. She and her husband, Henry Hager, gave George and Laura their first grandchild, a girl named Mila, in 2013, and a second, named Poppy for Bush 41, in 2015.

As President, Bush often made time for exercise, being a frequent runner and sometimes mountain biker. He was not often spotted out and about in Washington, D.C., but preferred to escape to Camp David or his Texas ranch. Security concerns for the President after 9/11 made forays into public spaces logistically complicated and costly. Bush was known for his emphasis on loyalty and spent free time with his family and close friends.

George W. Bush promised America a "humble" foreign policy, an image that many of his critics found difficult to square with the man who led the United States into Iraq and who swaggered on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, in a flight suit declaring that "major combat operations" in Iraq were over. Bush looked confident that day, and the sailors and airmen aboard gave him a rousing welcome—under a banner that read "Mission Accomplished." It was all too premature, and the Democrats who complained that the President had turned the entire U.S. Navy into a campaign photo-op began pointing to that event as something else—Bush's hubris and sense of unreality.

Good Will

When the 2000 recount was finally over, George W. Bush proved to be a gracious winner. This was made easy for him by Vice President Al Gore, who accomplished the hard task of being gracious in defeat. Gore realized that if he continued to challenge the results in Florida, there would be pressure on him to deliver an unstinting concession speech if he lost in the end. Gore provided the requisite speech and did so with perfect historical pitch, even as some of those around him were trying to explore other options to keep the contest alive."Almost a century and a half ago," he recalled, "Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, 'Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless.' Well, in that same spirit, I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country." For his part, Bush spoke in the same spirit. "As I begin, I thank President Clinton for his service to our nation," Bush said at the outset of his inaugural address. "And I thank Vice President Gore for a contest conducted with spirit and ended with grace."

Bad Will

Yet Bush's attempt at lowering the level of venom in American politics didn't get far. The reasons are varied, and perhaps his goal was a naïve one to begin with. For one thing, not all Democratic Party leaders were as philosophical as Gore had been and many simply never forgave Bush for how he assumed the presidency. In an attempt to keep their activist base motivated, Democratic National Committee chairman Terence McAuliffe and other leading Democrats openly questioned the very legitimacy of Bush's presidency. In so doing, they unleashed forces they could not control, especially when they introduced the toxic subject of race and "vote suppression" into the conversation.

Tipper Gore took to publicly describing the election as the time "when we won, but the Supreme Court decided we couldn't serve." Her frustration was understandable, but she wasn't alone. "Gore . . . beat the other guy. The election was stolen," declared former Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis."We won that election, and they stole that election," McAuliffe said in a 2001 speech to the Democratic National Committee. "President Bush tells us to get over it. Well, we're not going to get over it!" Some of the nation's most prominent liberals took their cue from such comments. "Bush is not our elected President," Gloria Steinem told college audiences in 2001 and 2002. "He took office due to fraud in Florida. He should be impeached."Long before he made the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 challenging Bush's reaction to the terrorist attacks, filmmaker Michael Moore said in an interview, "The majority of Americans never elected this guy in the White House. And I'll keep saying that until he's out of there."

Bush's Own Role

Bush was not blameless, either. After suggesting he'd staff his administration with Democrats as well as Republicans, he appointed a single Democrat, former California congressman and Clinton administration official Norman Y. Mineta, to his cabinet. "Norm felt as though he was like that kid in 'Home Alone,' one longtime Mineta aide quipped. The administration did not compromise much on its tax bill, either, meaning that it passed with only Republican support. Bush did reach across the aisle on education reform, but did so in ways that ultimately caused more ill feelings than goodwill. Democrats such as Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California helped with passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, but later felt undercut by the administration when the funding levels requested by the White House and approved by the Republican-led Congress seemed too low. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party in May 2001—breaking the tie and giving Democrats a 51-49 voting majority. One of the issues he cited most often as affecting his decision was education funding. Jeffords' defection gave every committee chairmanship in the Senate to Democrats, including Judiciary, which began stalling—or even outright rejecting—Bush's more conservative nominees.

This set up the bitter 2002 campaign. Judicial appointments may have been the stakes, but the context was the war on terrorism. Less than a year after the nation had been attacked and Democrats and Republicans had sang God Bless America together on the Capitol lawn, the two sides went at it tong and nail, with each side calling into question the patriotism of the other.

Amid talk among political professionals about "Fifty-Fifty Nation" and "red" states and "blue" states was a basic truth: the United States was becoming more polarized culturally and politically, as certain unifying forces in American life—sporting events, places of worship, network television—were themselves fragmenting into self-selecting places for the like-minded to congregate. Gerrymandered districts across the country produced a Congress in which true centrists are rare. News talk shows that at one time would try to produce a rough consensus featured, instead, designated liberal and conservative commentators who are paid—literally—to tow the party line.

Will the center hold? It's hard to see, in Washington, how it could. But as Bush and Kerry scrambled for every possible vote in a handful of battleground states, a promising thing happened. The few swing voters who are still out there began being heard—they, after all, were the main voters still being courted—and their sheer reasonableness was cause for optimism."I think what's happened is that the Republicans have really gone to the right," Linda Grabel, one of the audience members selected to ask the candidates a question at the St. Louis debate, explained later. "And the Democrats have really gone to the left. With the Democrats, if anyone has a problem, the government can help you with it. And the Republicans want to legislate morality for everybody. They're way over to the right. But most of the American people are kind of in the middle."

The legacy of George W. Bush remains, much like his 2000 election, a subject of profound controversy, and any truly objective evaluation will likely be years in the future. He entered office as one of only a handful Presidents to lose the nation’s popular vote. The election of 2000 and the Supreme Court case of Bush v. Gore remain two of the most controversial political developments in the last half-century. Some thought that President Bush should begin his term by trying to find common ground and avoid controversy to take some of the edge off the nation’s polarized politics coming out of the 2000 election. Instead, as one of his first actions, President Bush issued an executive order creating the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which further alienated some who thought government money should not go to organizations affiliated with churches. Yet he did reach across the aisle on other issues including the No Child Left Behind Act, which was the most impactful change in education policy in a generation.

Within nine months of taking office, President Bush was afforded the chance to unite the nation after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. By most accounts, Bush did a masterful job of speaking for and to the American people. His crisis leadership, including insisting on returning to the White House the night of the attacks instead of holing up in a safe bunker elsewhere, gave the American people confidence that someone was in charge. He became the most popular President in the history of polling, reaching an astounding 90 percent approval rating in the wake of the attacks.

Following an authorization from Congress to eliminate those who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11, Bush ordered an invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban leadership was driven into the mountains and across the boarders into neighboring countries, including Pakistan. Those early successes, however, turned into the longest war in American history, and the President never was able to achieve the greatest symbolic goal of the effort, the killing or capturing of the mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden; U.S. special forces achieved that goal in 2011 under Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama.

Following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush also presided over a restructuring of the American national security apparatus and the passage of the Patriot Act, which gave the government vast new powers in the effort to combat future acts of terror. Both efforts, especially the Patriot Act, sparked strong divisions within the American people throughout the Bush presidency. In 2002 and into 2003, Bush used the fear of further terrorist attacks to argue for a preemptive war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq under the rationale that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The initial attacks and invasion were extremely successful and popular but in the end no weapons of mass destruction were found anywhere in the country and a strong insurgency arose that resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans over the next eight years. The war grew increasingly unpopular, and the Democrats used it as a major wedge issue in the 2006 and 2008 elections, in which they first took over Congress and then the White House two years later.

On the domestic front, the Bush presidency scored early successes in gaining passage of large tax reductions and a major reform of the American educational system with the No Child Left Behind Act. The tax cuts, however, were not made permanent, as the President wished, and the bipartisan education reforms proved very controversial with their emphasis on testing and school report cards. The tax cuts were eventually made permanent during budget negotiations in the Obama administration but No Child Left Behind was eventually replaced with a new national education plan in 2015.

After his reelection in 2004, Bush sought major changes to Social Security, arguing a partial privatization plan could insure its solvency. He spent considerable political capital seeking such a change, but his efforts went nowhere in Congress. He also sought major immigration reforms that never materialized. As the tax cuts of 2001 reduced revenue to the government, while spending continued to increase partly due to the expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the federal government racked up large deficits. Ultimately, those deficits, exacerbated by the financial recession of 2008, helped create a politically impactful insurgency on the political right that went under the banner of the “Tea Party.” The last few months of the Bush presidency were marked by a major crash of the stock market, a controversial bail out of financial institutions and car companies, and a recession that would wipe out millions of jobs and impact the U.S. economy for many years.

The Bush presidency transformed American politics, its economy, and its place in the world, but not in ways that could have been predicted when the governor of Texas declared his candidacy for America’s highest office. As President, Bush became a lightning rod for controversy. His controversial election and policies, especially the war in Iraq, deeply divided the American people. Arguably his greatest moment as President was his initial, heartfelt response to the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks. Soon, however, his administration was overshadowed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush’s place in U.S. history will be debated and reconsidered for many years to come.

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States—becoming the first African American to serve in that office—on January 20, 2009.

The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met and married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in 1992. Their two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha), were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996 and served there for eight years. In 2004, he was elected by a record majority to the US Senate from Illinois and, in February 2007, announced his candidacy for president. After winning a closely fought contest against New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee for president, in the general election.

When President Obama took office, he faced very significant challenges. The economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W. Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help struggling financial institutions. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops deployed in difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the first two years of his first term, President Obama was able to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to improve the economy, pass health-care reform legislation, and withdraw most US troops from Iraq. After the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, the president spent significant time and political effort negotiating, for the most part unsuccessfully, with congressional Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit. After winning reelection in 2012, Obama began his second term focused on securing legislation on immigration reform and gun control, neither of which he was able to achieve. When the Republicans won the Senate in 2014, Obama refocused on actions that he could take unilaterally, invoking his executive authority as president. In foreign policy, Obama concentrated during the second term on the Middle East and climate change.

Obama left the presidency, at age fifty-five, after his constitutionally limited two terms ended on January 20, 2017. He announced plans to remain in Washington, DC, until his younger daughter finished high school and, as a former president, to play a restrained but active role in public affairs. He also devoted energy to raising money and planning for the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Illinois.

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. His parents, who met as students at the University of Hawaii, were Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a black Kenyan studying in the United States. Obama's father left the family when Obama was two and, after further studies at Harvard University, returned to Kenya, where he died in an automobile accident nineteen years later. After his parents divorced, Obama's mother married another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From age six through ten, Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools. “I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child,” Obama later recalled. “And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me.”

Concerned for his education, Obama’s mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and to attend Hawaii’s prestigious Punahou School from fifth grade through graduation from high school. While Obama was in school, his mother divorced Soetoro, returned to Hawaii to study cultural anthropology at the university, and then went back to Indonesia to do field research. Living with his grandparents, Obama was a good but not outstanding student at Punahou. He played varsity basketball and, as he later admitted, “dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” including marijuana and cocaine. As for religion, Obama later wrote, because his parents and grandparents were nonbelievers, “I was not raised in a religious household.”

Obama's mother, who “to the end of her life [in 1995] would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal,” deeply admired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and taught her son, he later wrote, that “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.” But, as culturally diverse as Hawaii was, its African American population was miniscule. With no father or other family members to serve as role models (his relationship with his white grandfather was difficult), Obama later reflected, “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

Obama left Hawaii for college, enrolling first at Occidental College in Los Angeles for his freshman and sophomore years, and then at Columbia University in New York City. He read deeply and widely about political and international affairs, graduating from Columbia with a political science major in 1983. (A movie version of his Columbia years, Barry, was released in 2016.) After spending an additional year in New York as a researcher with Business International Group, a global business consulting firm, Obama accepted an offer to work as a community organizer in Chicago's largely poor and black South Side. As biographer David Mendell notes in his 2007 book, Obama: From Promise to Power, the job gave Obama “his first deep immersion into the African American community he had longed to both understand and belong to.”

Obama's main assignment as an organizer was to launch the church-funded Developing Communities Project and, in particular, to organize residents of Altgeld Gardens to pressure Chicago's city hall to improve conditions in the poorly maintained public housing project. His efforts met with some success, but he concluded that, faced with a complex city bureaucracy, “I just can't get things done here without a law degree.”

In 1988, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he excelled as a student, graduating magna cum laude and winning election as president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review for the academic year 1990-1991. Although Obama was a liberal, he won the election by persuading the journal’s outnumbered conservative staffers that he would treat their views fairly, which he is widely acknowledged to have done. As the first African American president in the long history of the law review, Obama drew widespread media attention and a contract from Random House to write a book about race relations. The book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), turned out to be mostly a personal memoir, focusing in particular on his struggle to come to terms with his identity as a black man raised by whites in the absence of his African father.

During a summer internship at Chicago’s Sidley and Austin law firm after his first year at Harvard, Obama met Michelle Robinson, a South Side native and Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who supervised his work at the firm. He wooed her ardently (as memorialized in another 2016 movie, Southside with You), and after a four-year courtship they married in 1992. The Obamas settled in Chicago's racially integrated, middle-class Hyde Park neighborhood, where their first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998 and their second daughter, Natasha (called Sasha), was born in 2001.

After directing Illinois Project Vote, a voter registration drive aimed at increasing black turnout in the 1992 election, Obama accepted positions as an attorney with the civil rights law firm of Miner, Barnhill and Galland and as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He launched his first campaign for political office in 1996 after his district’s state senator, Alice Palmer, decided to run for Congress. With Palmer’s support, Obama announced his candidacy to replace her in the Illinois legislature. When Palmer's congressional campaign faltered, she decided to run for reelection instead. But Obama refused to withdraw from the race, successfully challenged the validity of Palmer’s voter petitions, and was easily elected after her name was kept off the ballot.

Obama’s time in the legislature initially was frustrating. Republicans controlled the state senate, and many of his black Democratic colleagues resented the hardball tactics he had employed against Palmer. But he adapted, developing cordial personal relations with legislators of both parties and cultivating Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones Jr., another African American senator from Chicago, as a mentor. Obama was able to get campaign finance reform and crime legislation enacted even when his party was in the minority, and after 2002, when the Democrats won control of the Senate, he became a leading legislator on a wide range of issues, passing nearly 300 bills aimed at helping children, old people, labor unions, and the poor.

Obama’s one serious misstep during his early political career (he later called it “an ill-considered race” in which he got “spanked” by the voters) was a 2000 Democratic primary challenge to US Representative Bobby Rush. Rush was a former Illinois Black Panther leader who subsequently entered mainstream politics as a Chicago alderman and was elected to Congress from the South Side’s first congressional district in 1992. Obama was not nearly as well known as the popular Rush, and the combination of his unusual upbringing and his association with predominantly white elite universities such as Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago aroused doubts about his authenticity as a black man among the district’s overwhelmingly African American voters. Obama suffered what he labeled “a drubbing,” losing to Rush by a 30-percentage point margin. Rush remained in the House; he was reelected to his thirteenth consecutive term in 2016.

Returning to the state senate, Obama began eyeing a 2004 race for the US Senate seat held by Peter Fitzgerald, an unpopular first-term Republican who decided not to run for reelection. In October 2002, as Congress was considering a resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to launch a war to depose the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Obama spoke at an antiwar rally in Chicago. “I don't oppose all wars,” he declared. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” By speaking out against Bush’s war policies, Obama set himself apart from the other leading candidates for the Democratic Senate nomination, as well as from most Senate Democrats with presidential ambitions, including Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, John Kerry of Massachusetts, and John Edwards of North Carolina. Obama’s initially unpopular antiwar stance eventually worked to his political advantage as the war became increasingly unpopular with the passage of time.

Advised by political consultant David Axelrod, who had a strong record of helping black candidates succeed in majority-white constituencies, Obama assembled a coalition of African Americans and white liberals to win the Democratic Senate primary with 53 percent of the vote, more than all five of his opponents combined. He then moved toward the political center to wage his general election campaign against Republican nominee Jack Ryan, an attractive candidate who, after making hundreds of millions of dollars as an investor, had left the business world to teach in an inner-city Chicago school. But Ryan was forced to drop out of the race when scandalous details about his divorce were made public, and Obama coasted to an easy victory against Ryan’s replacement on the ballot, black conservative Republican Alan Keyes. Obama won by the largest margin in the history of Senate elections in Illinois, 70 percent to 27 percent.

In addition to his election, the other highlight of 2004 for Obama was his wildly successful keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” he declared. “There’s a United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s a United States of America.” Obama encapsulated his speech’s themes of optimism and unity with the phrase, “the audacity of hope,” which he borrowed from Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright was the pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, a large and influential black congregation where Obama was baptized when he became a Christian in 1988. Obama also used the phrase as the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), which became a national bestseller in the wake of his newfound national popularity. Describing his religious conversion, Obama wrote, “I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”

Obama’s election to the Senate instantly made him the highest-ranking African American officeholder in the country and, along with the excitement generated by his convention speech and his books (Dreams from my Father, brought back into print, joined The Audacity of Hope on the bestseller list), placed him high on the roster of prospective Democratic presidential candidates in 2008. After spending a low-profile first year in office focusing on solidifying his base in Illinois and traveling abroad to buttress his foreign policy credentials as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama spent much of 2006 speaking to audiences around the country and mulling whether to run for president. According to annual National Journal evaluations of senators' legislative voting records, Obama ranked as the first, tenth, or sixteenth most liberal member of the Senate, depending on the year.

Obama announced his presidential candidacy on February 10, 2007, at a rally in front of the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln had given his famous “house divided” speech in 1858. Relying heavily on the Internet, the Obama campaign mobilized Obama for America (OFA), a massive grassroots organization of volunteers and donors. (After he was elected, OFA was recast as Organizing for America for the purpose of rousing public support for Obama’s legislative initiatives.) With Axelrod again at the helm, the campaign developed a strategy for winning the Democratic nomination that relied on assembling the same coalition of blacks and white liberals that had enabled him to succeed in Illinois, with an additional focus on young voters. Initially, however, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton opened a strong lead in the polls, even among African American voters and leaders who admired her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and did not think Obama had much of a chance to win. Former Senator John Edwards, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2004, was also widely regarded at the start of the campaign as a stronger candidate than the inexperienced Obama.

Drawing on his online base of supporters, Obama initially surprised political pundits by matching Clinton and besting Edwards in campaign fundraising throughout 2007. He became the co-frontrunner in the race by winning the crucial Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, defeating both Edwards and Clinton by an 8-percentage point margin. Clinton rebounded to win the New Hampshire primary five days later, edging out Obama by 3 points and crushing Edwards by 22 points. In the next important test, Obama opened up a narrow lead in the nomination contest by defeating Clinton handily in the South Carolina primary, 55 percent to 27 percent, on January 26. Black voters, convinced by the Iowa results that whites would vote for an African American candidate for president, gave him overwhelming support in South Carolina and in subsequent primaries. Edwards finished a distant third in the state where he was born and dropped out of the race on January 30. Other contenders for the nomination, including Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, and Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, had already dropped out because of their poor showings in the initial round of primaries and caucuses.

From February through early June, Obama and Clinton battled fiercely through the remaining primaries and caucuses. Overall, Clinton won twenty primaries to Obama’s nineteen, including victories in most of the large states, notably California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Both candidates were bidding to become historic “firsts”—the first African American president or the first woman president.

But Obama had three crucial advantages that enabled him to eke out a narrow victory for the Democratic nomination. First, he was able to contrast his consistent opposition to the war in Iraq with Clinton’s vote in 2002 to authorize the war before later turning against it. Second, although there was little difference between Clinton and Obama on the issues, Obama ran on a theme of change and Clinton on a theme of experience. In a year when the economy was steadily deteriorating, change was the more appealing theme, especially among Democratic voters. Third, while fighting Clinton in the thirty-nine primaries, Obama did not overlook the seventeen states and territories that, like Iowa, choose their national convention delegates through caucuses. He strongly out-organized Clinton in those contests, winning fourteen of seventeen caucuses. The delegates Obama won in the caucuses put him over the top. Clinton withdrew from the nominating contest on June 7, 2008.

As hard-fought as his victory was, Obama faced only one serious crisis during the entire nomination campaign. In early March, news organizations and websites showed video recordings of some controversial sermons by Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, including one in which Wright blamed the United States for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington and another in which he accused the federal government of “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” Obama largely defused the crisis by giving a speech in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, repudiating Wright's statements and thoughtfully outlining his own views on race relations. But he faced continuing difficulties winning white working class votes against Clinton in the primaries, and some doubted that he could win their support in the general election against the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

Partly to expand his appeal to working-class whites, and partly to offset his own modest foreign policy credentials, Obama named Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate on August 22, two days before the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado. Biden had grown up in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania, and during his thirty-six years as a senator from Delaware, had risen up the seniority ladder to become chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

In his acceptance speech on the last night of the convention, Obama outlined the issues of his general election campaign. Among other things, Obama promised to “cut taxes for 95 percent of all working families,” “end our dependence on oil from the Middle East,” “invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy,” provide “affordable, accessible health care for every single American,” close “corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow,” “end this war in Iraq responsibly and finish the fight against al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan,” and allow “our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to visit the person they love in a hospital and live lives free of discrimination.”

Obama left Denver on August 29 enjoying a small lead over McCain in the polls. But on that same day, McCain stole Obama's thunder by selecting Governor Sarah T. Palin of Alaska as his running mate. Palin balanced the Republican ticket in some obvious ways: young rather than old (Palin was forty-four, McCain was seventy-two), a woman rather than a man, a governor rather than a senator, and a social conservative rather than a national security conservative. At the same time, Palin's reform record in Alaska reinforced McCain's longstanding image as a political “maverick” who bucked the Washington establishment. Her rousing acceptance speech at the convention helped to propel the Republican ticket into a small lead over Obama and Biden in early September.

McCain maintained his narrow advantage in the polls until mid-September, when the nation's financial sector, heavily invested in risky mortgage-backed securities, went into a sudden tailspin. In the three nationally televised debates between the presidential candidates that took place from September 26 to October 15, Obama's calm, confident, and competent demeanor impressed voters who were looking for both reassurance that all would be well and a change in the nation's direction. By eschewing federal campaign funds, Obama was also able to outspend McCain substantially on media advertising and grassroots organizing. In addition, Biden impressed most voters as a much more qualified choice for vice president than Palin, whose unfamiliarity with national and international issues was revealed in a series of television interviews. And, much to his credit, McCain refused to revive concerns about Obama's long association with Reverend Wright for fear of inflaming racial tensions.

Obama was elected handily on November 4, 2008. He defeated McCain by 53 percent to 46 percent in the national popular vote. Exit polls revealed that the two candidates broke even among voters who had participated in the 2004 election. But Obama built his majority among first-time voters who surged to the polls in 2008, many of them young or African American. In the Electoral College, Obama prevailed by a margin of 365 to 173. While carrying all of the traditionally “blue” states in the Northeast, Pacific Coast, and Great Lakes region, Obama built his majority by winning previously “red” states such as Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Colorado.

Election night inspired gracious oratory by both candidates. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” Obama told a cheering crowd of supporters, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” Conceding defeat, McCain said, “This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African Americans and the special pride that must be theirs tonight. We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation's reputation.”

Midterm Election of 2010

From the very start of Obama’s tenure as president, congressional Republicans pursued a strategy of consistent, strenuous opposition to most of his legislative initiatives. Politically, the strategy bore fruit in the 2010 midterm elections. As Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota said, “Their bumper sticker has one word: 'No.' Our bumper sticker has way too many words. And it says: 'Continued on the next bumper sticker.'”

Looking at the stubbornly high unemployment rate Obama inherited on taking office, many voters refused to accept the president's argument that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had kept joblessness from rising even higher. Voters who were satisfied with their health insurance continued to worry that Obama’s plan for health care reform would increase the cost and reduce the quality of medical care. The new grassroots conservative Tea Party movement fueled a surge in turnout among Republican voters in 2010 even as participation among Obama's core constituencies in 2008—young and African American voters—declined. On election day, the Republicans gained 6 seats in the Senate, reducing the Democrats' majority in that chamber from 18 (59 to 41) to 6 (53 to 47). The GOP added 63 seats in the House of Representatives, enough to gain control of the House by a 242 to 193 majority in the 112th Congress.

The certainty that divided government—a Republican House and a Democratic Senate and president—would prevail for the remainder of Obama's first term persuaded the president and the leaders of both parties to act on a variety of important issues during the post-2010 election “lame duck” session of Congress. With George W. Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts set to expire on December 31, 2010, Obama put aside his opposition to continuing them for families with more than $250,000 in annual income and agreed to allow congressional Republicans to keep the cuts in place. In return, the GOP accepted President Obama's proposal to extend unemployment benefits for jobless workers for a longer period, and both parties embraced a one-year reduction in social security taxes for everyone who pays them.

In addition, Congress and the president agreed to abolish President Bill Clinton's “don't ask, don't tell” policy preventing openly gay and lesbian people from serving in the military. Republicans feared that federal courts were about to order immediate integration of homosexuals into the armed services. General Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, persuaded them that the military was prepared to accept the change if allowed to implement it gradually. The lame duck session also saw the Senate ratify the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia by a 71 to 26 vote.

The 2012 Election

President Obama entered the 2012 election year with job approval ratings that were dangerously low (roughly 40 percent) and an unemployment rate that was dangerously high (more than 8 percent) for an incumbent seeking reelection. But, like Bill Clinton in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2004, Obama benefited enormously from not having to fight for his party's nomination. Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George Bush in 1992 had to wage such battles, and each of them was defeated by his general election opponent in November. In contrast, Obama was able to use the first eight months of 2012 to raise money, rebuild his campaign organization, develop lines of attack on his likely Republican opponents, and launch his general election campaign from a united, enthusiastic Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Caroline, in September 2012. Following the pattern of reelection-seeking presidents since the 1950s, Obama chose Vice President Biden to run with him for a second term.

While Obama was uniting his party for the fall, the Republicans were waging a fierce intraparty battle to choose their nominee. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney won the nomination, but was subjected to severe attacks by his Republican rivals. For example, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accused Romney of having “looted” companies during his career as a business consultant and branded him a “vulture capitalist.” Governor Rick Perry of Texas said that Romney had gotten rich by “sticking it to someone else.” Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Representative Michelle Bachman of Minnesota, and businessman Herman Cain were among the other Republican contenders who battered Romney relentlessly for being insufficiently conservative. Romney won the nomination and placated conservatives by choosing the chair of the House Budget Committee, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, as his vice presidential running mate in advance of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. But only then was he able to focus on raising money for the general election, move toward the more popular political center, and direct his campaign toward defeating Obama.

The Supreme Court's 2010 decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened the floodgates to corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals to spend massive amounts of money in an effort to elect either Obama or Romney, as well as in the congressional elections. By year's end, about $1 billion was spent by or on behalf of each of the two nominees for president, both of whom eschewed federal financing and the spending limits that accompanied that financing.

In a closely divided country, both Romney and Obama counted on winning about twenty states and fought the campaign in about ten “battleground” states. Some of them were large such as Florida and Ohio, and some of them were small such as New Hampshire and Iowa, but all of them were neither consistently “red” nor consistently “blue.” Romney's best moment came in the first presidential debate, in which he came across as politically moderate and personally engaging. Obama, like many incumbents, turned in a rusty and therefore ineffective performance. But, chastened by his weak showing, Obama came back strongly in the second and third debates and regained his lead over Romney.

Toward the end of the campaign, the unemployment rate finally dipped below 8 percent, reinforcing Obama's claim that his economic policies had placed the nation on the road to prosperity. He also benefited from his response to Hurricane Sandy, a “super storm” that struck the Northeast in late October. Obama toured the devastated New Jersey shore with the state’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, who praised the president for “springing into action immediately.” In the election day exit poll, 15 percent of voters said that Obama's reaction to the hurricane was the most important factor in their decision, and 73 percent of them voted for the president.

Obama defeated Romney by 51 percent to 47 percent in the national popular vote and by 332 to 206 in the electoral vote. His margin of victory was down slightly from 2008, making him the first president since Woodrow Wilson to be reelected by a smaller majority than in his first election. Also disappointing to Obama, the House of Representatives remained in Republican control, by a margin to 234 to 201. Obama—and Democrats generally—took heart from the party’s success in the Senate elections. Even though twenty-three of their seats were on the ballot in 2012 compared with only ten for the Republicans, the Democrats actually gained two seats in the election, raising their majority in the upper chamber to 55 to 45. Still more important for the long term, Obama ran best among those groups in the electorate that were growing most rapidly: young people, single people, nonreligious people, Latinos, and Asian Americans.

Despite his victories, Obama began his second term with a very limited mandate. His campaign's one-word theme was content-free—Forward!—and most of his speeches and commercials during the election were devoted to tearing down Romney rather than offering a policy agenda for the second term. The one specific issue Obama did stress on the campaign trail—his continuing desire to raise taxes on wealthy Americans—bore fruit one month after the election, when Congress voted to raise the marginal income tax rate from 35.0 percent to 39.6 percent on households with annual incomes above $450,000. But during the campaign, he deemphasized other issues that were important to him but politically risky, including immigration reform, climate change, and gun control.

Midterm Election of 2014

The 2014 midterm election repeated the pattern of Obama’s first term: success in the presidential election followed by defeat two years later at midterm. As in 2010, voter turnout was considerably lower in 2014 than it had been two years previously: 34 percent in 2014 (the lowest in a national election since 1942) compared with 58 percent in 2012. Because midterm electorates tend to have a higher concentration of the older and more conservative white voters who tend to favor Republican candidates, the Democrats were likely to suffer. Adding to their disadvantage in the Senate elections was that Democrats held 21 of 36 seats on the ballot in 2014, seven of them in states that Obama had lost to Romney.

Republicans gained nine seats in the Senate elections, the largest gain for any party since 1980, and took away control of the chamber from the Democrats with a 54-46 majority. In elections to the House of Representatives, the GOP added 13 seats to their majority, increasing it to 247-188, the party’s largest House majority since 1928. The Republicans’ success extended to elections for state office. They added two to their ranks of governors, leaving them in control of the executive in 31 states. They also won majorities in ten additional state legislative chambers, giving them control of 67 of 99. These showings, too, were the GOP’s best since 1928.

The 2014 midterm election guaranteed that Obama spent the last two years of his presidency with a Republican Congress. According to Politico, on the morning after the election “he told his staff to take an hour to mope, then get back to work.” Signaling his intention going forward to rely strongly on his executive authority rather than seek legislation from Congress, he added: “We still run the largest organization on the planet, with the largest capacity to do good.”

Postscript on the 2016 Election

Although the 22nd Amendment barred Obama from seeking a third term as president in 2016, he was intensely interested in seeing a Democrat succeed him, especially because all of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination promised to seek the repeal of major parts of his legislative legacy if one of them was elected. Obama did not endorse either of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, but he clearly favored Clinton as the most electable and privately discouraged Vice President Biden from entering the contest for fear of dividing his supporters between Biden and Clinton.

In the fall 2016 campaign, Obama campaigned ardently in multiple battleground states for Clinton and against the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, whom he described as “temperamentally unfit to be president.” Of Clinton, Obama declared, “There has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office than Hillary Clinton.” Two days after Donald Trump won the election, however, Obama met with him at the White House publicly told him, “We now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.”

First-Term Transition and Appointments

Since 1933, when the 20th Amendment to the Constitution moved up the date of the president’s inauguration from March 4 to January 20, new presidents-elect have had about eleven weeks to make the transition from candidate to president. Several important tasks must be accomplished in this period if the transition is to be successful. None is politically more important than appointing the White House staff and the cabinet. None is personally more important than preparing the new president's family for life in the White House.

During the summer of 2008, Obama appointed John Podesta, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and former chief of staff in the Clinton White House to begin preparing for the transition that would occur if Obama won the election. In October, President George W. Bush appointed a transition team to work cooperatively with whichever candidate was elected. As a result, Obama could get started as soon as the results were in on November 4. Just two days later, Obama announced that Representative Rahm Emanuel of Chicago would be his White House chief of staff.

The Obama transition team announced further high-ranking staff appointments in short order, with most of them going to friends and personal loyalists of the new president. As senior presidential advisers, Obama appointed David Axelrod, his chief campaign adviser, Pete Rouse, his Senate chief of staff, and Valerie Jarrett, his longtime Chicago friend and supporter. Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary during his Senate and presidential campaigns, was chosen as White House press secretary, and Chris Liu, Obama's legislative assistant in the Senate, became cabinet secretary.

Other important staff appointments went to: Jim Messina and Mona Sutphen (deputy chiefs of staff), Greg Craig (White House counsel), Ellen Moran (communications director), and Phil Schiliro (legislative liaison). Obama also named former Marine general James L. Jones as his national security adviser, former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers as director of the National Economic Council, and veteran congressional staffer Melody Barnes as his domestic policy adviser. Former Congressional Budget Office director Peter Orszag was appointed head of the Office of Management and Budget. Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress who had served in several administrations, was chosen as director of the Central Intelligence Agency director and retired Admiral Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence.

In appointing the core members of the cabinet—the heads of the fifteen executive departments—Obama relied in part on the “team-of-rivals” approach that presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin attributed to Abraham Lincoln in her 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Obama first appointed Hillary Rodham Clinton, his chief opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, as secretary of state. Obama also included two Republicans in the cabinet, inviting Bush's secretary of defense, Robert Gates, to remain in that position, and appointing Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois as secretary of transportation. Other cabinet appointments went to: Timothy Geithner (treasury), Eric Holder (attorney general), Janet Napolitano (homeland security), Hilda Solis (labor), Shaun Donovan (housing and urban development), Steven Chu (energy), Arne Duncan (education), Ken Salazar (interior), Tom Vilsack (agriculture), Eric Shinseki (veterans affairs) and Kathleen Sebelius (health and human services).

After the midterm elections in 2010, as President Obama recovered from what he labeled the “shellacking” the Democrats received, he instituted personnel changes in his administration. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, resigned in October 2010 to return to Chicago to run for mayor. In January 2011, Obama appointed William Daley to replace Emanuel. Daley, whose father and brother had both been mayor of Chicago, had worked on various Democratic campaigns, served in the Clinton administration, and been a banker on Wall Street. Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, resigned in February 2011 and was replaced by Jay Carney, a journalist who had served as Vice President Biden's director of communications. Similarly, Obama's senior adviser, David Axlerod, was replaced by David Plouffe, who managed the Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

Financial Troubles and Recovery

Like Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and Ronald Reagan in 1981, Obama had to address a major economic crisis as soon as he was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. The nation’s leading banks and other financial institutions were in serious danger of collapse. The economy had stopped growing and was hemorrhaging jobs, with the unemployment rate nearing 10 percent. Housing prices were in freefall, leading to numerous foreclosures.

Even before taking the oath of office, Obama had endorsed President George W. Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a $700-billion initiative to rescue the nation’s major banks by lending enough money to keep them solvent. As president, Obama also directed $60 billion in TARP funds to General Motors and Chrysler and its suppliers (in addition to the $20 billion President George W. Bush had authorized for that purpose) in an effort to keep the American automobile industry from going bankrupt. TARP worked: The auto companies, which had to reform their corporate operations in return for funding, survived, as did all of the major banks. By the end of 2009, these institutions already had repaid the government more than $600 billion. Nevertheless, many voters perceived the program as a bailout for wealthy bankers and corporate executives.

Obama's first major new recommendation to Congress was for an $800-billion economic stimulus package: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. About one-third of the money involved grants to state governments to keep them from laying off public employees or reducing unemployment compensation; about one-third was for middle-class tax cuts; and about a third went for bridges, highways, sewage treatment facilities, and other infrastructure projects. The latter category included tens of billions of dollars to spur research and development of renewable sources of energy, especially wind and solar. These sectors flourished in the years that followed and came to occupy a rapidly growing share of the nation’s overall energy usage. Although Obama hoped to pass the Recovery Act with bipartisan support, not a single Republican House member and only three Republican senators voted for it. Democratic control of Congress was strong enough to secure its passage, however, and President Obama signed the act into law on February 17, 2009.

By many measures, the president’s economic policies worked, leaving behind a strong economy when he left office in 2017. The policies averted a possible, even probable, free fall into another Great Depression. During the remainder of his tenure, a net 11.3 million new jobs were created, the unemployment rate fell from 10 percent to less than 5 percent, inflation and interest rates remained low, the major stock indexes more than doubled, and the annual federal budget deficit fell from more than $1.4 trillion to less than $600 billion. In 2015 wages, heretofore a lagging element of the economic recovery, began to grow faster than inflation—indeed, the income of middle-class (by 5 percent) and lower-end (by 8 percent) workers rose more sharply than in any year since the Census Bureau began tracking the numbers in 1967. Still, the annual economic growth rate did not exceed 2 percent at any time during Obama’s presidency and the trend toward growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of the population grew, fueling widespread political discontent among voters.

Health Care Reform

Obama wanted to do more as president than put out the economic fire he inherited on taking office. He also sought to enact a major reform of the nation’s health care system. Health care reform had been a leading Democratic Party goal since the presidency of Harry S. Truman. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson had secured the enactment of Medicare for older Americans and Medicaid for the poor. The next two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, each failed to persuade Congress to pass legislation to guarantee health care coverage for everyone else. Although Obama had only promised during the election campaign to address this issue “by the end of my four-year term,” he decided that his best chance of success was during his first year in office, when his popularity was likely to be at its highest and the Democrats enjoyed strong majorities in both houses of Congress.

Obama faced major hurdles in achieving health care legislation. Although congressional Democrats were united in support of reform, they were divided about what form it should take. Some insisted that the federal government offer a “public-option” (that is, a government-run) coverage plan, and others urged that private coverage be extended to those who lacked it. More than three-fourths of Americans had private health insurance in some form, and despite the steeply rising costs of health care, many of them worried that changing the system might make their own situation worse, as well as adding to the federal budget deficit that the Recovery Act had already sent soaring above $1 trillion per year.

In the face of these obstacles, Obama resolved that any reform proposal would have to be budget-neutral—that is, save as much money as it spent. He accommodated the interests of the pharmaceutical and hospital industries, both of which had helped to sink President Clinton’s health care bill through massive advertising and extensive lobbying. Obama invited Congress to share in developing the legislation, in contrast to the secret process that Clinton had employed.

These efforts alone were not enough to secure passage, especially when members of Congress encountered angry opposition to “Obamacare” from the Tea Party movement in a series of August 2009 town-hall meetings in their home states and districts. The president, frustrated that he was not getting through to the American people, decided to speak to the nation in a prime-time address to Congress on September 9, 2009.

“The plan I’m announcing tonight would meet three basic goals,” Obama declared. “It will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance. It will provide insurance to those who don’t. And it will slow the growth of health care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.” Specifically, “individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance—just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. Likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the costs of their workers.” Obama’s argument was overshadowed to some degree when, in response to his declaration that the “claim . . . that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants . . . is false,” Republican representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted, “You lie!” from his seat in the House chamber.

But the speech succeeded in arresting the months-long decline in public and congressional support for reform. In this altered political environment, the president launched a successful campaign to persuade members of Congress in face-to-face meetings. By year’s end, both houses of Congress had passed different versions of health care reform legislation. On March 23, 2010, after some elaborate but procedurally necessary legislative wrangling to persuade the House to pass the Senate bill without modification, Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law. One week later he signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which restored some of the House's preferred features.

Controversy over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) did not end when Congress enacted it. After Republicans won control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections, they began voting regularly to repeal it. When the party gained a majority of the Senate in 2014, that chamber joined the repeal effort. In January 2016, Obama vetoed the first repeal bill that Congress sent him, only his eighth veto as president and arguably the most consequential.

The ACA also mostly survived serious legal challenges. In the 2012 case of National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, the Supreme Court ruled by a narrow 5-4 majority that the law’s requirement that everyone obtain health insurance was constitutional, but a seven-justice majority overturned the additional requirement that states expand their Medicaid coverage, thereby making expansion optional for each state.

Other court cases arose under the Affordable Care Act during Obama’s second term. In 2014, the Court ruled 5-4 in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that closely-held private companies could choose on religious grounds not to obey a regulation issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring employers to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees under the act. In 2015, the Court ruled 6-3 in King v. Burwell that the federal government’s new power under the law to provide tax subsidies for poor and middle-class people to buy health insurance whether the state they lived in created its own purchasing exchange or not was constitutional.

The ACA’s greatest initial problem was neither political nor legal. The launch of the program in 2013 was seriously botched when the website through which people were to buy insurance proved inadequate to the task. For months, nearly every news story about Obamacare concerned problems with its website. The problems eventually were fixed but the damage to the program’s public reputation lingered. Even as the longstanding steep upward trend in the cost of health care slowed and the number of the nation’s uninsured dropped steadily through the end of Obama’s second term, reducing the share of uncovered adults from 18 percent to 11 percent, the American people remained deeply divided about the law.

In the 2016 election, both the victorious Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, and the reelected Republican Congress pledged to “repeal and replace” Obamacare as soon as possible. They also promised to preserve certain popular elements of the program such as guaranteed coverage of pre-existing conditions and children’s eligibility to be covered by their parents’ health insurance until age twenty-six. Although the Republicans controlled both the presidency and Congress, they were unable to repeal and replace Obamacare during President Trump’s first year in office.

Other Domestic Policy Initiatives

President Obama’s other first-term domestic policy initiatives included the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program, which created a competition among the states for $4.5 billion in extra funding tied to public school reforms authorizing more charter schools and tying teacher evaluations to student learning. Competing for this relatively small amount of money, political scientist William G. Howell reported in a 2015 study, spurred previously reform-averse states to adopt measures such as testing teacher effectiveness and allowing charter schools. Even states that did not receive grants pursued reform as part of the grant application process.

In 2010, Obama persuaded Congress to enact financial reform legislation, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, designed to prevent economic meltdowns like the one he inherited when he took office. Among other things, the act required “systematically important” financial institutions (those often described as “too big to fail”) to protect against major losses by maintaining higher levels of capital. The act also reduced banks’ ability to invest in risky securities and created a new federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to monitor the lending practices of banks, mortgage companies, and “payday” lenders, which make short-term, high-interest loans to a mostly low-income clientele.

The Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm election brought an end to Obama’s period of dramatic legislative accomplishment. He lacked the majority needed to pass bills through the House, and the Democratic majority in the Senate was not large enough to overcome Republican filibusters, which require a three-fifths vote to be brought to a close. As a result of the 2014 midterm election, Obama faced a Republican majority in both congressional chambers during his final two years in office, bringing the legislative process almost to a standstill.

Budget Negotiations

Facing the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives and an enlarged Republican minority in the Senate, President Obama spent much of 2011 and 2012 on the defensive. Most of 2011 was dominated by congressional Republicans’ efforts to legislate massive cuts in domestic spending in order to bring down the federal budget deficit. Democrats in Congress fiercely resisted these efforts, leaving the president caught in the middle. Obama shared the Republicans’ goal of long-term deficit reduction, but worried that immediate reductions in federal spending would stifle the still struggling economic recovery. He also thought that any deficit reduction plan should include tax increases on high-income individuals and households, a policy he had pursued since announcing his candidacy for president in 2007.

During the summer of 2011, Obama secretly negotiated with the new Speaker of the House, Republican Representative John Boehner of Ohio, to see if they could agree on a deficit reduction plan. In early August, the two leaders came close to an agreement that would impose $800 billion in tax increases and $3.2 trillion in spending reductions over a ten-year period. But when a small group of Republican and Democratic senators offered a deficit-reduction plan of their own that included $1.2 trillion of tax increases, Obama realized that he would lose the support of his party if he stuck with his and Boehner’s agreement on the smaller amount. President Obama told Boehner he needed $400 billion more in taxes before he could agree to their deal, and the Republican leader, aware that most members of his party’s caucus opposed any tax increases at all, broke off negotiations. Boehner’s ongoing struggle with the increasingly conservative House Republican caucus led to his retirement as Speaker in October 2015 and his replacement in that position by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who had been the Republican nominee for vice president in 2012.

In lieu of the aborted 2011 $4 trillion deficit reduction agreement, Congress and the president settled on a more modest plan in which Congress would create a “super committee” of House and Senate Republicans and Democrats, whose purpose was to identify $1.2 trillion in tax increases, spending cuts, or some combination of both by the end of 2012. If the committee failed to reach an agreement, then the plan stipulated that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts would automatically take effect, half in defense and half in domestic programs. The rationale was that the threat of “sequestration” would motivate Republicans who did not want to see the defense budget cut and Democrats who did not want certain domestic programs cut to pressure the super committee to reach an agreement. This did not happen. As political scientists David Lewis and Terry Moe have written, “the super committee failed miserably, and most of 2012 was then wasted as legislators looked toward the November elections and refused to bite the bullet on the deficit issue.” The first round of sequestrations took effect but proved so politically painful to legislators from both parties that their repetition in future years became doubtful.

Supreme Court and Other Judicial Appointments

Two vacancies occurred on the US Supreme Court during Obama’s first term. David Souter retired in 2009, and John Paul Stevens retired in 2010. Both were liberal justices, and Obama nominated two liberals to replace them: federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court nominee in history, to replace Souter and Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace Stevens. Senate Republicans did not strenuously resist either nomination because replacing liberal justices with other liberals did not affect the Court's ideological balance. The Senate confirmed Sotomayor on August 6, 2009, by a vote of 68 to 31, and it confirmed Kagan on August 5, 2010, by a vote of 63 to 37.

On February 13, 2016, during Obama’s final year as president, Justice Antonin J. Scalia, a leader among the Court’s conservatives, unexpectedly died. About an hour after Scalia’s death was confirmed, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that because Scalia’s seat had become vacant during an election year, the Senate would not even consider a nomination from President Obama. “This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” McConnell declared, arguing that “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice.” Historically, the Senate had often denied confirmation to nominees appointed in a president’s final year in office, but it had never refused even to consider a nomination.

McConnell’s declaration did not deter Obama from nominating Merrick B. Garland, the Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, on March 16. Garland’s judicial record revealed him to be more conservative than many Democrats preferred but more liberal than many conservatives found acceptable, especially since his addition to the Court would mean that a majority of justices had been chosen by Democratic Presidents.

Senate Republicans held firm in their resolve, gambling that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016, would not win the election and appoint a justice even more liberal than Garland. In an unprecedented move, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump issued two lists totaling twenty-one names of his own potential Supreme Court nominees during the campaign. Garland’s nomination died, and Trump nominated someone from his second list, federal appellate court judge Neil M. Gorsuch, soon after taking office.

Nevertheless, Obama shifted the thirteen federal courts of appeal to a Democrat-appointed majority. Republican domination of the presidency for 28 of the 40 years from 1969 to 2009 had left the Courts of Appeals with a majority of Republican-appointed judges for nearly all of the two decades before Obama became president. In 2008, the final year of George W. Bush’s second term, 100 of 178 federal appellate judges were Republican appointees, compared with 66 Democratic appointees and 12 vacancies. As the end of Obama’s tenure approached in 2016, Democratic appointees outnumbered Republican appointees on the appellate courts by 94 to 76, with 10 vacancies. Obama had chosen 54 of these judges.  Democratic appointees now outnumbered Republican appointees on 9 of the 13 federal courts of appeals as compared with just one when he first took office. 

Facilitating the confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees, which had slowed dramatically midway through his tenure, was a change in Senate rules that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, initiated in 2013. Previously, the rules required a three-fifths majority—60 of the 100 senators—to bring a nomination to the floor for a vote. Even when the Democrats controlled the Senate, Republicans nearly always had enough members to thwart these efforts. The rules of the Senate itself, however, could be changed by a simple majority of senators—51, not 60—and Reid pushed through a rules change that allowed a simple majority to approve all judicial and executive branch nominations except for Supreme Court justices, to whom the old three-fifths rule still applied. Not just Democratic presidents with a Democratic Senate would be able to take advantage of the new rule in the future, of course, as the new Republican president and Republican Senate found when they benefited from it starting in 2017.

The Start of the Second Term

As with most two-term administrations, numerous changes occurred in the cabinet and White House staff as Obama began his second term. Only Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack served all eight years of the Obama presidency. What made the Obama presidency different was that these changes almost always occurred in the normal course of things, not as the result of scandal or political controversy—a consequence of Obama’s famously “no drama” style of governing.

Of the four “inner cabinet” posts, the heads of all but the Justice Department (Attorney General Eric Holder) decided it was time to move on. In 2013, Obama chose Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and Kerry served until the end of the president’s second term in 2017. Greater instability attended the position of secretary of defense. In 2011, Obama had appointed Leon Panetta, who had served in several administrations in high-ranking positions, to replace Robert Gates; during the second term, he appointed former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, to replace Panetta in 2013; and in 2015, he appointed Ashton Carter, who served out the remainder of Obama’s second term. In 2015, Holder stepped down as attorney general and was replaced by Loretta Lynch. Obama also named White House chief of staff Jack Lew to replace Timothy Geithner as secretary of the treasury.

In other cabinet positions, John Bryson became secretary of commerce in 2011, when Gary Locke stepped down, and Penny Pritzker replaced Bryson in 2015. As secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell replaced Ken Salazar in 2013, and as secretary of health and human services, Sylvia Mathews Burwell replaced Kathleen Sibelius in 2015. Thomas Perez took Hilda Solis’s place as secretary of labor in 2013. Housing and urban development secretary Shaun Donovan was replaced by Julian Castro in 2014; Anthony Foxx replaced secretary of transportation Ray LaHood in 2013; and Ernest Muniz replaced Steven Chu as secretary of energy in 2013. In the three most recently created departments, John B. King Jr. replaced Arne Duncan as secretary of education in 2016; Robert McDonald replaced Eric Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs in 2014: and Jeh Johnson became secretary of homeland security when Janet Napolitano stepped down in 2013. None of these transitions involved scandal or, except for Hagel’s abbreviated tenure as secretary of defense, seemed untimely. Historically, long tenure as head of an executive department has been the exception, not the rule.

The same pattern applied to leading positions in the White House staff and the executive office of the president. Obama had four chiefs of staff, replacing Rahm Emanuel with William Daley and Daley with Jack Lew during his first term before settling on deputy national security adviser Dennis McDonough as chief of staff for the entire second term. The president also had four Office and Management and Budget directors:Peter Orszag (2009-2010), Jack Lew (2010-2012), Sylvia Burwell (2013-2014), and Shaun Donovan (2014-2017). Three individuals served as national security adviser: James Jones (2009-2010), Tom Donilon (2010-2013), and Susan Rice (2013-2017). As White House press secretary, perhaps the most public staff positions, Obama was served by Robert Gibbs (2009-2011), Jay Carney (2011-2014), and Josh Earnest (2014-2017).

On January 20, 2013, Obama delivered his second Inaugural Address. It was traditional in some ways and innovative in others. Like most such addresses, he struck unifying themes grounded in the American experience. He opened the speech, for example, by quoting the Declaration of Independence's statement that “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But as the address unfolded, Obama became more specific than has been customary on such occasions. Among the issues he raised were climate change, same-sex marriage, and health care reform. The unifying theme of the address was that policies such as these would help to fulfill the ideals stated in the Declaration.

In his February 12, 2013, State of the Union address, Obama elaborated on the agenda that he offered at the inauguration, while also calling for greater federal support for early childhood education, immigration reform to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, an increase in the minimum wage, and new gun control legislation. The last of these issues had taken on special urgency after December 14, 2012, when a gunman shot and killed twenty school children and six teachers and staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. As in the past, Republicans in Congress, along with some Democrats from generally rural pro-gun states, thwarted passage of any gun control legislation. Congressional resistance to new gun control laws persisted after several subsequent mass shootings, including the slaying of nine worshippers at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015.

Obama also called on Congress to avoid the $85 billion of across-the-board cuts in the federal budget—half in defense and half in domestic programs—that were scheduled to take place automatically on March 1, 2013, if legislators could not agree on another plan for achieving deficit reduction. The scheduled automatic cuts were a consequence of the decision Congress made in August 2011 to achieve $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over a ten-year period through “sequestration” if no other method could be agreed on. Obama wanted Congress to forestall the scheduled sequester by raising taxes and making targeted cuts in spending. Sequestration nevertheless took effect on March 1 as scheduled. In October 2013, the government shut down for two weeks when Congress and the president were unable to agree on a budget. Later that year, they reached a compromise agreement that suspended sequestration for the foreseeable future. The combination of revived economic growth and budgetary austerity brought the annual federal budget deficit down from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to $0.4 trillion in 2015 before ticking upward to $0.6 trillion the following year.

Congressional Republicans were loath to pass nearly all of the legislation the president wanted. A possible exception, it seemed for a time, might be immigration reform, which many Republicans were open to in 2013—not because of Obama, but because the GOP’s dismal performance in the 2012 election among Latino voters made many party leaders want to repair their image as an anti-immigrant party. In 2013, a bipartisan majority of the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act—an immigration reform bill creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants—by a vote of 68 to 32. The bill died when Republican conservatives in the House, responding to growing grassroots anti-immigration pressure from their constituents, refused to bring it to the floor. Obama turned to executive action in an effort to achieve some of the immigrations reforms he had not been able to obtain through the legislative process.

Executive Action

Concerning immigration and several other matters, congressional Republican resistance to Obama’s legislative agenda led him to rely increasingly on executive orders, proclamations, regulations, and other unilateral executive actions during his second term. “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he said in 2014 as a way of characterizing his powers that did not depend on congressional cooperation. In the area of domestic policy, Obama’s executive actions included:

• Issuing the Climate Action Plan, which resulted in the Environmental Protection Agency ordering such severe reductions in carbon emissions from power plants as to reduce the nation’s coal plant capacity by nearly one-third.
• Vetoing a bill to authorize construction of the 1000-mile-long Keystone XL Pipeline that would have connected Canada’s oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico.
• Issuing an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contract employees to $10.10 per hour.
• Requiring background checks for purchasers of guns at gun shows.
• Issuing an executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. In 2014, Obama publicly celebrated the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision granting marriage rights to same sex couples. He called to congratulate the plaintiffs and had the exterior of the White House lit with rainbow colors.
• Creating MyRa’s to help Americans without pensions to save for retirement.
• Cracking down on for-profit colleges whose former students have high levels of student loan debt and low incomes.

Some of Obama’s executive actions were undone by his successor and others by federal court decisions ruling he had exceeded his legal authority. For example, in February 2015, a federal district judge stayed the president’s 2014 DAPA policy (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans), which would have allowed undocumented immigrants whose children were American citizens to stay in the United States, in the case of Texas v. United States. In June 2016, the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 in an appeal of the ruling, which left it in place. An earlier Obama initiative—DACA, or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals—remained in effect, however, allowing certain classes of minors who arrived in the United States illegally to stay in the country.

Obama used the veto power sparingly but effectively. He vetoed twelve bills passed by Congress during his eight years as president, including bills to overturn the Affordable Care Act and to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Congress overrode only one of his vetoes, a 2016 measure to allow victims of terrorist acts to sue countries that supported the acts. Equally important, veto threats by the president kept Congress from passing other measures of which he disapproved, or at least modifying them in ways that made them acceptable for him to sign.

The president’s constitutional power to issue pardons was used with much greater frequency by Obama, especially during his final two years in office when his attention turned to criminal justice reform. He issued 212 pardons and commuted 1,715 sentences, more than the previous thirteen presidents combined. Most of these acts of clemency were on behalf of individuals who had been sentenced to very long sentences for committing federal drug crimes.

Iraq and Afghanistan

In addition to inheriting an economy in crisis when he took office, President Obama inherited two wars, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. An early opponent of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Obama promised during the 2008 election campaign to withdraw American troops as soon as possible. In February 2009, he announced a plan to bring troop levels down from 160,000 to 50,000 by August 2010, including the removal of all combat forces. The remaining troops, he added, would be withdrawn by the end of 2011. For several years, the withdrawal proceeded smoothly, in part because Obama was able to build on the gains achieved by Bush's “surge” of 20,000 additional troops in 2007, which had helped the government of Iraq to restore a measure of stability to the country. By 2012, only 150 American troops were in Iraq, a number that remained level for about three years.

Obama’s other war-related campaign promise was to step up the US military commitment in Afghanistan in order to keep the extremist Taliban regime from regaining power and allowing al Qaeda once again to use the country as a base of terrorist operations against the United States and its allies. Soon after taking office, Obama granted the military’s request, initially made at the end of the Bush presidency, to send an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, raising the American military presence there to about 60,000.

As his first year as president unfolded, however, Obama became convinced that a change in military strategy was needed so that the government of Afghanistan eventually would be able to defeat the Taliban on its own. In June, he appointed a new military commander, General Stanley McChrystal, and asked him to recommend a new course of action. McChrystal requested 40,000 more troops and promised to deploy them to train Afghan forces to fight the Taliban instead of relying on American might. After an extended series of meetings beginning in September, Obama announced in a speech on December 1, 2009, at West Point that he had approved a short-term surge of 33,000 troops with a proviso that American forces must begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011. The president soon fired McChrystal for making disparaging remarks about members of the administration, and he replaced him with General David Petraeus, who had developed and implemented the successful surge in Iraq that inspired McChrystal's new strategy for Afghanistan.

After the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Republicans were much more interested in domestic policy than foreign policy, which allowed President Obama to accomplish a complete disengagement of US forces, at least in terms of active combat, from Afghanistan by 2014. The number of American troops in Afghanistan, which peaked at 97,000 in 2011, declined steadily to about 12,000 in 2015 before leveling off at that figure as the president reluctantly acknowledged that the campaign to defeat the Taliban was not yet won. Buttressing Obama’s credentials on military matters was the May 2, 2011, killing of al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, by a team of Navy SEALS. Intelligence agencies had concluded that bin Laden was probably hiding in a residential compound near Abbottabad, Pakistan. Lacking certainty on the matter, and realizing the risks attending a military strike, Obama nonetheless ordered the attack, which was successful. In celebrating bin Laden's death, Americans applauded the president's decisiveness and judgment.

Even after United States soldiers killed bin Laden in May 2011 and began disengaging from Iraq and Afghanistan, the president expanded the strategic deployment of special forces and drones in a “secret war” against suspected terrorists. (Drones are remotely controlled, unpiloted aircraft that conduct surveillance and drop precision-targeted bombs.) Moreover, the White House joined with NATO to help Libyan rebels end the reign of dictator, Colonel Muamar el-Qaddafi. The administration argued that the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to report to Congress when he deploys American forces, did not apply because a state of “hostilities” did not exist.

Obama and his national security team claimed that they were using a new approach to war that relied on multinational rather than unilateral action, and surgical air and Special Forces strikes rather than on massive troop deployments. The administration’s reliance on bombing rather than ground troops in Libya, however, deprived it of any means to reduce the chaos that ensued after Qaddafi was killed. One unfortunate consequence was a radical mob attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in which four American officials were killed.

Syria and ISIS

During the first year of his second term, President Obama seemed determined to take the United States off a “perpetual war footing.” Sensing the country’s war fatigue and noting resistance from both Democrats and Republicans to additional commitments in the Middle East, the president decided not to launch missile strikes in Syria in support of rebels fighting the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad, even though the brutal dictator had crossed Obama’s stated “red line” by using chemical weapons against civilians. Calling off a planned air attack on Syria at virtually the last minute, Obama decided to refer the matter to Congress, which had little interest in endorsing his proposed course. A few days later, Obama accepted Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s offer to persuade Syria to get rid of its chemical weapons.

With the dramatic rise of a radical group that declared itself the Islamic State during the fall of 2014, however, presidential forbearance gave way to a more muscular new course in the Middle East. The Islamic State, known by most as ISIS but, somewhat idiosyncratically referred to as ISIL by the president, was a former al Qaeda affiliate that took advantage of the civil war in Syria and the lassitude of the Iraq government to gain territory on both sides of the Iraq–Syria border.

As the president acknowledged, his administration underestimated the danger of ISIS’s incursions into Syria and Iraq; indeed, Obama initially dismissed these fighters as a “JV team.” But the steady advance of the self-proclaimed Caliphate and the powerful public reaction to ISIS’s release of videos that graphically showed the beheading of two American journalists spurred the President to action. In a September 10, 2014, speech to the nation, Obama announced a plan to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.” Two weeks later, soon after ordering air strikes on dozens of ISIS targets in Syria, the president issued an even more militant call to arms against the self-described Islamic State in an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations. The number of American troops in Iraq with a mission to help fight ISIS rose to more than 5,000 by 2016, and his administration conducted more than 10,000 air strikes against the radical organization.

Although the air strikes in Syria had strong bipartisan support, constitutional and partisan issues lurked just beneath the surface. In his speech to the nation, Obama said he “welcomed congressional support for this effort,” yet insisted he had “the authority to address the threat from ISIL.” That authority, he claimed, resided in the resolution Congress passed in 2001 authorizing President George W. Bush to use military force against those “who planned, authorized, committed or aided” in the September 11 attacks. The White House argued that the resolution covered a war on ISIS because the terrorist organization is “the true inheritor of Osama bin Laden’s legacy—notwithstanding the recent public split between al Qaeda’s senior leadership and ISIS.”

The president took pains to ensure that the battle against ISIS would be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because it “would not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Yet the military action involved not just “a systematic campaign of airstrikes” but the deployment of additional troops “to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence, and equipment.” Notwithstanding the strong public sentiment to strike back against ISIS’ atrocities, the failure of Congress to place limits on a new Middle East mission renewed concerns about executive power.

Legal and constitutional issues aside, the situation on the ground in Iraq and, especially, Syria remained troubled at the end of Obama’s tenure as president. Nightmarish instability in Syria had consequences not just for the region but for Europe as well, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled in pursuit of refuge from the chaotic conditions in their country. Growing Russian ambitions in the Middle East under Putin also were a source of frustration, as was the Putin-ordered military occupation of neighboring Ukraine in 2014. In response to the Russian occupation, the United States and European nations imposed economic sanctions against Russia but they brought about no withdrawal of Russian forces.

Iran Nuclear Agreement and Trade Policy

Obama’s foreign policy goals extended beyond the wars he inherited or that broke out while he was in office. At the start of his second term in 2013, he and the leaders of five other nations began negotiations with Iran that resulted in a 2015 agreement designed to prevent that country from developing nuclear weapons for at least a decade in return for removing United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. Under the agreement, Iran surrendered 97 percent of its enriched uranium. 

Obama also restored diplomatic relations with communist Cuba in December 2014 for the first time in more than a half century and visited the country in March 2016. In 2014, the president reached a bilateral climate agreement in which China and the United States agreed to substantially reduce carbon emissions. That agreement laid the foundation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015, at which nearly every country in the world agreed to monitor their emissions and develop plans to reduce them. 

In an effort to tie Pacific nations more closely to the United States than to China, Obama negotiated a multinational trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with twelve trading partners from round the Pacific basin. TPP was caught up in election-year politics in 2016, however, when the leading candidates in both major political parties opposed it, and it was never presented to Congress. So controversial had free trade become by the end of Obama’s second term that even Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state had called TPP “the gold standard” in trade agreements, opposed it.

Other than in his fervent long-term concern about climate change, Obama’s approach to foreign policy was pragmatic and piecemeal. He enunciated no sweeping Obama Doctrine analogous to the Monroe Doctrine or the Bush Doctrine, preferring to deal with situations as they arose around the globe on a case-by-case basis. More than anything else, Obama said, his rule was, “Don’t do stupid stuff,” sometimes substituting a different four-letter word for “stuff” in private conversation.

When Barack Obama celebrated America’s racial and cultural diversity during his active political and presidential career, he spoke from a lifetime of personal experience. In The Audacity of Hope, he wrote: “As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half-Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.”

Obama married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson on October 3, 1992. Their first daughter, Malia Ann, was born on July 4, 1998, and their second daughter, Natasha, known as Sasha, was born on June 10, 2001. Both Michelle and the Obamas’ two daughters were born in Chicago and, until moving to Washington, DC, on January 5, 2009, two months after Barack Obama was elected president, they had spent almost their entire lives there. The Obamas chose to send their daughters to Sidwell Friends School, Sasha initially as a second-grader at the school's Bethesda, Maryland, elementary school campus and Malia as a fifth-grader at its middle school campus in Washington. The Obamas were accompanied to Washington by Michelle's mother, Marian Shields Robinson, whom they invited to live with them in the White House and who did so for all eight years of the Obama presidency. Robinson is the only surviving parent of either Barack or Michelle Obama.

Other close family members include Michelle Obama's brother, Craig Robinson, who coached the Oregon State University men’s basketball team until 2014 before beginning a broadcast career with ESPN, and Barack Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro Ng. Ng was born in 1970 in Indonesia, the daughter of Obama's mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. Growing up, Barack Obama’s family influenced his values in ways that later shaped his political philosophy. “Empathy is at the heart of my moral code ... ,” he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes. Like most of my values, I learned about empathy from my mother.” As a result, Obama is “angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist[s] that government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all.”

During his final year as president, Obama consulted with a wide range of formal and informal advisers about life after the presidency, which began on January 20, 2017. In March 2016, Obama said that he and his family would remain in Washington, DC, at least until Sasha finished high school in 2019. In May 2016, the White House announced Malia’s decision to attend Harvard University, starting in the fall of 2017 after she took a gap year between graduating from high school and beginning college. The Obamas rented and then bought a house in the prestigious Kalorama section of northwest Washington.

Just 55 years old when his second term ended, Obama announced shortly before leaving office that as a former president, he and former Attorney General Eric Holder would focus on helping Democrats win control of more of the state legislative houses that will shape the redistricting process after the 2020 census. He also hoped to cement his legacy and give back to his adopted hometown of Chicago through the development of the Obama Presidential Center. Located in the South Side, the center will focus on civic engagement and community development.

Obama also said that although he intended to play a restrained role in national politics, he would speak out “when I think our core values may be at stake,” including matters involving “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and “efforts to round up kids who have grown up here . . . and send them someplace else, when they love this country." Applying this rubric, Obama criticized his successor, President Donald J. Trump, ten days after leaving office for his travel ban, which attempted to limit entry to the United States by refugees and residents of seven majority-Muslim countries.

When President Obama left office on January 20, 2017, his impact and legacy were unclear. He will always be the first African American president in US history, and his administration was notable for its stability. With Republicans in control of both the presidency and the Congress in 2017, however, some of Obama’s most notable achievements—the Affordable Care Act, the Paris climate change agreement, and Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals—were overturned or under attack. 

Obama’s lasting impact on American life may turn out to have been greatest in terms of the crises that did not happen. Despite teetering on the edge of economic catastrophe, the nation did not fall into the abyss of a second Great Depression in 2009. And despite calls for more aggressive military action, the nation scaled back on its troop commitments rather than launching additional wars. How long and in what form Obama’s policy changes will endure remains to be seen. Those that depended on unilateral executive action have been the most fragile, since they can be undone by subsequent actions by his successors in the presidency.

Obama’s job approval rating in polls of the American people rose during his second term, cresting at about 60 percent during his final months in office. The public also rated him highly in comparison with other recent presidents. A Quinnipiac University polls released in late January 2017 found that 29 percent said he was the greatest president since World War II, just one point behind Ronald Reagan, who was named by 30 percent and well ahead of every other postwar president.

Scholars who were surveyed at about the same time agreed. In a C-SPAN survey of 91 historians, political scientists, and other presidential scholars, Obama was ranked 12th among all presidents since George Washington for the overall quality of his performance as chief executive. Among his recent predecessors, Obama surpassed George W. Bush, who ranked 33rd, Bill Clinton (15th), and George H.W. Bush (20th), but not the president whose trajectory-changing legacy Obama once said he wanted to emulate: Ronald Reagan, who ranked 8th.

Donald Trump was elected on November 8, 2016, in what was widely seen as a surprise upset victory. He was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017. By the time he left office after losing the 2020 presidential election to former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s presidency was largely defined by scandal, investigation, and intense partisan division. Both supporters and critics often used the word “unprecedented” to describe his time in office.

A number of factors marked Trump as distinctive even before his presidency began. At 70 years old, he was the oldest person to ever become president, surpassing a record set by Ronald Reagan, who was 69 when he took office in 1981. Trump’s successor, Joseph Biden, re-set the record for oldest president when he was inaugurated four years later at age 78. Trump was also the first president never to have served in either public office or in military leadership before arriving in the White House. Finally, he was the fifth person (and the second in sixteen years) to win a victory in the Electoral College but to lose the popular vote. His Democratic challenger in 2016, Hillary Clinton, won 2.8 million more votes than Trump did, but he prevailed in the Electoral College, 304 to 227.

Trump was also the first US president to be impeached twice. In December 2019, the Democratically controlled House of Representatives impeached President Trump on the charge of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress because of his efforts to persuade a foreign leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, to interfere with the upcoming US presidential election. He stood trial in the Senate and was acquitted in February 2020.

The House of Representatives impeached President Trump again in January 2021. In a stark break from all past precedent, Trump refused to concede the 2020 presidential election or acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, in which Biden won approximately 7 million more votes and the Electoral College vote by 306 to 232. Trump led a protracted effort to undermine the certification of the votes, leading Trump supporters to violently assault the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. That event led to a second impeachment. He stood trial in the Senate and was acquitted again several weeks after his term expired.

Trump was also the first US president to be convicted of a felony. In May 2024, a jury in New York City found former President Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The case was known as the hush money case, and it alleged that in October 2016, Trump had one of his lawyers, Michael Cohen, pay a porn star, Stormy Daniels, to keep quiet about a sexual liaison she claimed to have had with Trump in 2006. The prosecution argued that Trump used fraudulent business practices for the purpose of interfering with the outcome of the 2016 presidential election by misleading voters. The jury agree with the prosecution, finding him guilty on all 34 counts, but Trump pledged to appeal the verdict.

Donald John Trump was born in the borough of Queens in New York City on June 14, 1946, and remained a New Yorker throughout most of his life. In the waning months of his presidency in the fall of 2020, he formally changed his residency to Florida. He was the fourth of five children born to Mary Anne MacLeod Trump and her husband Fred, a residential real estate developer. As a young adult, Donald Trump took over his father’s real estate business and expanded it into a range of other fields, from hotels and casinos, golf courses, beauty pageants, and branded products around the world.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he cultivated an international reputation, both for his branded venues and products as well as for himself personally, as the embodiment of the high life. Through a series of how-to books and, in the 2000s, as the star of a realty television show, The Apprentice, Trump portrayed himself as a fabulously wealthy and talented businessperson. Many of his traditional businesses, including his casinos, suffered financially, and he went through a series of bankruptcies. Yet his ability to craft an association between the brand-name “Trump” and business success remained strong.

Donald Trump was also the first US president to have been divorced twice. (Ronald Reagan was the first to have been divorced at all.) He had five children with three wives. The oldest three—Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—played key roles in his businesses. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, became senior White House advisors during the Trump presidency. Trump’s third wife, Melanie Trump (née Knauss), served as First Lady.

Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, the fourth of five children of Mary Anne MacLeod Trump and her husband, Frederick Christ Trump, Sr. Trump’s mother was born in Scotland and emigrated to the United States in 1930. His father was born in New York City, the son of German immigrants. During Trump’s childhood, the family lived an upscale community of the Queens Borough of New York City known as Jamaica Estates.

Fred Trump owned and operated a successful real estate company called Elizabeth Trump & Son, named after Fred Trump’s mother and himself, which developed properties for middle-class white families in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. When they were old enough, the three Trump sons—Fred, Jr., Donald, and Robert—worked for the company in construction sites and offices. The Trumps’ daughters, Elizabeth and Maryanne, did not work for the family business. Donald and Robert Trump eventually became involved in their father’s business as adults. Their brother Fred became an airline pilot and died of alcoholism in 1981. Donald Trump cites his brother’s ultimately fatal battle with addiction as the reason he does not drink. Robert Trump died in 2020.

As a child, Trump displayed behavioral difficulties. “He was a pretty rough fellow when he was small,” his father later remembered. In an effort to instill a sense of discipline, his parents enrolled him at age 13 in the New York Military Academy, north of New York City. Trump reported that he enjoyed the drills and lifestyle, but the academy marked the extent of his involvement with the military. He enrolled in Fordham University in New York City and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics through Penn’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in 1968.

During the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, when Trump was in his early 20s, he used college and medical deferments (due to a physician’s diagnosis of bone spurs) to avoid being drafted into the armed forces. When the United States instituted a draft lottery system in 1969, an effort to make conscription more random and less dependent on exemptions, Trump’s birthday was number 356 out of 366 in the lottery. He was not called into service.

Trump began his business career while still enrolled in college, investing in Philadelphia real estate. Upon completing his undergraduate education in 1968, he returned to New York and joined his father’s business full time. Public criticism and scandal marked Trump’s early career. In 1973, the US Justice Department accused the Trump company of discriminating against African American would-be renters. Although the company did not admit wrongdoing, it settled the matter by agreeing to rent more apartments to Black tenants.

In the 1970s, Trump helped expand the business, buying properties outside of New York City in locations such as Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, and California. At the same time, he expressed an interest in expanding the company’s real estate operations closer to home, moving from New York’s outer boroughs and into Manhattan, a traditionally more affluent and “high society” area. By the mid-1970s, the now renamed Trump Organization had branched into Manhattan skyscrapers.

Trump’s first big move, in 1976, was to develop the Grand Hyatt Hotel on the grounds of the by-then bankrupt Penn Central Railroad’s Commodore Hotel. Although the Trump Organization did not have enough money to purchase the hotel, Trump used his personal relationship with the Hyatt hotel chain and his father’s political clout (Fred Trump was a prominent member of Brooklyn’s Democratic Party) to negotiate an unusual arrangement with the government of New York City. Trump received a 40-year tax abatement, or a reprieve on paying property taxes on the hotel. Originally worth $4 million per year, the abatement totaled approximately $400 million over 40 years due to inflation in the value of the property and changes in the tax code. He then used the promise of those savings to persuade the Commodore to sell to him and Hyatt to partner with him. “Whatever my friends Fred and Donald want in this town, they get,” New York Mayor Abraham Beame reportedly said of the deal.

In the 1980s, Donald Trump established a reputation as a major real estate developer. He built the 36-story cooperative apartment complex called Trump Plaza as well as Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which housed luxury stores and Trump’s own multi-floor residence and company headquarters. He also expanded into the casino business in Atlantic City, New Jersey, building the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino (originally called Harrah’s at Trump Plaza) and Trump Castle. In 1990, he built the Trump Taj Mahal at a cost of nearly $1 billion—he called it the “eighth wonder of the world.”

Despite these major business operations, the Trump Organization faced severe financial challenges. Trump borrowed significant amounts of money to fund the hotels and casinos. The situation grew so severe in 1990 that Fred Trump, then in his 80s, purchased more than $3 million in casino chips at Trump Castle so the casino could make an interest payment. That purchase was later judged to be an illegal loan, and New Jersey assessed a fine of $65,000. Two Trump-owned companies filed for bankruptcy during this period: the Trump Taj Mahal in 1991 and the Trump Plaza Hotel in 1992. An unflattering biography of Donald Trump, published in 1993, was titled Lost Tycoon and declared that he has become a “public laughingstock” in the wake of his business failures.

In the years that followed, Trump used bankruptcy protection to reconfigure the debts of the many companies that comprised the Trump Organization, successfully making debt payments even as he accumulated more total debt at higher interest rates. As he explained, looking back in 2011: “I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt.”

He also formed a publicly traded company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, both protecting himself from financial liability and allowing him to sell shares to the general public. He initially owned 56 percent of the stock, giving him a majority and thus total control of the company, which acquired several of the Trump Organization’s properties and companies. In 2004, the company was unable to pay its loans and had failed to turn a profit. It entered bankruptcy protection, and Trump reduced his stock holdings to 27 percent, giving up an active role in the company.

Trump himself blamed the general decline of Atlantic City for his company’s failures, although critics pointed out that his casinos had never done well, even when Atlantic City’s gambling economy had been strong. Efforts to revive the company failed, and it entered bankruptcy again in 2009 and 2014. By the time Trump announced his campaign for president in 2015, his gambling businesses had entirely ceased operation. Shareholders in the company lost their investments, and many vendors and creditors suffered losses, but Trump’s personal financial losses were mitigated by his financial and legal actions.

During his tumultuous business career, Donald Trump retained the public appearance of high-flying success. As his real estate and gambling businesses failed, he succeeded in protecting his brand and shifting into licensing businesses in the United States and abroad. In 2004, the New York Times noted: “His name has become such a byword for success that even the most humiliating reverses barely dent his reputation….The rules that govern others just don’t apply to Trump.”

Working with ghostwriters, Trump published a number of how-to and business advice books, including the widely read Trump: The Art of the Deal, first released in 1987. He licensed the “Trump” name to golf courses, hotel resorts, and branded products from steaks to vodka to bottled water. From 1996 to 2015, he was an owner of the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss Universe beauty pageants. In 2015, television broadcasters Univision and NBC declined to broadcast the pageants in response to Trump’s racist attacks on Latin American immigrants during his presidential campaign. The next year, Trump announced that he had settled lawsuits with them and sold his stake in the pageants.

Trump’s expansion in the entertainment industry peaked with his role on the hit reality television show The Apprentice, which ran on NBC from 2004 to 2015. Trump played himself on the program, which pitted would-be business leaders against each other in a series of challenges. Trump judged their efforts and whittled down the contestant pool, each week telling one losing contender “You’re fired.” The show and its companion program, Celebrity Apprentice, were widely watched. They helped Trump reach national audiences and confirmed, to many viewers, Trump’s image as a successful and charismatic businessperson who was a straight talker, telling people the hard-to-hear truths. Only when Trump formally announced his presidential campaign with anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric did NBCUniversal formally end his relationship with the program.

Trump’s business interests are bundled into an entity known as the Trump Organization, the descendant of the company founded by his grandmother and father. Trump took over the company in 1971, renamed it in 1973, and bestowed formal leadership of it to his sons Donald, Jr. and Eric in 2017. Unlike a typical business corporation that officially owns its subsidiary parts, the Trump Organization is a collection of approximately 500 individual business entities, all owned principally or solely by Donald Trump himself. None of those constituent parts are publicly traded companies, so they are not required to publicly disclose their financial status or value (as public corporations are). Since Donald Trump, in a departure from recent precedent dating back to President Richard Nixon, never released his personal income tax returns, a complete assessment of the Trump Organization’s finances has proven impossible.

By the time Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, the Trump Organization owned a vast number of companies, products, and licensing agreements. These holdings included at least a dozen golf resorts in the United States and five in other countries; eight US hotel properties and six abroad; and dozens of other real estate holdings around the world. In August 2016, the New York Times reported that his real estate holdings held at least $650 million in debt. As a candidate, Trump boasted about his high levels of debt and his ability to reduce or eliminate his income tax liability, despite his very high personal net worth. (The exact level of his wealth has been and continues to be debated.) Avoiding taxes, he said during a debate with Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2016, “makes me smart.”

Trump’s businesses were also involved in a large number of lawsuits, both as defendant and plaintiff. The newspaper USA Today reported that, as of 2016, Trump or one of his companies had been involved, in 3,500 legal cases in federal and states courts. Trump was the plaintiff in 1,900, suing someone else; in 1,450, he was the one being sued. The remainder included other types of cases, including bankruptcies.

After his election in 2016, the Trump Organization settled several high-profile cases. Three involved allegations of consumer fraud by the then-defunct Trump University, a for-profit company launched in 2005 that offered classes in real estate and promised to teach the secrets of Trump’s personal success. Trump paid $25 million to settle those suits, without acknowledging wrongdoing. He also closed the charitable non-profit Trump Foundation in the wake of reports that he had not contributed his personal money to the foundation since 2008 but rather used it to distribute money he solicited from others and might have engaged in illegal self-dealing.

Trump’s business career, the idiosyncratic nature of the Trump Organization, and the unknown but substantial levels of personal indebtedness related to his global breadth of assets created an unprecedented situation when he was elected president. Many political observers raised concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest between his businesses and his presidential decisions.

Critics worried that he would inevitably violate the emoluments clause of the US Constitution, which prohibits federal officials from receiving gifts or payments (or anything else of value) from a foreign leader. Any foreign leader, company, or person doing business with a Trump-owned property, those critics charged, would put money into Donald Trump’s pocket. Trump himself rebuffed calls to fully divest himself from his businesses, declaring that he would instead give day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization to his adult sons. They in turn promised to avoid making new deals with foreign countries. Those moves did little to assuage critics’ concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest.