101 Facts About President Obama

1. President Obama went on to address the accomplishments of his administration.

2. President Obama worked to persuade Congress and the international community at large to take action against Syria, but found a majority on Capitol Hill opposed to military involvement.

3. President Obama coaxed Congress to expand health care insurance for children and provide legal protection for women seeking equal pay.

4. President Obama met with the Dalai Lama while in New Delhi.

5. President Obama gained 10 spots from the same survey in 2015 from the Brookings Institution that ranked Obama the 18th-greatest American President.

6. President Obama was living in seclusion in a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a suburban area 35 miles from Islamabad.

7. President Obama announced an increase in US troop levels to 17,000 military personnel in February 2009 to "stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan", an area he said had not received the "strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires".

8. President Obama said that the results came because not enough Americans had felt the effects of the economic recovery.

9. President Obama used his power under the Antiquities Act to create 25 new national monuments during his presidency and expand four others, protecting a total of 553,000,000 acres of federal lands and waters, more than any other US president.

10. President Obama emphasized the conservation of federal lands during his term in office.

11. President Obama signed into law the Car Allowance Rebate System, known colloquially as "Cash for Clunkers", that temporarily boosted the economy.

12. President Obama ended plans for a return of human spaceflight to the moon and development of the Ares I rocket, Ares V rocket and Constellation program, in favor of funding Earth science projects, a new rocket type, and research and development for an eventual manned mission to Mars, and ongoing missions to the International Space Station.

13. President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor on May 26, 2009 to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter; she was confirmed on August 6, 2009, becoming the first Supreme Court Justice of Hispanic descent.

14. President Obama revoked President George W Bush's restoration of President Ronald Reagan's Mexico City Policy prohibiting federal aid to international family planning organizations that perform or provide counseling about abortion.

15. President Obama ordered the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, but Congress prevented the closure by refusing to appropriate the required funds and preventing moving any Guantanamo detainee into the US or to other countries.

16. President Obama became the first African American to be elected president.

17. President Obama became Chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs.

18. President Obama introduced two initiatives that bore his name: Lugar–Obama, which expanded the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction concept to conventional weapons; and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which authorized the establishment of USAspending.

19. President Obama addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.

20. President Obama created a campaign committee, began raising funds, and lined up political media consultant David Axelrod by August 2002.

21. President Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election, and was re-elected again in 2002.

22. President Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999.

23. President Obama was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, president of the journal in his second year, and research assistant to the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe while at Harvard for two years.

24. President Obama helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.

25. President Obama worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.

26. President Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he "was not raised in a religious household".

27. President Obama proposed to her twice, but both Jager and her parents turned him down.

28. President Obama graduated with a BA degree in 1983 and worked for about a year at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer, then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.

29. President Obama attended Punahou School—a private college preparatory school—with the aid of a scholarship from fifth grade until he graduated from high school in 1979.

30. President Obama was born to a white mother and a black father.

31. President Obama advocated for gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, indicating support for a ban on assault weapons, and issued wide-ranging executive actions concerning climate change and immigration.

32. President Obama was elected over Republican John McCain and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.

33. President Obama received national attention in 2004 with his March primary win, his well-received July Democratic National Convention keynote address, and his landslide November election to the Senate.

34. President Obama represented the 13th district for three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, when he ran for the US Senate.

35. President Obama previously served as a senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008.

36. President Obama promised change and he seemed very different than a typical President.

37. President Obama is a Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life.

38. President Obama used to play basketball in high school where he was called the Barry O'Bomber due to his jump shot.

39. In an interview with People Magazine, President Obama revealed some of his favorite movies for the year 2012.

40. President Obama was a smoker, but after promising his wife Michelle that he would quit, he began his attempt to quit.

41. President Obama lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago and worked as an attorney on civil rights issues.

42. President Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where in 1983 he received a bachelor's degree in political science.

43. In 1979 President Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu.

44. President Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his half sister, mother, and stepfather.

45. President Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

46. In 1990, President Obama became the first African-American to become president of the Harvard Law Review.

47. President Obama helped usher in the rise of digital video in politics, sharing his weekly address through the White House YouTube channel.

48. In 2009, shortly after President Obama took office, residents in many countries expressed a sharp increase in confidence in the ability of the US president to do the right thing in international affairs.

49. President Obama is being criticized for the performance of the economy and for job creation.

50. In 2016, President Obama took credit for "saving the world economy from a Great Depression", but the recession ended in the US in June 2009, or five months after he took office and well before the vast majority of his "stimulus" bill took effect.

51. On January 20, 2009, President Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.

52. On November 4, 2008, Barack President Obama is elected president of the United States, the first African American to ever hold the office.

53. In the state Senate, President Obama sponsored a bill to require the police to videotape interrogations in capital crime cases, the first state to do so.

54. President Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 representing the South Side neighborhoods of Chicago.

55. President Obama promised his wife he would give up smoking before moving to Washington.

56. President Obama was 27 when he met his future wife, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson.

57. In 1993 President Obama worked as the director of the Developing Communities Project, working with job training programs and tenant rights organizations.

58. President Obama will be most remembered for his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, provisions of which went into effect from 2010 to 2020.

59. President Obama was a founding member of the board of directors of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife, Michelle, became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago in early 1993.

60. President Obama directed Illinois Project Vote from April to October 1992, a voter registration drive, officially nonpartisan, that helped Carol Moseley Braun become the first black woman ever elected to the Senate.

61. In his memoir, President Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's middle class family.

62. In the summer of 1970, President Obama returned to Hawaii for an extended visit with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham.

63. In 1971, President Obama returned to Honolulu to attend Punahou School, from which he graduated in 1979.

64. President Obama owns a pair of autographed boxing gloves owned by Muhammad Ali.

65. President Obama has admitted having experimented with marijuana and cocaine as a teenager.

66. President Obama had worked for many private companies, from Baskin-Robbins to Business International Corporation.

67. At that time, President Obama had actually passed several tax cuts to stimulate the economy.

68. First Lady Michelle President Obama was thrust into the spotlight during her husband's campaign for the presidency.

69. Michelle LaVaughn Robinson President Obama has become known for both her determined, faithful, and intelligent demeanor, as well as her work to combat obesity and her support of military families.

70. On February 10, 2007, President Obama announced that he would be running for President of the United States.

71. President Obama became the only black member of the congressional Black Caucus, a non-partisan group of African American Senators and Representatives which focuses on the economic, health and social issues of the African American.

72. President Obama campaigned for the United States Senate starting in 2002 by raising funds and developing his platform.

73. In 1993, while still teaching, President Obama went to work as director of the Developing Communities Project, a community organization comprised of eight Catholic parishes on Chicago's south side.

74. In 2008 Barack President Obama publically presented his Certificate of Live Birth which details his official birthplace as Hawaii.

75. On February 10, 2007, President Obama formally announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

76. In 1996, President Obama officially launched his own political career, winning election to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat from the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park.

77. In 1970, President Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents.

78. President Obama became the 44th president, and the first African American to be elected to that office.

79. In a tearful moment, President Obama addressed his wife, Michelle, and then spoke about being the proud father of his daughters, Malia and Sasha, and expressed his gratitude for Vice President Joe Biden.

80. President Obama expressed his commitment to the peaceful transfer of power to President-Elect Donald Trump, and called on politicians and American citizens to come together despite their differences.

81. On January 10, 2017, President Obama returned to his adopted home city of Chicago to deliver his farewell address.

82. President Obama found himself struggling on the domestic front in October 2013.

83. President Obama found himself grappling with an international crisis in late August and September 2013 when it was discovered that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians.

84. In the same month, President Obama found his efforts for gun-control measures thwarted in Congress.

85. President Obama achieved a major legislative victory on January 1, 2013, when the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a bipartisan agreement on tax increases and spending cuts, in an effort to avoid the looming fiscal cliff crisis.

86. On November 6, 2012, President Obama won a second four-year term as president by receiving nearly five million more votes than Romney and capturing more than 60 percent of the Electoral College.

87. On the economic front, President Obama worked to steer the country through difficult financial times.

88. On January 27, 2010, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union speech.

89. President Obama emphasized the importance of unity and made veiled jabs at the Bush administration and the diversionary use of wedge issues.

90. In 2000, President Obama made an unsuccessful Democratic primary run for the US House of Representatives seat held by four-term incumbent candidate Bobby Rush.

91. President Obama published an autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, in 1995.

92. President Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America's role in it.

93. President Obama has steadfastly resisted Kerry's requests, and seems to have grown impatient with his lobbying.

94. President Obama cited Reagan's decision to almost immediately pull US forces from Lebanon after 241 servicemen were killed in a Hezbollah attack in 1983.

95. President Obama went on to say that the belief in the possibilities of projected toughness is rooted in "mythologies" about Ronald Reagan's foreign policy.

96. President Obama said that to achieve this rebalancing, the US had to absorb the diatribes and insults of superannuated Castro manques.

97. President Obama has deep respect for the destructive resilience of tribalism—part of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, concerns the way in which tribalism in post-colonial Kenya helped ruin his father's life—which goes some distance in explaining why he is so fastidious about avoiding entanglements in tribal conflicts.

98. President Obama began by asking Ma a question about climate change.

99. President Obama believes, Carter said, that Asia "is the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future, and that no president can take his eye off of this.

100. President Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do.

101. President Obama had arrived in Manila the day before from a G20 summit held in Antalya, Turkey.