Barack Obama

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961 to a Kenyan father and an American mother, and was raised partly in Hawaii and Indonesia. He attended Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, then worked as a Chicago community organizer, a civil-rights lawyer, and a constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago. He served in the Illinois State Senate (1997-2004) and won a U.S. Senate seat in 2004; his keynote address at that year’s Democratic National Convention vaulted him to national prominence. He announced his presidential run in February 2007 on a “hope and change” platform promising to end Bush-era excesses.

Obama won the 2008 election with 53% of the popular vote, becoming the first Black president, on a campaign that raised over $745 million. That total included substantial Wall Street backing: Goldman Sachs employees were his single largest source of bundled private contributions (around $1 million), and he outraised John McCain among financial-industry donors. One month before the election — three days after the $700 billion TARP bailout was signed — Citigroup executive Michael Froman emailed John Podesta a list (“Lists” was the subject line) recommending most of Obama’s eventual cabinet; the list, later published by WikiLeaks in 2016, proved largely accurate (Holder, Napolitano, Gates, Emanuel, Orszag, Duncan, Sebelius). His economic team was drawn heavily from the institutions tied to the crisis — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (former New York Fed president and Robert Rubin protégé) and National Economic Council director Larry Summers among them. Citigroup, the bank that supplied the cabinet memo, received roughly $476 billion in federal support ($45 billion direct plus a $306 billion guarantee).

Despite Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission criminal referrals and extensive evidence of mortgage and securities fraud, the Obama Justice Department under Eric Holder prosecuted no senior Wall Street executive. In March 2013 Holder told Congress that some institutions had grown “so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them” — a remark widely characterized as a “too big to jail” doctrine. HSBC paid a $1.9 billion money-laundering settlement with no executive charged; a 2012 robo-signing settlement with five major banks was valued at $25 billion but included no admissions of wrongdoing and no criminal charges. Meanwhile the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), announced in 2009 to help up to 4 million borrowers, produced roughly 1.7 million permanent modifications and spent only about $15 billion of its $75 billion authorization, routing aid through mortgage servicers that often foreclosed instead.

Obama also expanded national-security and surveillance powers he had once criticized. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, his administration conducted roughly ten times as many covert drone strikes as the Bush administration (over 560 strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen), embraced “signature strikes” against unidentified targets, and claimed authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial. After Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures of NSA mass surveillance, Obama defended the programs and charged Snowden under the Espionage Act; in all, his administration brought Espionage Act cases against eight alleged leakers — more than every previous president combined. He championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which included investor-state dispute settlement provisions allowing corporations to sue governments, before it failed to win congressional support. In April 2017, months after leaving office, he accepted $400,000 for a single speech to Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

Sources

• Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign — Wikipedia — biography, campaign themes, and fundraising
• WikiLeaks Podesta Email #8190 — Michael Froman to John Podesta, “Lists” — primary document, the 2008 cabinet-recommendation email
• The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton — The New Republic — analysis of the Citigroup cabinet email
• After Failing to Prosecute Bankers, Obama Cashes In With Wall Street Speeches — Common Dreams (Sept. 2017) — $400,000 Cantor Fitzgerald speech, post-office income
• Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush — Bureau of Investigative Journalism (Jan. 17, 2017) — drone-strike totals
• After helping a fraction of homeowners expected, Obama’s foreclosure prevention program is finally ending — Washington Post — HAMP results