Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama IIis the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office and the first president born outside of the continental United States. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionUS President
Date of Birth4 August 1961
CityHonolulu, HI
CountryUnited States of America
It's time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.
I actually think, when you're young, ambitions are somewhat common - you want to prove yourself. It may grow out of different life experiences. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the admiration of the demanding father. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the love of an absent father.
There are places I want to visit where if I'm wearing a baseball cap and some sunglasses I think I can get away with and mingle in a crowd.
If you only think about yourself - how much money can I make, what can I buy, how nice is my house, what kind of fancy car do I have? - over the long term, I think, you get bored. I think your life becomes diminished. The way to live a full life is to think: What can I do for others!
I think, as you get older, that's when your ambitions become "peculiar"...
I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law
There is a wonderful book called "Gandhi's Truth," by Erik Erikson, the psychologist. It is a great book. And I remember reading that and thinking about this connection between what we think in our personal lives and how that manifests itself in our politics. Those are two books, just off the top, that I think are sort of representative of reading that I did at that time. I never get a chance to read anymore.
There are 10 warheads in that one container?
When BP was not moving fast enough on claims, we told BP to set aside $20 billion in a fund - managed by an independent third party - to help all those whose lives have been turned upside down by the spill.
When disaster strikes, it tears the curtain away from the festering problems that we have beneath them,
We thought it was wrongheaded and the amount of anxiety caused by this review was significant, ... We stopped the VA from going backward, but we still need to move forward.
To the extent that we've got a fiscal crisis right now, part of it is prompted by a bullheaded insistence on the part of the president, for example, that we should extend all of his tax cuts, make all of them permanent.
What remains is the need to review claims that might have been denied, particularly in Illinois, so that we can close that imbalance,
What people want to know is who has a set of concrete plans to help them send their kids to college, or save for retirement.