Barack Obama

Barack Obama was the 44th president. He served two terms, from 2009 to 2017. Before the White House he represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate. He was born in Hawaii and later made Chicago his political home. Aides nicknamed him No Drama Obama because he liked a calm, even style — even when the news was not calm. His vice president was Joe Biden, a longtime Delaware senator who later became the 46th president. Obama was the first U.S. president who was Black / African American. That is one fact on his record, next to the laws and wars of those eight years.

He inherited a deep recession. His team first tried to fight it with a large stimulus spending-and-tax bill in 2009. The government helped restructure General Motors and Chrysler so the car companies could survive. Dodd-Frank, a 2010 law, set new rules for banks after the 2008 crash. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — is a health-insurance law. It is best known for letting young people stay on a parent's plan until age 26.

In May 2011 a U.S. raid in Pakistan killed Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 al-Qaeda leader. Obama used drones to strike terrorist targets, including outside regular battlefields. In 2011 NATO air power, with the United States, helped rebels topple Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. During his second term, ISIS (the Islamic State) seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, in his first year. The 2015 Iran deal was meant to limit Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. After the 2010 midterm election — he called it a “shellacking” — Republicans took the House, and he often had to govern with the other party in charge of spending fights.