OBAMA

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the President-elect of the United States of America, and the first African American to be elected President of the United States. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 3, 2005, until his resignation on November 16, 2008, following his election to the presidency. His term of office as President of the United States is scheduled to begin after he is sworn in as the forty-fourth President of the United States at noon EST (17:00 UTC) on January 20, 2009, in an inaugural ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.

Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer, and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama was elected to the Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain in the general election with 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173 and became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. In his victory speech, delivered before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Chicago's Grant Park, Obama proclaimed that "change has come to America".

On January 8, 2009, the joint session of the U.S. Congress met to certify the votes of the Electoral College for the 2008 presidential election. Based on the results of the electoral vote count, Barack Obama was declared the elected President of the United States and Joseph Biden was declared the elected Vice President of the United States. Obama is scheduled to be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States at noon EST (17:00 UTC) on January 20, 2009, in an inaugural ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.