Obama - The 44th American President Quiz

Answer: He was the first president born outside the continental United States

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. His father was Barack Hussein Obama Sr., born in Kenya, and his mother was Stanley Anne Dunham. Obama was also the first president to have racially- mixed parents.

Answer: Indonesia

Obama's parents divorced when he was three years old. His mother married Lolo Soetoro and they moved to his native Indonesia when Obama was six. He moved back to Hawaii when he was 10 and lived with his maternal grandparents.

Answer: Harvard

Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979. He transferred to Columbia University in 1981 and graduated with a bachelor degree in political science. He then moved to Chicago and got a job as a community organizer. He enrolled at Harvard Law school in 1988 and graduated magna cum laude in 1991. Obama soon became a prominent civil rights attorney and also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

Answer: Illinois state senate

Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996. During this time, he made great success in ethics reform and criminal justice issues. His greatest accomplishments came in 1998 when his legislation banned gift giving from lobbyists and then in 2003 when he persuaded police to videotape interrogations of prisoners on death row.

This proved that many death row prisoners were innocent of crimes they were convicted of. Obama ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000 but was defeated.

Answer: they worked together at a law firm

Obama met Michelle Robinson in 1989 while working as a summer associate at the Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago. She was a lawyer and later became a hospital executive. They married in October 1992. The Obamas have two daughters, Malia and Natasha (Sasha).

Answer: 2004

Obama won election with 70 percent of the vote, a record high in Illinois. Also in 2004, Obama made the nomination speech for Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who was the Democratic candidate for president. His stirring speech about 'politics of hope' made him a rising star in the Democratic party.

Answer: Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton, wife of former president Bill Clinton, was a U.S. senator from New York. She was more than twenty points ahead of Obama in early polls. However, Obama won the Iowa caucus in January 2008 and several other primaries, although he failed to win New Hampshire, the first and most important primary. By June, 2008, Obama had enough votes to win the nomination.

At the convention, he chose U.S. senator Joe Biden from Delaware to be his vice-president and after his inauguration, appointed Clinton to be secretary of state.

Answer: Change We Can Believe In

Obama was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, held in Denver CO. Obama stressed that his Republican opponent, John McCain, U.S. senator from Arizona, voted with the unpopular outgoing president George W. Bush, 90% of the time.

The most notable were Bush's decision to send the USA into the unpopular Iraqi war, which Obama was against. He emphasized that a McCain victory would produce a 'third Bush term' and that he was not willing to take a chance on 10%. McCain, in return, argued that Obama's ideals on a 'new kind of politics' were too unrealistic and dangerously liberal.

Answer: Nebraska

Nebraska is a staunchly Republican state but has a law that a candidate for president must win every district to receive all of the states 5 electoral votes. Obama carried the district of Omaha/Lincoln, giving him 1 vote and McCain ended up with the remaining four.

Answer: 28

Obama enjoyed a great victory over McCain. He beat McCain by almost 10 million popular votes and received 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173 (270 were needed to win). Obama also won several Republican states, including Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana (the latter two hadn't voted Democrat since 1964).

He also won Florida and Ohio, two large battleground states that Bush needed to win in the previous election. However, he failed to win the bellwether state of Missouri, a state that has voted for the winning candidate in every 20th century election except 1956, but by a razor thin margin.