- Barack Obama was the 44th President of the United States of America, succeeding George W. Bush. Born in Honolulu to a white American mother and a Kenyan father, he spent his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii before attending Harvard Law School and eventually settling in Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer and a college professor before being elected to the state Senate in 1996, and from there to the U.S. Senate in 2004.