Paul ryan biography video of barack obama
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Barack Obama: Campaigns and Elections
Obama’s election to the Senate instantly made him the highest-ranking African American officeholder in the country and, along with the excitement generated by his convention speech and his books (Dreams from my Father, brought back into print, joined The Audacity of Hope on the bestseller list), placed him high on the roster of prospective Democratic presidential candidates in 2008. After spending a low-profile first year in office focusing on solidifying his base in Illinois and traveling abroad to buttress his foreign policy credentials as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama spent much of 2006 speaking to audiences around the country and mulling whether to run for president. According to annual National Journal evaluations of senators' legislative voting records, Obama ranked as the first, tenth, or sixteenth most liberal member of the Senate, depending on the year.
Obama announced his presidential candidacy on F
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Hundreds of pages of internal White House memos show Obama grappling with the unpleasant choices of government.Illustration by The Heads of State
On a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, Davi
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Personal: Catholic, has cited as influences libertarian writer Ayn Rand and philosopher and saint Thomas Aquinas.
Career path: 1992, aide to medlem av senat Bob Kasten, Republican of Wisconsin and advocate of using tax cuts to spur economic growth; 1993-1995, adviser and speechwriter, Empower America, a conservative think tank cofounded by Jack Kemp and William Bennett that would be merged into FreedomWorks, a lobbying group linked to the Tea Party movement; 1996, speechwriter to Kemp, then vice presidential nominee; 1995-1997, legislative director to medlem av senat Sam Brownback of Kansas; 1998-present, US representative for Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, a område south of Milwaukee that Barack Obama carried in 2008.
Key votes: Considered a social and fiscal conservative and utländsk policy moderate, he has voted with the majority of Republicans 92 percent of the time; in 2002, voted to back President Bush’s request for authorization to use force against Iraq; in 2008, reluctant