Barack Obama Bio - Playingpoliticstv.com

Hey everyone! I'm ----Ginny Jones your host for playingpoliticstv.com, your online video guide to everything political. On this edition of playing politics I will be discussing presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Illinois senator Barack Obama is the other candidate for the Democratic nomination in this year’s presidential election. Barack is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history, the third to have been popularly elected, and the only African American currently serving in the Senate.

He earned his law degree in 1991 from Harvard and became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. Since then he has been a huge advocate for making change. He has helped to create programs like the state Earned Income TaxCredit, which in three years provided over $100 million in tax cuts to families across the state and has fought to help Illinois veterans get the disability pay they were promised, while working to prepare the VA for the return of the thousands of veterans who will need care after Iraq and Afghanistan.

He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In August 2005, he traveled to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. The trip focused on strategies to control the world's supply of conventional weapons, biological weapons, and weapons of mass destruction as a first defense against potential terrorist attacks.

In February 2007, standing before the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 U.S. presidential election and said he was putting an end to negative campaigning. He said it can't be about who digs up more skeletons on whom or who makes the fewest slip-ups on the campaign trail. We owe it to the American people to do more than that.

Since his announcement to run for president in 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care as his major priorities. He is also working to bring auto companies, unions, farmers, businesses and politicians of both parties together to promote the greater use of alternative fuels and higher fuel standards in our cars.

Thanks for watching playing politicstv.com, I’m Ginny Jones reminding you to get out and vote.