Speeches of Barack Obama Speeches of Barack Obama Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Before his presidency, he served in the Illinois Senate (1997–2004) and the United States Senate (2005–2008). It was during his campaign for the United States Senate that he first made a speech that received nationwide attention; he gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. and stated "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America". Obama began to run for president just three years after that speech. In response to a
Family of Barack Obama States in October 1963 when he was 17 years old as part of Kenya president Tom Mboya's Airlift Africa project, to send promising Kenyan students to the US for education, particularly undergraduate and graduate school. Once he arrived in the country, his half-brother, Barack Obama Sr., found him a place at a boys' school then known as Browne & Nichols, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later dropped out of school and changed his name to O. Onyango Obama. He has operated a liquor store in Framingham, where he resided as of March 2011. Barack Obama lived with Onyango in the 1980s