Meet the Obamas

Today someone said to me, who is this guy - Barack Obama?

And today's Wall Street Journal did a profile on Michelle Obama.

So if you haven't figured out who they are, here is some info...


What do you know about Barack Obama?

- He attended Columbia University as an undergrad and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard Law School where he had been elected president of the Harvard Law Review - the "first black president in its 104-year history".
-Obama returned to Chicago after graduation and directed a voter registration drive.
- As an associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland from 1993 to 1996, he represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights cases.
- He was a lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

He was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (born in Kenya) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas). Obama's parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii. They separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father went to Harvard University to pursue Ph.D. studies, then returned to Kenya, where he died in an auto accident in 1982. His mother married another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta from ages 6 to 10, where classes were taught in Indonesian. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham and attended school there until his graduation in 1979. Obama's mother died of ovarian cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

What do you know about Michelle Obama?

- Like Barack, she's a Harvard Law School graduate.
- She grew up in a four-room apartment with a kitchen the size of a closet. Her father was a pump operator at the city water plant. He suffered from Multiple Sclerosis. Her stay-at-home mother pushed she and her brother to get the education their parents never got. Both Michelle and her brother Craig attended Princeton in the 80s.
- She's 44 years old.
- She and Barack have two daughters aged 6 and 9.
- She worked for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, as a liaison with service agencies on tasks such as finding shelters for the homeless during the winter.
- As a health care executive she worked for the University of Chicago Medical Center as vice president of community affairs
- She plans her campaign appearances around her daughters' activities and her peace of mind improved greatly when her mother decided last summer to retire and help take care of the girls, Malia and Sasha.

"The Obamas present themselves as equals. "We're two well-versed lawyers who know each other really well," Mrs. Obama says in an interview. "We each think we're right about everything, and can argue each other into a corner." Friends and campaign aides describe them as a high-powered team built on contrasts: She's the heart to his head, the enforcer to his lapses, regimented to his laid-back, critic to his ego, details to his broad strokes, sarcasm to his sincerity, toughness to his cool vibe."

- from The Wall Street Journal