Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
Kamala Harris is not perfect, but far better than Donald Trump
As a Ukrainian child, I’ve been obsessed with American politics. I was 13 when I was following my first American presidential election, avidly reading Russian Newsweek and watching the discussion about the debates between Barack Obama and John McCain on Savik Shuster’s political talk show on Ukrainian television.
Obama and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, were the only Democrat politicians I liked in my “Republican” teenage years.
And while I respected Brzezinski for his anti-Soviet views, my sympathy toward Barack Obama was personal. At 13, I didn’t have words to describe myself as an autistic or trans* person, but I had a feeling that there is something deeply unusual about me.
I was cruelly bullied among peers for being “weird.” I knew the history of the American Civil Rights Movement much better than any stories about Eastern European activism, and the idea that a Black man could become the president of the United States while millions of Americans still remember segregation gave me some hope about the possibility of social change.
