Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1961 and was elected for two terms as the 44th president of the United States (US). He was a politician and an attorney before his election as president. He was the senator of Illinois between 2005 and 2008 and was elected as the first African-American president through the Democratic Party. In 1983, he graduated from Columbia University and volunteered as a community coordinator in Chicago. He then enrolled in Law School at Harvard in the year 1988 and thereafter became an attorney in civil rights. He also started teaching constitutional law at the Law School of Chicago University between 1992 and 2004.
He was nominated for the presidency in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, and he won the election over John McCain. Obama was then inaugurated as president of the US in 2009. In September 2009, Obama was nominated as the laureate of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. During his reign as the president of the US, he signed many bills such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly referred to as “Obamacare,” Budget Control Act, and the New START treaty, among others.
Greatest Influences as a Leader
Obama is one of the greatest leaders who served as the president of the US. A leader understands his/her attributes and generates some sense of belief where he/she performs on those beliefs. As a leader, Obama was able to instill faith among the people of the US and the world in general. He was able to do this by achieving a number of functions during his reign. First, he was the key to the end of the war in Iraq. The Iraq war is just one of the international conflicts that Obama inherited, and he helped end it by ordering the withdrawal of the US troops, which happened by the end of 2011 (Chait, n.p). Related to this is the ending of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, which stipulated Iran from continuing with its nuclear program for the benefit of economic sanctions.
The Healthcare reform that led to the formation of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 extended the coverage of healthcare in the US. This program was meant to support the humble social circle, especially the African Americans and colored people, and society as a whole in the US. ACA improved health care systems and is one factor that has reduced the mortality rates to a higher percentage. Obama also helped end major planned terror attacks by championing the killing of Osama bin Laden 2011, who was the kingpin of the Al-Qaeda terror group (Osama bin Laden was the mastermind for the 9/11 terror attack in 2001).
In 2009, the US economy was in recession, and Obama passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. With this, the economy was financed with $787 billion as a way of creating growth and sustainability. This brought the US out of the economic recession, which was majorly initiated by the effects of the Great Depression. As well, Obama passed a bill to increase the budget for veterans in 2010. He signed the G.I. bill, which provided $78 billion to the Department of Veterans Affairs (Darsey, pg. 88-103). This funding was meant to encourage the education of veterans as well as enable them to engage in commercial investments.
Obama also defined the future of the US’s renewable technology by signing a bill to fund $90 billion in renewable energy. The list of his achievements is long, and that is why his leadership as a president is remarkable to many people in the US. This is because he was a democratic leader who wanted the best for his people and not what he personally desired.
Obama’s greatest strength is being reactive, whose attribute was commonly referred to as “No-drama Obama.” Obama did not rush to action once a crisis occurred but rather planned for sustainable action, even if he would be criticized for inaction. This attribute helped him prosper the ACA, which many people would have thought would be obliterated following the many setbacks towards its implementation. Obama’s strength also arises from his ability to find a profound connection with ordinary citizens in the US (Finley and Esposito, pg. 100-127). Obama’s greatest weakness was his inability to appreciate the executive branch of the federal government; he was slow in staffing the executive branch. Also, his weakness is seen in his decisions on foreign policy which many have criticized as being overly cautious.
Obama used the democratic leadership style since he acted on the well-being of the people and involved the participation of different leadership levels in the formulation of policies in the federal government. Much of the decisions and policies he formulated were humanitarian, and any liberal person would have sanctioned his/her support (Greenstein, n.p). As a democratic leader, he was able to determine the general needs of the society, not only in the US but rather the whole world, and thus aimed at standardizing social justice and equality for the greater future.
Leadership is about leading people and making sure that their desires are attained; by doing this, these people will have faith in the beliefs of such a leader. What makes a great leader is not about the greatest achievement but rather the ability to unite followers into believing the principles of the leader (Cronin and Genovese, pg. 40-57). With this shared notion, it becomes easy to drive a nation or any social group to greater heights in terms of policing and attributing the sense of shared efforts.
