Barack Obama - biography; photo wallpapers: Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961; IPA pronunciation: [bəˈɹɑk oʊˈbɑ.mə]), is the junior United States Senator from Illinois. According to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, he is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history and the only African American currently serving in the U.S. Senate. He is a candidate for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination.
He was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. Four years later, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Obama won reelection to the state senate in 2002, running unopposed. As early as 2002, he was a critic of the proposed Iraq War, declaring in a television interview that he would have voted against the Iraq Resolution. In 2004, he ran for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. Midway through the campaign, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and became a nationally known political figure. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with a landslide 70% of the vote. Obama formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007. Recent opinion polls rank him as the second most popular choice among Democratic voters for their party's nomination, after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY).