OBAMA The new face of America

Democrat Barack Hussein Obama has been elected the first African-American president of the United States in a contest that shattered racial barriers.

With polls now closed, the 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois has captured the key states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and California. Those wins, combined with a slew of other states, have given him 338 electoral votes so far, more than enough to defeat Republican rival John McCain.

Obama is the first African American, to be elected as President of the United States, was also the first African American to be nominated for President by a major U.S. political party. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he became the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham. His parents met in 1960 while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student. The couple married February 2, 1961; they separated when Obama was two years old and subsequently divorced in 1964.

Obama met his wife, Michelle Robinson, in June 1989 when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Assigned for three months as Obama's adviser at the firm, Robinson joined him at group social functions, but declined his initial offers to date. They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992. The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998, followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), in 2001.