जीवनी

At his wife's suggestion, he quit smoking before his campaign to win the Democratic nomination began.

Can speak Indonesian to a certain degree, having lived in Indonesia for a number of years during his childhood.

The movie he saw on his first date with Michelle Obama was Do the Right Thing (1989).

Is a big fan of the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man and collected the comics as a youth.

The first US President to be born after the Vietnam War started.

[from keynote speech given at the 2004 Democratic party national convention] There's not a liberal America and a conservative America. There's the United States of America. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war, and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

And it lives on in those Americans -- young and old, rich and poor, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American, gay and straight -- who are tired of a politics that divides us and want to recapture the sense of common purpose that we had when John Kennedy was President of the United States of America.

[regarding former President Bill Clinton's support for his wife--and Obama's opponent for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination--Hillary Clinton] Sometimes I don't know who I'm running against.

[when asked whether he would call on Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to release their tax returns, after Hilary loaned $5 million of her own money to her campaign] I'll just say that I've released my tax returns. That's been a policy I've maintained consistently. I think the American people deserve to know where you get your income from. But I'll leave it up to you guys to chase it down . . . I think we set the bar in terms of transparency and disclosure that has been a consistent theme of my campaign and my career in politics.

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.