Barack Obama, who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017, has elicited a number of public perceptions regarding his personality and background. As the first African-American president of the United States, his race and culture played a prominent role, both positively and negatively.

His relative youth (47 when elected) has alternately resulted in him being praised for his freshness and criticized for his inexperience. His temperament and demeanor have been praised for perceived unflappability, but criticized for a perception of lacking emotional attachment.

Origins and identity

Race and culture

Obama, who is biracial, self-identifies as African-American due to being black Kenyan and white American. His father was a black Kenyan from the Luo ethnic group and his mother was white of European descent, mainly of English lineage. Obama, who grew to adulthood after the Civil Rights Movement, had early life experiences that differed from most African American politicians who launched their careers in the 1960s through participation in that movement. He was brought up in Honolulu, Hawaii, lived in Jakarta, Indonesia as a young child, and received a private prep school and Ivy League education. See also:

In a March 2007 op-ed, African-American film critic David Ehrenstein of the Los Angeles Times said that Obama was an early popular contender for the presidency not because of his political record, but because whites viewed him as a kind of "comic-book superhero", who would selflessly solve white people's problems. Black commentators such as Stanley Crouch of the New York Daily News expressed mixed feelings about his racial identity, while others like Laura Washington (Chicago Sun-Times), Gary Younge (The Nation), and Clarence Page (Houston Chronicle) reported a general ambivalence among the black community about his authenticity as an African-American.

In January 2007, The End of Blackness author Debra Dickerson warned against drawing favorable cultural implications from Obama's political rise: "Lumping us all together", Dickerson claimed it, "erases the significance of slavery and continuing racism while giving the appearance of progress". On the liberal website Salon Dickerson wrote, "African-American, in our political and social vocabulary, means those descended from West African slaves, because Obama is not a descendant of West Africans brought involuntarily to the United States as slaves, he is not African-American," although his father is from Africa. Stanley Crouch wrote in the New York Daily News, "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan," in a column entitled "What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me".

Addressing the issue of whether he was "black enough," Obama told an August 2007 meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists that the debate was not about his physical appearance or his record on issues of concern to black voters. Obama said, "we're still locked in this notion that if you appeal to white folks then there must be something wrong."

After a McCain advertisement accused Obama of being "just a celebrity like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton," Obama asserted that McCain and other Republicans would try to scare voters because he (Obama) "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." The Obama campaign initially denied that the comment was on race, but campaign strategist David Axelrod later conceded that it was.

Though the media discussed his racial and ethnic heritage, a 2008 post-election poll by FactCheck.org found that about 22% of Americans still incorrectly believed that Obama is half Arab, possibly due to the influence of misleading blogs and the conflation of the religious heritage of his Muslim Kenyan father with being of the Arab race.

In 2010, when filling out his form for the 2010 United States census, Obama self-identified as African American.

Racism towards Obama Obama's election was also met with hostile reactions connected to his race, birthplace, and religion, and as president, he faced numerous taunts, racist remarks and generally racialized criticisms by some conservative pundits. Some also falsely claimed that Obama practiced Islam – at a time when anti-Muslim sentiments were prevalent in the United States – with a 2015 CNN poll finding that 29% of Americans believed Obama to be a Muslim.

Starting in 2011, Donald Trump – who would later directly succeed Obama as president – would regularly promote conspiracy theories that Obama had been born in Kenya, and therefore, was not an American citizen. Trump winning the presidency right after Obama was described by some commentators as the culmination of decades of white backlash against Black Americans achieving social mobility in the face of racist policies against them. Carol Anderson, author of the book White Rage and a professor of African-American studies, said that Obama was caught off guard by the backlash, and "was surprised by how racist this country is."

In September 2009, former President Jimmy Carter stated that "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man." Though Obama publicly disagreed with Carter's assessment at the time, in a 2015 interview with NPR, he also said, when asked about critics who believed he was making their country worse:In the same interview, however, he also stated that, despite the existence of racially motivated criticism against him, others who criticize his policies may still have "perfectly good reasons" for doing so.

Religion

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that he "was not raised in a religious household". He describes his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as "non-practicing Methodists and Baptists") to be detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known". He describes his father as "raised a Muslim", but a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful". His spiritual change of heart as an adult and his coming to believe in Christianity is a major part of his autobiography Dreams from My Father. Obama has stated that he "felt a beckoning of the spirit" at this time. He has also said that his political/ethical beliefs are "guided by his Christian faith" including belief "in the power of prayer."

Although Obama is a Christian, some July 2008 polls showed that some Americans incorrectly believed that he is Muslim or was raised Muslim (12% and 26%, respectively, in Pew and Newsweek polls). Citing the latter poll by CNN's Larry King, Obama responded, "...I wasn't raised in a Muslim home," and he said that advancement of the misconception insulted Muslim Americans.

Much of the speculations and allegations began with chain e-mails of unknown origin during Obama's presidential campaign. The Obama Nation, a book (published August 1, 2008) by Jerome Corsi, openly speculated that Obama had concealed a religious affiliation with Islam. His book opens with a quote by Andy Martin, who The Nation, The Washington Post, and The New York Times have identified as the primary source for the allegations that Obama is concealing a Muslim faith. Speculation about Obama's Muslim heritage has been widely denounced in the news media by both political supporters and political opponents (such as David Freddoso in his book The Case Against Barack Obama) of Obama.

Personal image

Youth and experience In July 2002, 40-year-old state Sen. Barack Obama embarked on a two-year campaign for 41-year-old Republican Peter Fitzgerald's U.S. Senate seat, against a large field of better known and wealthier opponents in the most expensive Senate primary in U.S. history. In March 2004, Obama won an unexpected landslide in the Illinois primary election for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate—which overnight made him a rising star within the national Democratic Party, started speculation about a presidential future, and led to the reissue of his memoir, Dreams from My Father.