President Barack Obama celebrated his 50th birthday with friends and family on Thursday, hosting a low-profile private party at the White House. The president is then scheduled for a subsequent trip to the presidential retreat at Camp David to spend the weekend with his family.
Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Stanley Ann Dunham, a woman from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., an ethnic Luo tribesman from Kenya, who was then a foreign exchange student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
On Wednesday, Aug. 3, a mere 24 hours after signing the debt compromise legislation bill known as the Budget Control Act of 2011, Obama headed back to his hometown of Chicago and attended three birthday-themed campaign events hosted by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), where guests paid up to $35,800 for a ticket.
Amid all the celebrations and festivities, however, the shadow of a sputtering economy still hangs over the Obama presidency, and his re-election to the White House in 2012 is far from guaranteed.
The latest Gallup poll has President Obama’s approval rating currently sitting at around 41 percent, while dismal unemployment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the months of May and June have put doubts into the minds of many Americans about whether President Obama is the right man to fix the country’s economic woes.
At the same time, the nation is still dealing with three foreign military interventions abroad, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
In yet another campaign speech before fundraiser attendees, the president reminded his audience that although the debt-ceiling debacle—which he characterized as a “self-inflicted wound” and a “partisan game”—is over, he still has to deal with the sobering challenge of righting America’s weak economic recovery.
Obama defended his economic record, mentioning that the financial collapse of 2008 caused the American economy to contract by 8 percent and lose 8 million jobs, and he said that while his economic policies were unpopular, they were necessary.
“We took a series of emergency measures that first year to save the economy from collapse. And I promise you not all of them were popular. But we did what we needed to do to start getting the economy growing again, and it has been growing—not as fast as we want, but we got the economy growing instead of contracting because we wanted to help families get back on their feet,” the president stated.
Afterward, the president highlighted his plans for fixing the economy, which included investment in clean energy, Alzheimer’s and cancer research, and fixing the nation’s health care system so that everyone can have affordable health care.
On Wednesday, President Obama received a happy birthday telephone call from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the two leaders discussed Russia’s ambitions to join the World Trade Organization.
