The Senate meets today; the House next meets Nov 23, 2009.

Barack Obama
U.S. President

Track Barack Obama

We have two feeds for every member of Congress. Select a feed for more information:

Outside Links

The following external websites may be of interest:

Biography from the official Congressional Biographical Directory

Campaign Contributions tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics

Party:	Democrat
Birthday:	Aug 4, 1961 / 48 years old

Obama’s latest tweet:

(see TweetCongress)

“The senate has unveiled an excellent health reform bill. Call your senators and ask them to move forward: http://bit.ly/8Ar4yG #hc09.” (Nov 20, 2009)

Congressional Service

Below are the past and present terms in the Senate, House, and White House held by Barack Obama:

When	Role	Representing
2009-2013	U.S. President		(was preceeded by George Bush)
2005-2008	U.S. Senator	Illinois	(was preceeded by Peter Fitzgerald)

Sponsorship Analysis

Obama is somewhere between a leader and a follower. Obama sponsors others’ bills and other Members of Congress cosponsor Obama’s bills. For more, see congressional statistics.

To compute the leader-follower score for Obama, we make a table that lists all other Members of Congress. Each row has the number bills sponsored by Obama and cosponsored by the other Member of Congress divided by the number of bills sponsored by the other Member of Congress and cosponsored by Obama.

This is a measure of who is following who. The higher the number, the more times others are cosponsoring Obama's bills without Obama returning the favor. We then take the mean of (the logorithms of) these ratios. Thanks to Joe Barillari for the idea.

Voting Record

Barack Obama missed 314 (24%) of 1300 votes since Jan 6, 2005. The graph to the left shows the number of missed votes over time. Click for a larger chart and a list of recent votes.

Money & Influence

The top campaign contribution to Obama in 2007-2008 was $1,598,395 from employees of University of California. Barack Obama’s net worth was between $2,022,016 and $7,356,000 in 2007, according to Obama’s mandated financial disclosure statements. For more information, see the Center for Responsive Politics’ page for Obama.

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

Barack Obama has sponsored 121 bills since Jan 24, 2005 of which 115 haven't made it out of committee and 3 were successfully enacted. Obama has co-sponsored 506 bills during the same time period. (The count of enacted bills considers only bills actually sponsored by Obama and companion bills identified by CRS that were themselves enacted, but not if they were incorporated into other bills, as that information is not readily available.)

Search Sponsored/Cosponsored Legislation

Photo from the Congressional Pictorial Directory.