Table of Contents

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Subject
Introduction
Background
Achievements
Failures
Leadership Styles
Conclusion
References

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Introduction

Barack Hussein Obama II also known as Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961,
Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. He is the 44th president of the United States from
2009 up until now. He is also the first African American to hold the office. Before
winning the presidency, Obama represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate (200508). He
was the third African American to be elected to that body since the end of
Reconstruction (1877). In 2009, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his
extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between
peoples (Wallenfeldt, 2016).

We chose President Barack Obama as our example of leader because he is a good

leader and he is perceptive. As the leader of the free world, President Barack Obama
unite for the people. He understands that the United States can only work as a unit
when everyone has the same opportunities in healthcare, education and employment.

Background

Barack Hussein Obama II was born August 4, 1961. He is an American politician

who is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African
American to hold the office and the first president born outside the continental United
States. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of
Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the
Harvard Law. He was also a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law
degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at the
University of Chicago Law School around 1992 and 2004. In 2008, he was elected
President of the United States, becoming the first African-American commander-inchief (Biography, 2016).
His mother, Ann Dunham, was born on an Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during
World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham's father, Stanley,
enlisted in the military and marched across Europe in General George Patton's army.
Dunham's mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war,
the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing
Program and, after several moves, ended up in Hawaii.

When President Obama took office, he faced very significant challenges. The
economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W.
Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help
struggling financial institutions. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops
deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During the first half of two years of his first term, President Obama was able to work
with the Democratic-controlled Congress to improve the U.S. economy, pass healthcare reform, and withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq. After the Republicans won
control of the House of Representatives in 2010, the President spent significant time
and political effort negotiating, for the most part unsuccessfully, with Congressional
Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit. After winning reelection in 2012,
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Obama began his second term focused on securing legislation on immigration reform
and gun control. (Nelson, 2016). When the Republicans won the Senate in 2014,
however, he refocused on actions that he could take unilaterally, invoking his
executive authority as President. In foreign policy, Obama concentrated during the
second term on the Middle East and climate change.

Achievement
After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, Obama
signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans
beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care
cost growth, which is the number one cause of Americas long-term fiscal problems
(Glastris, 2012).
The second achievement of Barack Obama is passed Wall Street Reform. He signed
the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to reregulate the financial sector after its practices that caused the Great Recession. The
new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institution. It
requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large
banks provide living wills to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade
with customers money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.
Other than that, Obama also ended the war in Iraq. What he did was he ordered all
U.S. military forces out of the country. The last troops left were on December 18,
2011.
Next, Barack Obama has also increased support for veterans. There are many soldiers
coming home from Iraq and Iran with severe physical and mental health problems and
yet have to face long waits for services. So, he increased 2010 Department of Veterans
Affairs budget by 16 percent and 2011 budget by 10 percent and also signed new GI
bill offering $78 billion in tuition assistance over a decade that will provide multiple
tax credits to encourage businesses to hire more veterans.

Last but not least, Obama has provided payment to wronged minority farmers. In
2009, he signed Claims Resolution Act, which provided $4.6 billion in funding for a

legal settlement with black and Native American farmers who the government cheated
out of loans and natural resource royalties in years past.

Failures.
1. He didnt heal our racial divisions.
The first thing people expected of Obama, the whole reason his presidency was
already hailed as historic on Inauguration Day 2009, before he had taken a single
official act, is because voters thought that the first black president would help
America put the ugly history of racially divisive politics behind us.
But from his earliest stumbling effortsanyone remember the Beer Summit?
Obama has proven alternately uninterested and ham-handed in dealing with this
signature issue.
So as the recent race riots in Ferguson confirm, Obama has not served as some kind of
magical bridge who would promote mutual understanding between whites and blacks.
Instead, he has done more to inflame the tensions in these cases than to defuse them.
Our expectations of Obama were overblown from the beginning, but he worked pretty
hard to overblow them. Certainly, when voters chose him, they were hoping for the
opposite of an unscrupulous race-hustler like Al Sharpton. There was even a joke
about Obama sending Sharpton and Jesse Jackson on missions to non-existent
countries just to get them as far away from his campaign as possible. Now, Sharpton
is being described as Obamas go-to man on race, with a White House source
gushing to The Politico that Theres a trust factor with The Rev from the Oval Office
on down.
2. Financial reform didnt reform.
Except that the Dodd-Frank financial reforms didnt really reform anything. They
created a couple thousand pages of new legislation and many, many more new
executive-branch regulations, which have helped to muddle the rules rather than
clarify them. But these regulations have never really resolved any of the pre-crisis
problems.
The old system in which a handful of giant financial institutions were considered too
big to fail and thus could depend on the rest of us to bail them out? That system is
alive and well.

3. Obama failed to reform immigration.

He spent all of his political capital, and then some, on the failed stimulus and the
Obama Care boondoggle, leaving nothing for immigration reform. Having failed to
get anything through Congress, he floated a dubious plan to enact amnesty through a
unilateral executive authority that he doesnt have. Then he dropped the idea.
Instead, he has simply failed to enforce the immigration laws, contributing to a crisis
on our southern border.
The result: he has managed to enrage the right, the left, and the middle. He hasnt
cracked down on illegal immigration, he hasnt legalized it, and he hasnt forged any
kind of compromise or consensus on the issue. Nobody is happy and nothing has been
accomplished.
4. Obama ignored the threat of a resurgent Russian dictatorship.
During a debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, Obama dismissed Romneys suggestion
that Russia might be a threat to American interests, sneering, The 1980s are now
calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Now its looking more like the 1970s are
calling, with an aggressive Russian dictatorship invading its neighbors, leaving our
European allies feeling exposed and unsure whether they can really count on support
from the US and NATO.
The presidents response to Russian aggression has been to impose a few more
sanctions, make a speech in Estonia, and otherwise ignore the crisis and hope it goes
away.
5. He has made America irrelevant.
Certainly, in a lot of these cases, Obama has given speeches or press conference to
announce his enlightened intentionsthen done nothing to plan for how to actually
achieve his goals.

But if he is irrelevant, that makes America irrelevant. We can look at the Arab Spring,
at Ukraine, and at Iraq, but lets add one more example. For most of his presidency,
Obama has declared his intention to pivot to Asia, extricating himself from the
Middle East and focusing on bolstering our Pacific allies to peacefully manage the
rise of China. Its pretty widely acknowledged that he never managed to do it, letting
the Asia pivot die of neglect.
This may fit with the quasi-isolationist mood that has taken hold in America in recent
years, but it is yet another case where Obama promised something very different. He
campaigned on the promise that America would be more respected in the world after
the Bush yearsnot that we would be considered a useless ally and an ineffectual
opponent.
Combine all of this with his frequent vacations and golf outings and his fascination
with the trappings of pop-culture celebrity, and you get the impression that Obama has
checked out of the presidency and lost interest in the responsibility he is neither
willing nor able to shoulder.
Obama was originally elected on the basis of celebrity, on vague slogans about hope
and change, on a sense of self-congratulatory smugness about how progressive and
enlightened we would all be if we voted for him. He was re-elected on all of that, plus
the smearing of his political opposition as racists and mean rich white guys.
If the result is an utter failure of leadership, maybe there are a few lessons we thought
to learn for the next presidential election (Tracinski, 2014).

Leadership Style
A transformational leader really focuses on their followers. They want to motivate
their followers to provide a high level of performance and, in turn, help their
followers to develop and recognise their own leadership style.
The four components to transformational leadership :

The leader serves as an ideal role model for followers

The leader has the ability to inspire and motivate followers
The leader challenges followers to be innovative and creative
The leader demonstrates genuine concern for the needs

He is very engaging with his audience. It is clear that he is trying to make connections
with the American people to help motivate them to follow him. This is a classic trait
and example of transformational leadership.
Another reason is that, through his speech he comments a lot on his dedication to the
working class but also refers to the middle class too. This shows that he is trying to
appeal to the majority of the population of America. By relating to them, and showing
his commitment to them he is making a connection. This in turn will help motivate
them to follow him.
It is not just this speech, but Obama's whole background that makes one believe he is
not after the power of being President. He comes from a value enriched background
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and shows in his speech that he is dedicated to bringing this quality forward and
reconcile them with a country that is being broken apart by class, race and nationality.
Throughout the speech Barack is showing the above qualities and more of a
transformational leader. The praise received at the end of the speech shows it was in
receipt of a deeply motivated and attentive audience.

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Conclusion
Barack Obama is true leader because of his leadership characteristics and personality
traits. One characteristic that makes him a leader is integrity, that is, the strength of
someone able to keep his personal ethics. Obama has this trait because he will not
compromise to anything that is unethical to him and he will stick to his position and
ethics for the greater good of the country, even if he is risking his career.
Not many leaders have the ability to have time for both their families and the public
welfare, but apparently Barack Obama keeps balance of his time and also devotes
time to his beloved family. Confidence is another virtue of Barrack Obama, which is
particularly obvious in his speeches and the way people perceive him.
Barrack Obama's leadership has taught us that every leader needs to set his goals and
create his own strategy of implementing them. Barrack Obama's vision has enabled
him to set goals and priorities such as the welfare of the American citizens, to be selfmotivated and confident of what he was doing and inspire others to follow him. His
activities have inspired many people and provide them with a new vision that
increases commitment and performance.

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References
Biography. (2016, September 17). Barack Obama Biography. Retrieved on 16th
September 2016 from: http://www.biography.com/people/barack-obama-12782369
Glastris, P. (2016). Obamas Top 50 Accomplishments. Retrieved on 16th September
2016 from: http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2012/obamas-top50-accomplishments/
Nelson. M. (2016, September 17). Barack Obama: Life in Brief. Retrieved on 15th
September 2016 from: http://millercenter.org/president/biography/obama-life-in-brief
Wallenfeldt. J. (2016, February 18). Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved on 15th
September from: https://global.britannica.com/biography/Barack-Obama
Tracinski. R. (SEPTEMBER 16, 2014).The Federalist. Retrieved on 15th September
2016
from :http://thefederalist.com/2014/09/16/10-ways-obama-has-failed-as-president/

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MULTIMEDIA UNIVERSITY

FIRST TRIMESTER, 2016/2017 SESSION

The Practice Of Leadership

MPU 3209

President
Barack Obama
SUBMITTED BY:
MUHAMMAD SYAFIQ BIN MOHD FAIZAL
1121116534
NAZIRA BINTI AZMAN
1161301935
NURUL FATIHAH BINTI ZAMRI
1161300957
GROUP: B2
SUBMITTED FOR:
Nurhayati Binti Yusoff

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