Barack Obama
Barack Obama was the President of the United States in the early part of the 21st century, (COMIC: Ghost of the Northern Line; TV: The End of Time) beginning in 2009. He held the honour of being the first black man to take the role. (TV: Rosa)
He was resident in the White House on 25 December, at the time the Saxon Master became every human on Earth. During a globally-publicised press conference in which the president was to announce his plan to reverse an economic downturn, the Master used the Immortality Gate to turn Obama, and everyone else on the planet, into a member of the so-called "Master Race". After the substitution had taken place, the Master which had formerly been Obama gleefully announced the financial solution "deleted."
When Rassilon reversed the Master's transfer of genetic code, President Obama returned to normal along with the rest of the human race. (TV: The End of Time)
In 2012, the President conveyed his personal best wishes for Henry van Statten's birthday. Van Statten, however, wanted the president replaced, noting that he was ten points down, and firing his assistant when he disagreed. Though he offered Diana Goddard a choice of party for the next President, Van Statten was soon usurped by Goddard following the Metaltron incident. (TV: Dalek) Obama remained as President. (PROSE: Buccaneer)
In August 2016, President Obama condemned Donald Trump as an unsuitable candidate for president. (PROSE: Buccaneer) Ultimately, Obama had been succeeded as president by Trump by 2018. (TV: Arachnids in the UK)
Obama was resurrected in the City of the Saved. Krisztina-Judit Németh guessed that he may have been at a masked ball held by Allisheer St Marx. (PROSE: Unification Theory)
Behind the scenes
- Barack Obama was played in The End of Time by an uncredited stand-in whose face was obscured from camera view. The actor's back was to the camera and archive audio of the real Obama's voice was heard as the character began his speech. Brief footage of the real Obama is also shown. In the Doctor Who Confidential episode Lords and Masters, the actor's face was briefly seen during a break after shaking his head around for the transformation of Obama into the Master.
- Barack Obama was the first sitting real-life American president to be depicted in a televised Doctor Who story. Obama's relationship to his fictional predecessor, President Arthur Winters is considerably unclear. It's not known whether Winters, who was killed by the Saxon Master in The Sound of Drums, was Obama's immediate predecessor — in which case Obama would have been Winters' Vice President, or whether he simply won the 2008 general election, and took over from an interim, "caretaker" president. Both eventualities are possible, given the vagueness of the scripts involved.
- In the episode Dalek, set in 2012, Diana Goddard mentions she thinks the next President will be Democrat. Barack Obama, who was a Democrat, would receive a second term that year. This therefore proves her prediction technically correct, if the same president in another term is taken to be the "next president," though generally this is not how the procession is considered.
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