"He would not exist as a human being, as a politician, without his mother's sensibility..."

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible
By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2008

....Hawaii is about the forces that shaped him, and Chicago is about how he reshaped himself. Chicago is about the critical choices he made as an adult: how he learned to survive in the rough-and-tumble of law and politics, how he figured out the secrets of power in a world defined by it, and how he resolved his inner conflicts and refined the subtle, coolly ambitious persona now on view in the presidential election. Hawaii comes first. It is what lies beneath, what makes Chicago possible and understandable.

Hawaii involves the struggles of a teenage hapa at Punahou School who wanted nothing more than to be a professional basketball player. It is about his extraordinary mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, deeply loving if frequently absent. While politicians burnish their histories by laying claim to early years of community work and lives of public service, she was the real deal, devoting her career, unsung and underpaid, to helping poor women make their way in the modern world.

It is about his mysterious father, Barack Hussein Obama, an imperious if alluring voice gone distant and then missing. It is about his grandparents, Madelyn and Stan Dunham, Toot and Gramps, the white couple with whom he lived for most of his teenage years, she practical and determined, he impulsive, hokey, well-intentioned and, by his grandson's account, burdened with the desperate lost hopes of a Willy Loman-style salesman. It is about their family's incessant migration away from the heartland, from the Great Plains to the West Coast to Hawaii.

And that was not far enough for their daughter, who followed the Pacific farther to Indonesia and traveled the world until, at the too-early age of 52, she made her way back to Honolulu, taking an apartment next to her parents' in the high-rise on the corner of Beretania and Punahou, to die there of cancer. It was the same year, 1995, that her son made his debut on the national stage with a book about himself that searched for the missing, the void -- his dad, Kenya, Africa -- and paid less attention to the people and things that had shaped his life, especially his mother.

The simple fact is that he would not exist as a human being, let alone as a politician, without his mother's sensibility, naive or adventurous or both. Of all the relationships in Obama's life, none has been deeper, more complex or more important. They lived under the same roof for only perhaps 12 years and were frequently apart during his adolescence, but her lessons and judgments were always with him. In some sense, because they were just 18 years apart, they grew up together, each following a singular path toward maturity....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082201679_pf.html

[Captain Hilts]

1. This is one of the things about him that reminds me of Bill Clinton. nt

[DeepModem Mom]

2. VERY perceptive, Mookie. From the article --

"Like many presidential aspirants before him, and perhaps most like Bill Clinton, Obama grew up surrounded by strong women, the male figures either weak or absent. Once, during the heat of the primary race between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a claim came from Bill Clinton that he "understood" Obama. As different as their backgrounds and families were, it was no doubt this strong-female-weak-male similarity that he had in mind."