Obama: How He Got Here: The Ghost of a Father

[Adelante]

This biographical piece will likely be of no interest to anyone anti Obama, but for Obama supporters and others who may be open to him, especially those who were abandoned by their fathers or who otherwise lost their fathers in childhood, it's good reading.

The Ghost of a Father

By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 14, 2007; Page A12


Sometimes the trigger will be a newspaper story he is reading about Africa. Or he may spot a group of boys on a street corner on the South Side of Chicago and think that one or more of them "could be me, they may not have a father at home." At other moments, he will be playing with his daughters -- Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6 -- and begin to wrestle with what kind of father he has become, what a career in politics has meant to their lives and how to guard against his father's mistakes.

Thoughts of his father "bubble up," as Barack Obama puts it in an interview, "at different moments, at any course of the day or week."

"I think about him often," he says.

He last saw his father in 1971, when he was 10 years old. Remarried and living in his native Kenya, Barack Obama Sr. sent word that he wanted to visit his son in Hawaii over Christmas.

To the son, he had become a ghost, an opaque figure hailed as brilliant, charismatic, dignified, with a deep baritone voice that reminded everyone of James Earl Jones. All the boy knew was that his father had gone off to study at Harvard and never come back. Now, the old man would put flesh on the ghost.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/13/AR2007121301784.html?hpid=artslot&sid=ST2007121301893