aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, February 04, 2008

The women behind the man

I’ve not yet had the luxury of a quiet reading, but the March Vanity Fair has a timely profile, Raising Obama:

Is he tough enough? That’s the question being asked of Barack Obama. To those who have known the candidate since boyhood, it’s not just those “dreams from my father” that make Obama a contender, but also his mother’s daring, his grandmother’s grit, and his own relentless drive.

Ann Durham, Obama’s mother, died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 52:

It was his mother’s presence-and not infrequent absence-that most colored his early years. She cried easily and remained an impossible romantic. (She would pull her children from bed to look at a particularly beautiful moonrise.) But she also possessed enormous drive and determination. In Indonesia, she would wake Barack up before dawn for English lessons from a correspondence course. Alice Dewey told me that Dunham “divorced happily” from Soetoro-who died in 1987 of complications from a liver ailment-in part because “he gradually became more and more like a Westerner and she became more and more like a Javanese.” Obama told me he could only laugh at the false press accounts that portray Soetoro as some kind of radical Muslim who had sent him to an Islamic school. “I mean, you know, his big thing was Johnny Walker Black, Andy Williams records,” Obama said. “I still remember ‘Moon River.’ He’d be playing it, sipping, and playing tennis at the country club. That was his whole thing. I think their expectations diverged fairly rapidly.”

“She was sort of unflinchingly and unwaveringly empathetic, you know,” her daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is nine years younger than Barack, told me over coffee one afternoon in Honolulu. “She had an ability to see herself in so many different kinds of people, and that is something she was very strict about with us-that absence of judgment, of acrimony. She was always very good at finding a language that the other person would understand, regardless of where they were from, or their socio-economic background. And I think that’s something that’s been given to us, a major gift that’s bestowed on us.”

The water to Ann Dunham’s fire was her mother, Madelyn, who at 85 still lives in the same high-rise in Honolulu where she helped raise Barack; she is ailing, and declines interview requests. “Barack is interesting,” Maya said, “because he has our mother’s romantic tendencies, but he has our grandmother’s pragmatic tendencies.”

I’m still standing by my prediction that Barack’s going to be our candidate, even as I will be voting Hillary tomorrow.

RELATED: I get that Obama’s a Mac and Hillary a PC (online too). Macs are well-engineered, dazzling machines-but the analogy has a downside. They’re pricey, Apple has succumbed to hollywood drm, the Mac sheen is largely sustained through masterful marketing, and their owners tend towards proud zealotry.