Obama should bring mom's memory into his campaign
She was the "mother from Kansas" balanced alliteratively with the "father from Kenya." Or she was the white parent whose genes combined with the black parent. Or she was the woman dying of cancer "more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well." And on Tuesday night when her son all but sewed up the nomination, she appeared again as the "single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point."
I have been thinking of her not just because it's nearly Mother's Day but because Obama will soon have to reach out to Hillary Clinton's supporters, especially to women of a certain age who attached their hopes to having a woman in the White House. Obama has not yet had a "gender conversation" with those women.
What better link does he have than his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the girl whose own father expected and wanted a boy child? A nonconformist, a woman of the world who traveled a trajectory of change so associated with Clinton's generation?
It's no surprise that Obama wrote an entire memoir dedicated to his "barely known" parent: "Dreams From My Father." Single mothers can tell you how much time and energy their children spend on the absent parent. Especially when the world identifies the son by the race of this father.
It was only after his mother's death that he wrote in a new preface, "I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book — less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life." He added that "she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her."
From all accounts, this daughter of a family that kept traveling west in restless pursuit of the American dream took no part in Eisenhower-era conformity. She was a teenager in Hawaii when she fell for the charismatic Kenyan in her Russian class and married him six months before her son was born. This was a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in parts of the country.
The rest of the story is known: a divorce, a marriage to an Indonesian, a second divorce. She was a mother who kept her children focused as well as fed. But what's less known is the woman in her own right, the one who became an anthropologist, the woman who spent years as the respected head of research for Women's World Banking, bringing micro-financing to poor people in Indonesia.
Recent comments
To your candidate of choice. As the season goes on, I am sure more...
Excellent tribute | May 9, 2008 at 11:39 a.m.
Thank you for such a lovely, thoughtful Mother's Day Tribute...
Nicely done | May 9, 2008 at 8:09 a.m.
and will use his mother in whatever way suites him at the moment....
Obama is a politician | May 9, 2008 at 7:02 a.m.
