Why do we hear so little about Barack Obama's mother in this campaign? The silence about a person who the Democratic Presidential candidate describes fondly as the most influential person in his life, is becoming deafening. Media mongrels attack Obama daily and today reach new levels of hypocrisy when two of them label him in polar opposite terms.One calls him too lacking in gravitas ( Andrea Tantaros)and the other says he is too serious (Maureen Dowd). Yet no one seems to have anything to say about his mother?
I smell a rat. Do you?
Can it be that the GOP wingnuts think that exploring the backgound of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 53, might backfire? Could these facts ease some of the doubts independent and undecided voters have about the brilliant man who is the first African American to be nominated for President by a major political party?Let's try to spread some news and truths about this remarkable woman before they try to "fill in the blanks" as only they can.
The April 8,2008 cover story of Obama's mother was an 8 page, almost 7000 word, in depth, combination bio and news article by Time Honolulu bureau correspondent Amanda Ripley.
http://www.time.com/...
I will use material from that story as well as info from an article by
Rick Montgomery,McClatchy-Tribune News Service
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/...
Ann Dunham was born in Wichita,Kansas in 1942. She was named after her father,who reportedly gave his only child his name because he had wanted a boy. She was referred to as "Ann" for most of her life.
Her family moved from Kansas to California to Texas to Washington—before she was 18.In high school she took advanced courses in philosophy and a close friend described her as: "a very intelligent, quiet girl, interested in her friendships and current events.She wasn't particularly interested in children or in getting married,"
She was invited to attend the University of Chicago before her graduation, but her father, a furniture salesman, felt she was too young to live on her own.
A few months later her father moved the family again—this time to Honolulu, after he heard about a big new furniture store there. Ann enrolled in the University of Hawaii as a freshman.
She met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian-language class. He was one of the first Africans to attend the University of Hawaii. Neil Abercrombie, a member of Congress from Hawaii who was friends with Obama Sr. in college remembers him this way; "He had this magnetic personality.Everything was oratory from him, even the most commonplace observation."
One day Ann came home from school and told her parents about an African student she had met at school. They invited him over for dinner. Her father didn't notice when his daughter reached out to hold the man's hand, according to Obama's memoir "Dreams from my Father."
On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met,Obama's parents got married in Maui.Ann was three months pregnant with Barack.
The thread is picked up here by Obama in his memoir,"I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?" Obama wondered. "I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more."
From the Time magazine article:
At 18, Ann Obama dropped out of college after one semester, according to University of Hawaii records.Then, when Obama was almost 1, his father left for Harvard to get a Ph.D. in economics. He had also been accepted to the New School in New York City, with a more generous scholarship that would have allowed his family to join him. But he decided to go to Harvard. "How can I refuse the best education?" he told Ann, according to Obama's book.
Obama's father had an agenda: to return to his home country and help reinvent Kenya. He wanted to take his new family with him. But he also had a wife from a previous marriage there—a marriage that may or may not have been legal. In the end, Ann decided not to follow him. "She was under no illusions," says Abercrombie. "He was a man of his time, from a very patriarchal society." Ann filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964, citing "grievous mental suffering"—the reason given in most divorces at the time. Obama Sr. signed for the papers in Cambridge, Mass., and did not contest the divorce.
Ann had already done so many daring things at such an early age.She had married an African and had their baby. She got a divorce. She might well have been bitter about her lot but she was not the bitter type. She could have painted a picture in her son's mind of a worthless father but she was not the vindictive type either..
Ann returned to college and would get her bachelor's degree four years later. While matriculating she met Lolo Soetoro,an easygoing foreign student from Indonesia. Barack,in his memoir speaks of Soetoro spending a lot of time with him and teaching him how to play chess. Lolo proposed to Ann in 1967.
After they were wed the family of three moved to Lolo's house, on the outskirts of Jakarta,Indonesia. Ann and her son were the first foreigners to live in the neighborhood. Obama attended a Catholic school called Franciscus Assisi Primary School.
Time descibes the Jakarta years:
Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son's room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn't afford the élite international school and worried he wasn't challenged enough. After two years at the Catholic school, Obama moved to a state-run elementary school closer to the new house. He was the only foreigner, says Ati Kisjanto, a classmate, but he spoke some Indonesian and made new friends.
In 1971, when Obama was 10, Ann sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend Punahou, an élite prep school that he'd gotten into on a scholarship with his grandparents' help. This wrenching decision seemed to reflect how much she valued education.A year later, Ann followed Obama back to Hawaii, as promised, taking her daughter but leaving her husband behind. She enrolled in a master's program at the University of Hawaii to study the anthropology of Indonesia
Ann's husband, Lolo visited Hawaii often, but they never lived together again. She filed for divorce in 1980.She did not ask for any alimony or child support As with Obama's father, she kept in regular contact with Lolo.
After three years of living in a small apartment in Honolulu,Ann decided to go back to Indonesia to do fieldwork for her Ph.D. Obama, then about 14, told her he would stay behind. In Indonesia, Ann joked to friends that her son seemed interested only in basketball.
She was hired by the Ford Foundation as the program officer for women and spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities. She worked at convincing the Foundation to get closer to the people.
"She wasn't ideological," notes Obama. "I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant." He remembers her joking that she wanted to get paid as much as a man, but it didn't mean she would stop shaving her legs. In his recent Philadelphia speech on race, in which he acknowledged the grievances of blacks and whites, Obama was consciously channeling his mother. "When I was writing that speech," he told nbc News, "her memory loomed over me. Is this something that she would trust?" When it came to race, Obama told me, "I don't think she was entirely comfortable with the more aggressive or militant approaches to African-American politics."
Barack Obama's mother's most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia,from 1988 to '92. Today Indonesia's microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million member.
In the fall of 1994, Ann was having dinner at her friend's house in Jakarta when she felt a pain in her stomach.A few months months later, she learned it was ovarian and uterine cancer. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, at 52.
Her son ,possibly a U.S. President next January attributes "what is best in me" to her can-do idealism and resilience to adversity.
He also notes how her wanderlust and "a certain recklessness" compelled him to seek for his own daughters a more stable upbringing — a home in Chicago, with two parents.
Those who knew her notice other traits passed down: A pointy chin, tilted up in pensive moments. A genuine rejection of racial lines. A supreme confidence — some might say elitism — in the face of circumstances that were anything but elite.
All in all a feminist long before it was fashionable.