One afternoon in February 1961, a black man and a white woman slipped away to
the Hawaiian island of Maui and got married. There were no guests, not even
family members, with both sets of parents disapproving of the union. It was
at a time when mixed-race marriages were still illegal in much of the United
States.
He was 25, a Kenyan scholarship student, charming, arrogant and irresponsible.
She was 18, rebellious, dreamy and three months pregnant. It was a marriage
between a drifting polygamist (he had left another wife and two children
back in Africa, a piece of information he had not shared with his new bride)
and an immature idealist, a relationship with a deeply uncertain future.
What it produced was Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.
Both geographically and metaphorically, Mr Obama’s journey to the White House
is the longest and strangest undertaken by any president. It begins on an
island almost 2,400 miles off the coast of California, the westernmost
frontier of America, before setting off on a meandering path to Indonesia to
Chicago to Kenya and finally to Washington DC. It also starts with a
mixed-race child, a “hapa” or “half-and-half” in Hawaiian, raised
principally by his white grandparents, searching for his identity and
smoking pot to ease his uncertainties; “a skinny guy with a funny name”, in
his own words, who propels himself to the most powerful office in the world.
There are multiple journeys within the Obama story: from atheism to
Christianity; from dry legal academic to the epitome of political cool; from
“Barry” to “Barack”; from surfer dude to hardscrabble community worker to
sharp-suited lawyer to president. “In no other country is my story even
possible,” Mr Obama told the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Mr
Obama’s genius was to realise, very early in his career, that so far from
being a political liability, his extraordinary and unlikely story could be
turned into his greatest asset. John McCain had a good story too – of
courage and resilience – but for sheer rags-to-riches, all-American
self-renewal, it was never a patch on Mr Obama’s.
Mr Obama told the story himself in two bestselling books, the first a
carefully calibrated and movingly written memoir of self-discovery (see
extracts), the second more obviously political, filling in the gaps. He
told it when he effectively launched his presidential campaign in 2004: “My
father was born and raised in a small village in Kenya . . .” He rehearsed
it again in the early hours of yesterday morning, as he celebrated victory
and marvelled at the distance he had travelled. “I was never the likeliest
candidate for this office,” he told the crowd. “If there is anyone out there
who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible . . .
tonight is your answer.”
When historians come to assess the Obama victory, they will record his
charisma, his tactics, his rhetoric and his astonishing run of good luck.
But they will also have to recognise that what won it for him was his story.
As an adult, Mr Obama would look back on his parents’ union and invest it,
naturally enough, with lyrical romance. “My mother was that girl with the
movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father’s
attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own
parents’ lives . . . it was a guileless need, one without
self-consciousness, but perhaps that’s how love begins.”
Kansas-born Stanley Ann Dunham (her father, Stanley, or “Gramps”, had wanted a
boy) was only 17 and newly arrived on Hawaii when she met Barack Hussein
Obama Sr in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii. The elder Obama was
the first African to attend the university, one of a group of fortunate
young students brought to the US with American donations in the heady days
after Kenyan independence. His arrival had been greeted with some fanfare in
Honolulu. “Young men from Kenya, Jordan and Iran here to study at U.H.”
reported a local paper.
Barack Obama Sr was an odd mixture of parts: fiercely bright and ambitious and
possessing a deep voice and a mellifluous British-Kenyan accent; he was also
outspoken to the point of arrogance, selfish and equally adept at giving and
taking offence. His new mother-in-law, Madelyn, known as Toot, thought him
“strange”.
Barack means “blessed”, but Mr Obama’s start was anything but. His father
walked out early on, heading off to Harvard on another scholarship (the
second time he would leave behind a wife and child, but not the last). The
young Mr Obama would grow up with an heroic idea of this missing father.
“The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader . . . It
was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed
all the attributes I sought in myself.” The truth about his father was very
different. He would not see him again for another eight years.
By the time Mr Obama was 6, his parents had divorced and his mother was about
to remarry, to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian geologist studying in Hawaii,
with whom she was later to have a daughter, Maya. Mother and son moved to
Indonesia, and “Barry”, as he was known, was plunged into a new, demanding
and exotic world.
In his book, Mr Obama depicts his mother as a liberal idealist, an
anthropologist and Bohemian free spirit devoted to others, and it is true
that she spent her life, before an early death from cancer in 1995, helping
women in poor countries to get ahead, but she was also remarkably naive,
loving but disorganised. Mother and son would spend only a dozen years
living under the same roof.
When her second marriage began to disintegrate, she decided that, for the sake
of his education, Mr Obama should return to Hawaii and live with her
parents. He was enrolled at Punahou school, an elite academic environment in
which he found himself one of the few black children in a remarkable
multiracial melting pot. Mr Obama’s grandparents adored him, and brought him
up in a conventional middle-class home, instilling their Midwestern values
of honesty and respect for others. Yet his was a strange childhood: an
adored but largely absent mother, an heroic but missing father, a mixed
blood-heritage, and a pervasive but unarticulated sense of abandonment.
A brief visit to Honolulu by father and mother when he was 10 years old did
little to clarify matters: Mr Obama was relieved when his father left; he
never saw him again. Both parents, in reality, were oddly childlike. In a
most telling remark, Mr Obama told Newsweek in September: “At some
level I had to raise myself.”
Those close to Mr Obama credit him with an extraordinary capacity for
self-control and imposing order, an ability to synthesise divergent views
into a single direction. His childhood was confusing and messy but his adult
life has been single-minded and controlled to an astonishing degree. Indeed,
one of his vulnerabilities is a tendency to react badly to surprises.
In his first book, Mr Obama describes his teenage struggle to frame his own
identity. “I was trying to raise myself as a black man in America, and
beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly
what that meant.”
He admits medicating this teenage crisis of confidence in the usual ways. “Pot
had helped, and booze, and maybe a little blow when you could afford it . .
. something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something
that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my
memory.” It is hard to know how much to believe of this self-forged image as
a drug-inclined rebel. Even Mr Obama’s closest friends from this time deny
that he was ever a “party animal”, and no one has come forward as a witness
to his supposed drug-taking. If he inhaled, and snorted, it was on a small
scale: yet the image is vital to his story, part of the narrative of
redemption and self-discovery. While hardly a dropout, the teenage Mr Obama
was adrift, unfocused, unhurried and apparently entirely without ambition:
he played poker, listened to Earth, Wind & Fire, read Mal-colm X and
planned to be a professional basketball player.
The magazine American Conservative once described him as “a formidable
identity artist”. The observation was meant pejoratively, but it is also
true, and arguably the key to his success: Mr Obama’s early life suggests
not adaptation, the chameleon’s ability to blend with the surroundings, but
something more fundamental, a clear-eyed determination to change himself and
establish his own identity by force of will. As a student, he read
Nietzsche, while developing his own will to power.
It was at Occidental College, a liberal arts university in Los Angeles, that
Mr Obama appears to have made his first foray into politics, with a speech
at an antiapartheid rally. At about the same time he began to ask people,
notably his black friends, to call him Barack rather than Barry. From
Occidental he transferred to Columbia University, and then took a series of
jobs in New York. It was there, in 1982, that he learnt that his father had
died in a car crash in Kenya. “I felt no pain,” he later wrote. “Only the
vague sense of an opportunity lost.”
In 1985 he moved to Chicago, to work as a community organiser, and it was
there that his political identity and social conscience were forged, and
fused. Working in the city’s tough South Side, his task was to organise a
black community to participate in a political system from which they had too
often been excluded, lobbying for jobs and improved public housing, fighting
for rights concealed under generations of racial discrimination. Hawaii had
been a racial kaleidoscope with no overall ethnic majority; South Side
Chicago, by contrast, is one of the most concentrated black communities in
the US. Earning a meagre $12,000 a year, Mr Obama called his experience “the
best education I ever had”.
His upbringing had been largely secular, but in Chicago he joined Trinity
United Church of Christ, and befriended its pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright,
whose extreme comments on the subject of race would later come back to haunt
Mr Obama’s campaign.
In 1988, he headed to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black
president of Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious law journal in
the US. He was fast becoming famous, but before going to Harvard, he
completed another journey, one that looms larger in his campaign than any
other. That summer, he travelled to Kenya for the first time, prompted by
contact with his Kenyan half-sister Auma. There, he discovered the truth
about his father. Far from bestriding the new Africa, his father had ended
his life as a sad drunk and a failed bureaucrat, with eight children he
could not support by four different marriages.
At the climax of his book, Mr Obama describes a cathartic moment when he wept
on his father’s grave: “I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was
no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of
words. I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the
sense of abandonment that I’d felt as a boy – was all connected with this
small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a
name or the colour of my skin.”
Fatherlessness is one of several traits Mr Obama shares with Bill Clinton.
Indeed, the failure and fate of his father help to explain his personal
ambition, so lightly worn but so deeply felt. “A man is either trying to
live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,”
he once said. “In my case, both things might be true.”
Dreams From My Father was published in 1995 and went on to become a
huge bestseller. Political opponents would later claim that the book was
really a disguised political manifesto, ideally positioning him to run for
the presidency and providing a set text through which voters could
understand and relate to his exotic family roots. The book also earnt him a
large amount of money.
Armed with this remarkable back-story and married to Michelle Robinson,
another Harvard law graduate from a working-class Chicago family, Mr Obama
launched his political career from the Chicago base he had established as a
community worker.
In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois State Senate as part of the Democrat
minority; four years later he stood for a seat in the US Congress, and was
crushed by Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther. Some claimed this
Harvard-educated, light-skinned black man was “not black enough” for some
African-American voters. His second book, The Audacity of Hope, was
in part a response to those suggestions: “I know what it’s like to have
people tell me I can’t do something because of my colour,” he wrote. “I know
the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger.”
Two years after the humiliation of losing to Mr Rush, Mr Obama was bidding for
an even bigger prize, a seat in the US Senate, which he won by an unexpected
landslide. In 2006, he announced his presidential candidacy at the Old State
Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, but with hindsight the moment that it
became a possibility occurred two years earlier, when he took the stage at
the Democratic convention, and told a story that is now part of American
political folklore. “Tonight is a particular honour for me because, let’s
face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father . . . grew
up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roofed shack. His father, my
grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.”
It is possible to see Mr Obama’s story as an epic of balance: part black, part
white; the Harvard academic balanced by the Hawaiian basketball player; the
African-American experience in Chicago tempered by childhood in a
multiracial society on the edge of America. Mr Obama arrives at the White
House carrying important mementoes from the most remarkable presidential
journey of modern times: a bit of Hawaii and part of Kenya, some grit from
the South Side and the polished Ivy League manner of Harvard and Columbia.
“The audacity of hope” (a phrase from one of Mr Wright’s sermons) has remained
the Obama campaign mantra for the past two years. But perhaps the most
wildly optimistic moment in the story occurred 47 years ago when a young
Kenyan man and a teenager from Hawaii called their baby Barack, with the
audacity of hope that he might be blessed.
As an American that grew up in Oklahoma, moved to LA and loves Hawaii I feel sad for the people of my home state that they are blinded by their lack of understanding that we in the USA have a president that can change how the world views us. Hopefully our new president can change them too.
Marco Domingos, Palm Desert, United States
Mr.Obama is great.
Support you!
Rita wang, Beijing, China
I was raised from a poor family, with my father having two wives,i was brought in family of rage and hatred,i had to raise myself ,paying tuition,name it all,today iam studying towards chartered accountancy,Obama's victory has given me nuch hope and who knows may be i will the next president .
paul, Johannesburg, South Africa