Obama shaped by search for identity

Despite the attention to the men who have influenced Barack Obama, from his inconstant Kenyan father to his fiery former pastor, a woman did the most to mold him.

She was his mother, oddly named Stanley Ann Dunham - her father wanted a boy.

A white woman from conventional, small-town Kansas, she lived a wildly unconventional life, scampering about the globe, marrying men of color from foreign societies, doing social work in Asian villages.

Her social idealism and political progressivism inspired Obama’s political thinking.

“She is the single constant in my life,“ he has said. “What is best in me I owe to her.“

But he also diverged from that constant.

Where Dunham was a wanderer who disdained conformity, her son sought belonging, an establishment career and a conventional life in his homeland. Where she was a prodigal, he longed for home.

Her wandering life produced a son who moves easily through communities of all kinds, at all levels, and scarcely appears to see boundaries or racial lines.

“This crowd looks a little bit like my family,“ Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, told white, black and Hispanic supporters in Tampa in July.

His mother’s parents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Dunham, who partly reared Obama, figured almost as heavily in his life.

They seemed a typical “greatest generation” Kansas couple - he went to Europe with Patton, she worked in a bomber plant.

After the war, Stanley Dunham started moving the family west, chasing jobs and opportunity, finally settling in Honolulu.

At the University of Hawaii in the 1960s, Stanley Ann began dating a brilliant, charismatic Kenyan student, Barack Hussein Obama.

In 1961, 18 and pregnant, she married him.

At the time, Obama notes in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,“ miscegenation was still a felony in most states.

On Aug. 4, 1961, she gave birth to Barack Hussein Obama Jr.

But Barack Sr. had a village wife and two children in Africa, and seemed no more devoted to his Hawaii family. In 1963, he left them to go to graduate school at Harvard University, then back to Kenya.

Stanley Ann divorced him, went back to school and supported herself and her toddler, partly with food stamps.

“Dreams From My Father” is largely about Obama’s attempt after his father’s 1982 death to reconcile himself with his father’s failings, in part by going to Africa to meet his relatives there.
‘I Needed A Race’

In 1967, his mother married another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian, and the couple moved to Djakarta with 6-year-old Obama.

Obama attended a Catholic school, then a public school, which has been falsely called a Muslim “madrassa” in some smears.

His mother worried about his education and about the lack of black people in his life, and gave him books on black history and Martin Luther King.

In 1970, she sent him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and go to prep school.
Not surprisingly, the young, black American boy, reared among whites and Asians, had begun to feel rootless, questioning his own identity.

“I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America. No one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant,“ he wrote in his memoir. “I needed a race.“

He experimented with youthful rebellion, neglected studying and tried marijuana and cocaine - but stopped short of harder drugs that got one friend arrested.

At Occidental College in Los Angeles, he ditched the lifelong nickname “Barry” and began to go by Barack.

He transferred to prestigious Columbia University for a bachelor’s degree in political science.
Helping Communities

After graduating in 1983, Obama went to Chicago to work for a church-based community organizing group in the city’s economically depressed South Side.

His $1,000-a-month job was to help neighborhood people get action from government or civic agencies to clean up parks, fix streets and sidewalks, and remove asbestos from a housing project.

He met the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, who preached an “Afrocentric” theology - black self-reliance, social responsibility, opposition to racism, but rejecting separatism and segregation.

Wright officiated at Obama’s 1992 wedding and baptized his two daughters, but became a controversial figure in this campaign when seemingly anti-American statements he made from the pulpit were publicized.

Obama quit his job to go to Harvard Law School in 1988, and became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.

That gave him his pick of jobs at top law firms. Instead, he chose a Chicago civil rights firm, and taught at the University of Chicago Law School.

Obama met his wife-to-be, Michelle Robinson, during a summer job at her Chicago law firm. When they got engaged, she left the prestigious firm to take a job with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

Obama’s career after that is well-known. After eight years in the Illinois Senate, he won a U.S. Senate seat in 2004, and a breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention gave him a national name.

—In 1996, Obama played hardball to make his first political mark, unseating incumbent Democratic state Sen. Alice Palmer by using technical challenges to invalidate her filing petitions. His supporters respond that he ran only because she left the race to run for Congress - she re-entered it after losing the U.S. House primary. I shortened this in hope of getting it in.

—In 2000, after less than a full state Senate term, he ran for Congress against another Democratic incumbent, losing by an embarrassing 2-1 margin.

—By 2004, Obama was making a name for himself as a charismatic young politician, but was still a long shot when he entered a race for an open U.S. Senate seat.

Reporter William March can be reached at (813) 259-7761.