Posted on 04/20/2011 8:16:05 AM PDT by STARWISE
Complete title:
NYT Mag features new book with Obama interview about his mother: 'She was a very strong person in her own way'
FIRST LOOK New York Times Magazine cover story, WHY SHE WENT: When Barry Obama was 6 years old [in 1967], his mother moved him to Indonesia.
It was a decision that would define his life and hers, by Janny Scott, a reporter for The New York Times who went on leave in 2008 to write A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obamas Mother, from which this article, "The Young Mother Abroad," is adapted:
The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left.
His elastic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny.
He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly.
The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle.
The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother.
It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas. The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those [oversimplifications], as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews.
When we spoke last July, Obama recalled serial displacements.
I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than hed care to admit at the time, Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Office and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, This is my choice, my? decision.
But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see you know what? that would be hard on a kid. He spoke about his mother with fondness, humor and a degree of candor that I had not expected.
There was also in his tone at times a hint of gentle forbearance. Perhaps it was the tone of someone whose patience had been tested, by a person he loved, to the point where he had stepped back to a safer distance. Or perhaps it was the knowingness of a grown child seeing his parent as irredeemably human. She was a very strong person in her own way, Obama said, when I asked about Anns limitations as a mother. Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation.
But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over.
Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, Well, itll all work out, and itll be fine.
But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.
But he did not, he said, hold his mothers choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.
He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.
Article .. See the cover: Barack Obama [in pirate hat and patch] with his mother in Hawaii. Photograph from friends and family of Stanley Ann Dunham.
I really hope he keeps on talking. He’ll eventually slip up and tell another easily deconstructed lie.
“... how her selfish choices put a little innocent boy in such turmoil ...”
Funny you bring that thought up, as it went through my mind as well, looking at the pirate picture (yes, Hale has brief moments of compassion, occasionally)...
Kind of sad in a way.
Ok - I’ve had my compassion moment. He’s STILL a feckless douchebag. What he was no longer matters. What he’s DOING is ALL that matters.
we had homes for pregnant gals too..before Roe
man..aside from medical technology and affordable AC
I prefer the early 60s of my youth to this culture
well...at least they married..we think
Here in metro Nashville area which btw has according to Tennessean is one of the largest percentages of mixed race spawn in the nation...it has little to do with marriage
It's 98% undesirable white girls taking advantage of sexual opportunities unavailabloe before the stigma collapsed...just the babies..no marriage...no daddy
I would wager that in the Nashville suburb of Lebanon that 1/4 of the lower class white girls are obsese and have mixed fatherless kids
we are dealing with how that went for Obama...how about all those kids in 25 -50 years?
the better off white girls who get knocked up by black guys tend to raise their kids in their environment and those have a chance
She was a commie muzzi globe trotting whore. Who did porn on the side when she wasn’t pretending to be an “anthropologist” (another way of saying that the asians paid more for white meat, even if it was ugly).
She hated Barry because he reminded her of BHO SR. Baggage she could do without. It came to a head in Indonesia as SADO’s abuse of Barry increased. Barry went to Hawaii for the summers to stay with SADIST’s parents[I’m sure it was for the change in weather].
When back in Hawaii she wanted to dump the whiny POS for good. Barry kept asking to meet his real father and SADO thought that it might be a good way to get rid of him. That’s why BHO SR. was summoned, she wanted him to take custody and he told her to stick it. He told her that he had dozens of children of his own that he couldn’t care for.
Her parents didn’t want the demon spawn either.....which is why they arranged to pay for Sr’s expenses while in Hawaii. Eventually, SADO dumped Barry with her parents which they in turn dumped him with Frank Marshall Davis.
Abanodoned by Father, Mother, Grandparents.
Abused by mother and reared by FMD——> Explains his faggotry
Is it any wonder this guy is a narcissistic sociopath?
Let's not forget pantyhose as a factor befores Roe and the pill. Gals were fairly well armored up in panty girdles and stocking on formal dates. Definite protection against wild impulses.
man..aside from medical technology and affordable AC I prefer the early 60s of my youth to this culture.
Amen brother.
“She was a very strong person”
She had to be, the “train” ran through her bed several nights a week.......Frank Marshall Davis was one of the Engineers!........Some claim
I still think this guy in the WH may not be the real BHO.
Couldn’t agree more. There is also the fact that BOTH his parents abandoned him, and he seems to have an unnatural need (even for politicians) to have crowds cheering him, and to appear before the cameras as much as possible. He is a disturbed man who was scarred terribly, IMO.
That sounds depressing.
I had spent most of 81-96 abroad and had no clue things had changed so much
I was recently back in Miami and saw much less of a all that
I suspected Nashville had more of all that and I
was right
Almost no rednecks left...all white trash thug culture
Not so much in the deep south though from what I see when I travel home
I’d like to see a picture of her in the 90s. A candid picture of her.
Thanks very much. To me, she looks exactly the same through the years. Just more weight, but the face stays the same. Most people change a lot from their teens to their 40s and on.
I agree. That’s why he started his re-election campaign so early. He loves fundraisers like the one he had in Hollywood. The abandoned child seeking attention.
A big yup on why Obama hates America.Same applies to Lisa Jackson and Eric Holder. They hate what white America has built in the last 400 years. We have lots of immigrants these days but whitey built America and died in wars for America.
I knew it, Corsi reveals on C2C-George Noory, that he leaked part of the book that contains new info never released to Matt Drudge.
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