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NO SUSPENSION.
Folks need to stop saying that Obama is "suspending" his campaign to go visit his ailing grandmother. He's not. His ads will run, his field workers will organize, his running mate and wife will give speeches. He himself is leaving the trail for a day to attend to personal business. It's an important distinction: The campaign, at this point, is bigger than Obama, bigger than McCain. It involves hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of millions of workers and volunteers. The idea that it seizes up if the candidate turns his attention elsewhere is absurd. It's comforting that Obama has kept sight of this distinction between candidate and campaign, and isn't pretending that his temporary absence somehow overwhelms the functioning of the American electoral process. Candidates don't get to call time out on democracy.
Meanwhile, others have remarked on this, but the resemblance between Obama and his grandfather is incredibly striking, and folks should read Ta-Nehisi Coates' touching meditation on what it tells us about Madelyn and Stanley Dunham.
COMMENTS (8)
I give my parents huge props for being brave... but as a mixed race kid, I think Ta-Nehisi's overstating for effect: it's life, not bravery, and most people are human enough to have their hearts melt over the grandkids. All four of my grandparents - who had tremendous reservations about my parents' marriage (and in the case of my mom, her sister's marriage, also to a black man) - were pretty much won over by grandchildren. It's not courage. It's life.
I think that, too, is an important point to be made about integration and mixing races - that we overthink, and overstate, just what it means. From my end, my life and who I am is pretty unremarkable. But to this day, I still can surprise people simply by pointing out my racial background. Because it's unexpected, because it's not - even now - what usually happens (mixed marriages are something like 8% of the population). The one thing I've always known is that I don't have to wonder about Barack Obama's personal story - it's my story, too. But it's also, when you live it, not really so "courageous" or strange. It's just your Nana and Papa, your mom and dad, your family and how they are. I feel so sad for the possibility that he will lose the woman who helped raise him, especially so close to such a major achievement. I hope she hangs on to see him win. Not because it's historic, but because he is hers.
Posted by: weboy | October 21, 2008 1:24 PM
weboy--the usual path is that it has to start with bravery--and if we are all very lucky, it ends with banality and boredom. But just because it's banal now, no need to take away from the tensions that people had to overcome at the time.
Posted by: JMS | October 21, 2008 4:10 PM
I'd go with JMS... by the time I turned up (maybe because I turned up) my grandparents (on both sides) were reconciled to this mixed race relationship of my parents... but they've all admitted that there was a lot of bad stuff at the beginning.
Posted by: Meh | October 21, 2008 5:10 PM
When I received my copy of Dreams From My Father I looked at the cover and wondered, "when was Obama in the military?" Because there he was, wearing a military uniform and holding a baby girl...but then I examined it closer. The uniform was old, and it was his mother in the photo with his grandfather.
Posted by: KathyF | October 21, 2008 6:01 PM
I think Obama acknowledged deep unhappiness in reaction to Anne's elopement w/ Barack, Sr. How much this has to do with elopement or elopement w/ someone unknown or "a black man?" isn't clear, @ least from the book. What is clear is that Stanley and Madelyn never alienated their daughter to the extent of her feeling that she couldn't turn to them for help.
I have a biracial friend, and from what she says, her mother and father did not receive such generous treatment from her (white) parents. There were a couple of pretty outrageous incidents (one involving a shotgun), and years of estrangement. This was probably a decade after Barack, Sr. and Anne first got together, albeit in the midwest.
I'm going to stop because it's really none of my business to spew on blogs. However, I just have to make a point that before I met my friend I would have assumed that after a certain point in American history and outside the South that everyone would be generally "accepting", if not entirely comfortable, w/ interracial marriage.
Although I do agree that Coates overstates a bit for effect (he's blogging, after all ;)), I also think that he's got a point about how hard it is sometimes to act decently when run up against big social prejudices like this.
Posted by: Paula | October 21, 2008 8:15 PM
> The campaign . . . involves . . . tens of millions of workers and volunteers.
I think that probably overstates the number of workers and volunteers by an order of magnitude or so. The 2004 campaign involved tens of millions of *voters*.
Posted by: DC | October 21, 2008 8:57 PM
i have often wished during this campaign, that obama's mother was here to see him.
......obama has absolutely no hint of unkindness in his face, in any photograph i have ever seen of him.
i think these few days before the election, with his grandmother, will be profoundly special days for him. she is just the person that barack needs to be with.
i am glad that he will be with her during these days.
his grandmother has to have been an unusually good and loving person, to have shaped a man as fine as barack obama.
Posted by: jacqueline | October 22, 2008 12:56 AM
Folks seem to be forgetting that Grandma is a typical white person (read: racist) and deserving of no praise or sympathy.
Posted by: Anonymous | October 22, 2008 3:36 AM