Yet the key to understanding the disciplined and often impassive 44th president is his mother, as Janny Scott, a reporter for the New York Times, decisively demonstrates in her new biography, “A Singular Woman.”
The solicitousness that can anger liberals, the deliberativeness that can infuriate conservatives, the unusual belief in both empirical research and human goodness, the wicked cutting humor — all of it comes from a woman who broke gender conventions by happenstance rather than design.
A bookish outsider and only child, she was plunked down in Hawaii the year after it became a state by her restless father and her resolute mother. In her first months as a college freshman, at 17 years old, she got pregnant by her first boyfriend, an older student from Kenya named Barack Hussein Obama, who married her but left her when the baby was 11 months old. Twice, she married men from different cultures and races, then divorced them. With the help of her parents, she raised two biracial children as a single mother on the Pacific islands of two nations, got degrees in math and anthropology, spent years in peasant villages studying Javanese cottage industries, and pieced together grants and development work to make money and provide for her children’s education. Colleagues credit her with helping pioneer microcredit as a tool for lifting women out of poverty.
As a journalist who has explored how women compose an authentic life for themselves as the partners and confidants of powerful male politicians, I have often been irritated by Obama’s reductive descriptions of his mother, who died in 1995 in Honolulu as he began his run for state Senate in Chicago. “She was just the sweetest woman that I knew and really a wonderful spirit,” he told Larry King in 2006.
Scott pointedly notes: “The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white woman from Kansas coupled alliteratively with the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In ‘Dreams from My Father,’ the memoir that helped power Obama’s ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naive idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food stamp recipient, the victim of a health-care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for coverage as her life slipped away.”
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