Obama Visits Grandma Who Was His 'Rock'

But Obama has talked openly about his relationship with his grandmother this week in interviews with morning network news shows.

"She has really been the rock of the family, the foundation of the family," he said on CBS's "The Early Show." "Whatever strength and discipline that I have, it comes from her."

Obama at times points to Dunham as an example of a generation of women who advanced despite sexist constraints.

She worked her way from the secretarial pool to become the Bank of Hawaii's first female vice president and the family's breadwinner. But it was a process that took more than 20 years, and in the memoir that he wrote as a young man, "Dreams From My Father," Obama said his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, complained about the treatment her mother received.

"More than once, my mother would tell Toot that the bank shouldn't get away with such blatant sexism," Obama wrote. "But Toot would just pooh-pooh my mother's remarks, saying that everybody could find a reason to complain."

Part of the reason may have been that she never thought of her job as a career.

Obama wrote that late in life, his grandmother told him she had always dreamed of life as a housewife or volunteer.

"I was surprised by this admission, for she rarely mentioned hopes or regrets," he wrote. "It may or may not have been true that she would have preferred the alternative history she imagined for herself, but I came to understand that her career spanned a time when the work of a wife outside the home was nothing to brag about, for her or Gramps -- that it represented only lost years, broken promises."

Dunham was not pleased when she found out that her 18-year-old daughter was pregnant and planning to marry Obama's Kenyan father, and Obama writes frankly about the racial dynamic of the newly expanded family and the views -- largely open and tolerant -- of his white grandparents from Kansas.

In the book, Obama recounts how his grandfather once told him that his grandmother was afraid of a panhandler at the bus stop, and that the reason she had given him money was because he was black. The words, he said, "were like a fist in my stomach."

And Obama was criticized for bringing Dunham into the controversy that surrounded the racially charged comments made by his former longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

In a highly scrutinized speech about race, the candidate said he could not "disown" Wright any more than he could his "white grandmother."

He described her as someone who "loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Obama did eventually disown Wright. But he often speaks of his grandparents' love and how they scrimped to send him to the exclusive Punahou Academy while his mother was living in Indonesia.

Obama -- who last visited Dunham in August, with his wife, Michelle, and two daughters coming to her apartment each day -- plans to return to the campaign trail on Saturday.

Obama has talked about how, when his mother died young of cancer, the end came so suddenly that he did not make it to Hawaii in time to say goodbye. He said he did not want that to happen again.

"One of the things I want to make sure of is that I had a chance to sit down with her and talk to her," he said of his grandmother on "Good Morning America." "She's still alert and she's still got all her faculties. And I want to make sure that I don't miss that opportunity right now."