Barack Obama is hard to know. Despite his easy style and occasionally apparent candor, his deepest motives remain a mystery to most of us. He has been in the fishbowl of the presidency for well over two years, yet his innermost self continues to be hidden from view.
Important clues, however, are to be found in Janny Scott’s revealing new book. Entitled “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” it sheds unexpected light on the internal dynamics of her son. Most people know our president’s history is an unusual one, they just don’t know how unusual.
Stanley Ann Dunham (yes, her first name was “Stanley”) was not just singular; she was peculiar. Very intelligent, energetic, engaging, and on several levels brave, she never did solve the central mysteries of her life. Instead, she bequeathed much of her unfinished business to her children.
The most important fact to understand about Stanley Ann is that she was running away from her demons. First, she ran away from her given name. This, of course, was forgivable. A girl named Stanley is at least as strange as a boy named Sue. Thus, nearly all of her adult life she was known as Ann.
But second, she was running away from her family. Her parents (Barack’s grandparents) were constantly bickering. And no wonder. The elder Stanley may generously be described as a charming rogue. Regularly given to embroidering stories about his achievements, he was essentially a restless n’er-do-well.
It was therefore up to Ann’s mother Madelyn to pick up the slack. She was much more straightforward and responsible than her husband and therefore held down jobs wherever his aimless ramblings led. Eventually her competence allowed her to rise to become the vice-president of a Hawaiian bank.
Nevertheless, it was her father with whom Ann was more psychologically involved, apparently because he was the less emotionally distant parent. Yet given his unreliability, theirs too was a conflict filled relationship. Ann loved him deeply, but could not abide what she perceived as his crudeness.
And so she ran away. For starters, she ran way emotionally. She always seems to have been a person who kept her own counsel. Next, as a teenager she ran way from home to the romantic lure of San Francisco. Absent any plans on how to survive, she naively trusted to whatever would turn up.
Eventually, after she, at seventeen, entered college, Ann ran into the arms of an exotic marriage. In becoming sexually involved with an older African (Barack Sr.) she could not possibly have understood, she entered an idealized life-space very different from the one she had known. And that was the point—it was different and hopefully better.
Once this fantasy failed to pan out, she again ran away into marriage with a mysterious foreigner—in this case an Indonesian. This led to physically deserting her country. Indeed, even after this marriage disintegrated she spent the better part of her adult life as an expatriate—idealistically attempting to solve others’ problems.
In the process, of course, she ran away from raising her ten-year-old son Barack. Despite her ostensible love for him, he was farmed out to her parents to be raised in Hawaii.
As for Barack, he evidently inherited this proclivity. While he has not run away from his family or country, he does run away from important responsibilities. Consider how he abandoned writing the stimulus and health care laws to Nancy Pelosi and congress. Consider how he leads from behind in Libya. And consider how he has not offered a serious budget to address our impending national bankruptcy.
Instead, he continues to bombard us with idealized talk about saving the nation. Others, whether vice-president Biden, the Senate, the Republicans or Nato are left to deal with the particulars, while he stands above the fray—or rather scurries away for it as expeditiously as he can.
Our president has even run away from the nation as a whole—at least symbolically. At nearly every turn he has been prepared to blame the United States, and its allies, for other’s problems. Thus, he regularly apologizes for who we are. Like his mother, he is evidently embarrassed by us and therefore pursues naively idealized policies as a substitute.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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