With exactly two weeks to go before the election, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has announced he will leave the campaign trail for two days to visit his gravely ill grandmother in Hawaii.
Madelyn Payne Dunham, 85, played an instrumental role in Obama’s early life. She and her late husband, Stanley, raised him in Hawaii for many years while his mother, who had remarried, lived in Indonesia.
The Obama campaign offered few details about Dunham’s condition beyond saying that “her health has deteriorated to the point where her situation is very serious.” Both of Obama’s parents are dead.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the senator planned to head to his native Hawaii on Thursday, and was cancelling appearances in midwestern Iowa and Wisconsin. Gibbs said that Obama planned to return to the campaign trail Saturday.
Dunham is known by Obama and his half-sister as “Toot”- short for “Tutu,” the Hawaiian word for grandparent.
Besides helping to raise her grandson after the collapse of her daughter’s marriage to a Kenyan graduate student, and again, later, when her daughter moved to Indonesia, Dunham was a trailblazer in her own right. She worked on a Boeing aircraft B-29 assembly line during World War II, and later became one of the first female vice presidents at the Bank of Hawaii.
In a March 18 speech on race, Obama described her as “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world.”
She was his grandmother, whom he could no more disown than he could his controversial African-American pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Yet he said that she was also “a woman once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
In a radio interview two days later, Obama said he meant no disparagement of Dunham.
“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity - she doesn’t,” he said. “But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know…there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”
In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama had described his grandmother as a practical, no-nonsense woman who was “suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims.”
Born Madelyn Payne in Peru, Kan., on Oct. 26, 1922, Dunham married Stanley Armour Dunham, a Baptist furniture salesman, in 1940 against the wishes of her parents, who were stern Methodists.
As the two struggled to earn a living, they moved to California, Texas, Kansas, Washington and finally to Hawaii. Madelyn Dunham started working at the Bank of Hawaii in 1960 and was promoted to be one of the first bank female vice presidents in 1970 - no easy task in 1970s Honolulu, where both women and the minority white population were routinely discriminated against.
Her husband died in 1992. Dunham still lives in the same small high-rise apartment where she raised Obama, not far from his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.
In an interview with USA Today, Soetoro-Ng said that Dunham mostly stays at home “listening to books on tape and watching her grandson on CNN every day.”
Update: The Associated Press is reporting that Dunham’s brother, Charles Payne, said in a telephone interview that she recently fell and broke her hip.
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2 Comments
#1. John Locke 10.21.2008
No problem with Obama visiting his grandmother, and suspending his campaign to do it - the problem is the media is NOT accusing him of a “campaign tactic” as they did McCain when HE suspended his campaign to go to Washington in our Nation’s Financial Crisis. Anyone remember that? The (I won’t say “liberal”) communistic, hypocritic, lopsided, warped propaganda filled press is keeping silent. Americans need to see the reality on this - not that it is a problem of Obama suspending his campaign for this, but that the media shows double standards in nearly everything they do. For me, no more ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, or CNN - I don’t believe in their rhetoric and, not only will not watch them, I will not buy anything from sponsors who I find our are advertising on them.
#2. Clarck Jameson 10.21.2008
You Moron visiting a dying familymember is not a campaign tactic ! Mccain suspended his for other reasons economical ones….DO NOT EVEN COMPARE and for you not buying stuff from these advertisers you so hate….good for you, it’s not as if they will lose something now.
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