Obama's Biography Is Unique Among American Presidents

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Barack Obama is by far the most “rootless” – and therefore most “cosmopolitan” – president Americans have ever elected to that office.

His mother, Stanley Ann Durham, was a transient left-wing “hippy” from Wichita, Kansas, a child of the “sixties” who lived in various places before ending up in Hawaii.

There, while attending the University of Hawaii, she married a Luo graduate student from Kenya and had a child at age 18. The husband, Barack Sr., abandoned her almost immediately and returned to Kenya. Barack never really had a father.

In 1965, Ann married another student, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Indonesia. From age six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools in Jakarta.  He therefore spent his formative childhood years in a country culturally, geographically and religiously about as far from America as possible; he still has a half-sister in Indonesia.

Ann’s second marriage too would eventually dissolve. Meanwhile, his mother shipped the boy off to live with his white grandparents in Honolulu – itself a city in another island chain out in the mid-Pacific that had only become an American state in 1960.

Obama finally went off to college and law school, in California, New York, and Massachusetts – like many a foreign student coming to study in the United States.

After graduation, Obama in effect chose to become part of the historic African-American community – by moving to Chicago’s South Side, working as a community organizer, joining the Trinity United Church of Christ, a Black congregation, and, in 1992, marrying Chicagoan Michelle Robinson.

America’s 44th president has “made it” through sheer intellect and drive. (He holds degrees from Ivy League universities Columbia and Harvard.) He had no money, no “background,” no ethnic or social ties of the sort that even a poor boy like Bill Clinton of Arkansas could rely on.

Barack Obama is in effect culturally the equivalent of a naturalized citizen – and this is both his strength and weakness.