Head Strong: Obama's unique American story

3.8.08

Michael Smerconish

 

I'm an avid reader, so chances are I would have gotten around to Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father sooner or later. I confess that I read it sooner out of curiosity about his reported admissions of drug usage. Yes, there is such a discussion. But it accounts for only two pages in the 442-page tome; the remaining 440 pages were something entirely different and, dare I say, uniquely American.

 

It's an amazing story and, regardless of the electoral ending, a uniquely American one. This country has always valued rags-to-riches tales, and Obama's family history is nothing less. I suspect that if the story began in Poland, or Germany or the Ukraine, it would be trumpeted as an American classic, not made a subject for urban legend.

 

The book is the story of Obama's search for identity. Some milestones in that journey have been reported elsewhere, including his birth in Hawaii in 1961; time in Indonesia; return to Hawaii and attendance at a prestigious prep school; college education; and work as a community organizer in Chicago before attending law school at Harvard, where he was the first African American president of the Law Review.

 

From that perch, he was offered his first book deal. The resulting memoir, written when Obama was 33, was first published in 1995. He was elected to the Illinois state Senate the following year. Almost a decade thereafter, he added a new preface acknowledging that "certain passages have proved to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research."

 

Indeed.

 

In our focus-group, poll-driven, muzzled political climate, you just don't find presidential candidates saying things like "white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals s- on our curbs . . ." Nor are we accustomed to future commanders in chief quoting acquaintances who use the p word for female genitalia. We're equally unaccustomed to talk of the similarities between white and black college students who are "trying to get laid."

 

And yes, only time will tell whether America will elect a man who admits that "pot helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it."

 

On the stump today, some criticize Obama for his grandiose language. But his first book minces no words. He deals with matters of race in a direct manner, for example, recounting when he once confided to his sister Auma that he had loved a white woman in New York. ("I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers. After all, I'd been doing it most of my life.")

 

I'm afraid we'll hear some of these passages quoted in the next eight months, both in and out of context, especially in our Internet-driven culture. I hope my suspicion is unfounded, because at its core, Obama's story, as recounted in the book, is an embodiment of the American dream of which we should all be proud.

 

How else to acknowledge that a man born to a white American woman and a Kenyan father from the Luo tribe on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego is poised to become the Democratic nominee for president? ("That my father looked nothing like the people around me - that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk - barely registered in my mind.")

 

His parents went separate ways. As a boy, Obama lived for more than three years in Indonesia as a result of his mother's remarriage. Like Obama's paternal grandfather, his mother's second husband followed Islam. ("He followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths.") Obama spent two years at a Muslim school and two years at a Catholic School. (GOP opposition research should temper its glee, as he wrote this: "In the Muslim school the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during the Koranic studies.")

 

Then it was back to Hawaii, where Obama studied at Punahou Academy and was raised by his mother and grandparents. His birth father was then living in Kenya, though he returned when Obama was 10 and spent a month with his son, former wife and onetime in-laws.

 

It was upon his transfer from Occidental College to Columbia that Obama tasted city life and became a serious student. ("I spent my first night in Manhattan curled up in an alleyway.") He stopped getting high, began running three miles a day, fasted on Sundays, and hit the books.

 

His book culminates by recapping a trip he made to Kenya six years before its writing, during which he interacted with relatives, including his grandmother ("Granny"), who offered him a narrative of the family history that began as follows:

 

"First there was Miwiru. It's not known who came before. Miwiru sired Sigoma. Sigoma sired Owiny, Owiny sired Kisodhi, Kisodhi sired Ogelo, Ogelo sired Otondi . . . "

 

Barack Obama's grandfather was a farmer and an herbalist, an eccentric man who was the first in his village to wear Western clothing. His father herded his granddaddy's goats before pursuing his own education all the way to Harvard. Both lives were unlike anything seen in America in their day. Even today, some relatives live in huts without the benefit of water or electricity, but the grandson of Hussein Onyango Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee.

 

With a resume like that, Barack Obama, in his quest for the White House, should be celebrated by his supporters and respected by his opponents - even if his politics are not.

 

Michael Smerconish's column appears on Thursdays in The Daily News and on Sundays in Currents. He can be heard from 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays on "The Big Talker," WPHT-AM (1210). Contact him via the Web at http://www.mastalk.com.