Janny Scott’s book, A Singular Woman The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother is out, and the reviews are in—two of them, at least, from Jacob Weisberg at Slate and Ian Buruma at the New York Review of Books. Both reviews, while not entirely inaccurate, dance gracelessly around the obvious fact that our president’s mom and dad were lousy parents.
Barack Obama, Sr. was a Kenyan-born economist who left his Kenyan wife behind when he came to Hawaii in 1960 to study the arts of government. He promptly got 17-year-old Ann Dunham pregnant, though he was sport enough to marry her in 1961, departing from Hawaii to study at Harvard in 1962. Ann filed for divorce in 1964. She had a second “failed marriage” (Weisberg’s description) to an Indonesian dude, Lolo Soetoro, but the marriage did lead her to Indonesia, where she spent about 25 years doing field work in anthropology that one could uncharitably describe as entirely useless to anyone except herself. Like many misfits, Dunham preferred exile. If you don’t know how to fit in, or don’t want to, it’s simpler to be in a place where you can’t fit in.
Weisberg and Buruma both work pretty hard—and one gets the impression that Scott worked pretty hard as well—to make Ann Dunham’s life sound charming and free-spirited, but words like “aimless,” “feckless,” and “irresponsible” make a better fit, though she certainly wasn’t as irresponsible as Barack Senior.
Weisberg himself remarks that Obama’s description of his mother to Scott shows “a striking degree of critical distance,” which is certainly true: “She was a very strong person in her own way. Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent—the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over.”
It certainly did. When Ann Dunham was dying of ovarian cancer in Honolulu, Barack Obama, “preoccupied with legal work and his newly published book” (as Weisberg tells it), failed to make the trip from New York to visit her.
One suspects that Barack wrote Dreams from My Father about his father precisely because he didn’t know him. Barack Sr. was smart; he left early, so that his son could imagine him as the sort of dad he should have had but didn’t. Barack couldn’t do that with Ann; she wasn’t around very much, but she was around enough for Barack to remember that she didn’t seem to care about him very much at all.
Afterwords
Despite all the negativity I’ve generated, Ann and Obama look (pretty) happy in the high school graduation picture shown above. Obama referred to himself as his mother’s “experiment,” suggesting that she was more in love with the idea of having a child by a black man than she was in love with the child she actually produced. Obama obviously didn’t care very much about being an experiment, but somehow he found the wit to survive it. Now if only he would get out of Afghanistan, cut the defense budget in half, restore our civil liberties, abandon the Bush/Obama “I am above the law” concept of the presidency, and stop talking about high-speed rail and “green” jobs, everything would be OK.
