The Transcendent Presence of 2008

There is a transcendent presence that ties Barack Obama directly to the Kennedys, to the High Thesis era of Camelot when any dream seemed possible.

Her name was Stanley.

Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Kansas in 1942. She died in Hawaii in 1995, of ovarian cancer, aged 53. The same age I am now.

Hers was a great American life. What John F. Kennedy talked about, she did. What he wanted us to believe she lived. She saw through color to character. And when her dreams took her away she had her parents live those values, and show her son the devotion she’d shown him, to teach him to dream as she did.

Her son described her as "a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism." His greatest regret was he did not make it to her death bed. He did not see her transcend life and death, after teaching him to transcend so much, and to believe in transcendence, which is the American dream.   

So what if they tell you you’re black. You are descended from princes, Stanley told him. So what if we’re poor? You can be whatever you want to be.

You can be President of the United States.

By now you know that Stanley Ann Dunham was Barack Obama’s mother.

Of course growing up he looked more like his dad, Barack Hussein Obama. He called his first book "Dreams from My Father," but these were only dreams. The reality was Stanley Ann, because his father’s ambition, to rule his home country of Kenya, could not suffer a half-breed son, and in that bigotry of others he left them.

So Stanley married a second time, to an Indonesian man, and they went back-and-forth between Hawaii and Indonesia. Their daughter, Maya Seotoro, teaches at the University of Hawaii. (Go Rainbow Warriors.) It was a multi-cultural upbringing. White mom, absent father, black son, Asian sister. All-American.

Stanley was named for her father, a salesman who wanted a son. Barack was that son, and he raised him through high school, in Hawaii. Much of what you see in Barack’s face came from Stanley. He has Stanley’s long chin, his thin lips, his questing eyes. He
also got the grandfather’s touch of salesmanship, his skeptical nature, and
his drive to succeed.

Stanley Ann was raised
on Mercer Island, off Seattle, before it became an enclave of wealth,
when it was mainly an enclave of white conservative convention. Which
she resisted. She had teachers who let her read Atlas Shrugged, 1984,
and the Communist Manifesto. She attended the Unitarian church, derided
as the Red Church on the Hill. When the elder Stanley, the salesman,
found a new opportunity in Hawaii she followed, and fell in love with Barack Hussein Obama. He was brilliant, he was beautiful, he was ambitious.

It’s a silken thread which ties us together. We’re all tapestry woven from the past. Barack Obama inherited ambition, intelligence, and good looks from his father, who finished his education at Harvard. He inherited his ideals and so much else from his mother. He is what she taught him to be.

It’s what we do with what we inherit which makes us what we are. Obama writes of how, for a while, he squandered his inheritance, but then got his act together. The rest you know.

I’ve written before of my support for John Edwards. He is a brilliant man who is right on the issues, and right on the fact that power won’t give way, that it must be confronted and turned forcefully for the benefit of all people.

What Barack Obama wants from us is simply transcendence, which I’ve seen as mere compromise. Transcend, he says. Transcend rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, white and black, young and old. Transcend it all to reach the future.

We can do it.

Stanley Ann did, he says. I’m living proof. You can, too.

To that dream I can find no objection.