Closing the Deal

I’m sort of accustomed to being ignored. But since I often end up being right, I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

I’m a bit like the lady to the right in that. As has been noted before, she passed away at the same age I am right now, at 53. And she didn’t live one day for how other people saw her. She charted her own path. She was a role model.

So now, despite my distinct lack of qualifications or notoreity, I’m going to explain to Barack Obama just how he closes this nomination deal.

Yo Mama.

Had Stanley Ann Dunham not been felled by ovarian cancer in 1995, she would be turning 66 this year. She would be right in Hillary Clinton’s wheelhouse.

So use that. Speak from the heart of how she might feel. This is the time in campaigns where we start getting the full autobiography anyway. This question has to be addressed.

Start by stating the obvious.

"If my mother were still alive, she would absolutely love you,
Hillary. She would be so proud, so thrilled. She would be just a few
years older — no offense.

Her life was a lot like yours. It was about breaking down
boundaries. The way she did it was by living as though boundaries did
not exist. 

She learned that from my grandfather. He was a dreamer. My grandfather dreamed of having a son. That’s how she got her name. His name was Stanley, too. She went by her middle name, Ann.

Grandpa was a dreamer, always seeking riches over the next horizon.
He was a salesman. He sold furniture.

You sell furniture by selling
dreams, using words to make people imagine a better future with you. He sold my mother this American dream. Race doesn’t matter. Color
doesn’t matter. Wealth doesn’t matter.

What matters is what’s inside.   

That’s how my mother lived. She wasn’t devastated when her husband left
her, a white girl from Kansas, with a black baby carrying the unlikely
name of Barack Obama. She wasn’t ashamed. She was proud. She held her
head high, and taught me to do the same.

When I traveled to Africa, to my father’s home, to meet my
grandmother, my grandmother asked me the strangest question.

"Why didn’t you change
your name?"

My father was gone, the mother re-married. Why wasn’t I
Barry Dunham? Why, when my sister Maya was small, did I not become
Barack Seotoro, just as another boy, born William Blythe Jr., changed
his name for a younger brother, became Bill Clinton?

Why? Because my mother saw me as unique, as myself, as a man who deserved all his heritage.

Heritage was my mother’s life work. She had gone over the rainbow
again, to Indonesia. And there, even after the year of living
dangerously, she made her home a a refuge, for women who sought their
own lives. She was an anthropologist. She learned about what made us
all unique, she celebrated it, and she encouraged everyone around her
to celebrate it as well. Her dissertation was on peasant blacksmithing.
   

The greatest regret in all my life is that I wasn’t there when she
passed. I didn’t know the disease would progress so fast. I had built
my own life by then, in Chicago. I was a State Senator. I had
responsibilities. Surely you know more than anyone what
responsibilities can make you do.

So she would have loved you. You were very much alike. In
competing with you these many months I sometimes felt like I was
competing with her.

But she wouldn’t mind that. She liked a good argument. A civil argument. This is what we’ve had.

And now that the people have chosen sides, the time has come to end it. Because we have a much bigger argument ahead of us. An argument against 40 years of failed policies, of deep-seated assumptions that deny everything she knew, everything you know, and everything I know to be true.

The biggest mistake of my grandfather’s life, of my mother’s life, lay in seeking the rainbow over the next horizon. This is where the rainbow ends. There’s no place like home.

It’s time to save that home from the forces threatening to destroy it. And the only way to do that is by uniting, by working together, by seeking consensus and accepting where we disagree. 

No one is perfect. She wasn’t. You aren’t. God knows I’m not. But by coming together we can form a more perfect union. And that’s what our shared American home now demands.

Anyway, something like that is coming. He can say it better, write it better. But that’s the general idea. Make of your mother and your opponent a sisterhood, then draw that to you as a son draws his mother to him, naturally, easily, without threat or rancor, with love.

Once that’s done, we go forward, make the rest of the year about all of us, have the discussion and debate, come to consensus and walk into the future together.