Obama: Fine, When He Didn’t Feel Like an Orphan
Obama’s parents met at the University of Hawaii in 1960. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (her own father, who badly wanted a son, named herStanley — she went by Ann), was a white 18-year-old from Kansas. His father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a 23-year-old foreign-exchangestudent from Kenya, grew up herding goats but excelled academicallyand was offered the chance to study first in Nairobi and then Hawaii.When Obama was 2 years old, Barack Sr. left his family to attendHarvard on a scholarship, and divorced his wife one year later, in1964. Obama saw his father only once after that, for a few weeks whenhe was 10. Obama ascribes his best characteristics to his mother, whodied in 1995 of ovarian and uterine cancer, writing in Dreams FromMy Father that she was “the kindest, most generous spirit I haveever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.” A new biography by New York Times reporter Janny Scott does describe, however,an at-times uneasy relationship between mother and son. “Despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person,” the presidenttold Scott in an interview for A Singular Woman: The Untold Storyof Barack Obama’s Mother. “And that disorganization, you know,spilled over.” Although Obama stayed with his grandparents during high school while Ann lived in Indonesia and, according to author David Mendell, felt “like an orphan” growing up, the two remained close. But by the time Barry, as his mother called him, went off to college and, later, started dating Michelle, they seemed to drift apart. One ofAnn’s colleagues in Indonesia told Scott that she “felt a little bitwistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity.” Rejection would’ve been too strong a word for what she felt, the colleague added, but she certainly saw him “distancing himself from her.” Around that time, Ann wrote for herself a list of long-term goals, which included finishing her dissertation and “having a constructive dialogue with Barry.”
Romney: The Baby of the Family
By the time Mitt Romney was 12 years old, his father, future Michigangovernor and presidential candidate George Romney, had already gracedthe covers of Time and Newsweek for the incredibleturnaround he’d engineered at American Motors. George Romney’s presssecretary, Dick Milliman, remembers the particularly close bond Georgeand his youngest, Mitt, had. “They would hug upon meeting, and notjust any hug,” he told a Boston Globe reporter. “He wouldgive Mitt a big bear hug and a kiss.” Growing up, Mitt was a constantpresence on his mother’s lap. Speaking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos,Romney gave the old man his due: “My dad, I mean, I am a small shadowfor the real deal.” Romney also had a strong relationship with hismother, inheriting “her tact and even temper qualities,” as a 2007Boston Globe article put it, simultaneously describing GeorgeRomney as “blunt, intense.” Romney’s mother was a “witty, dramatic andhighly professional platform performer,” Hugh Hewitt writes in AMormon in the White House, having tried her hand at a Hollywoodcareer before settling down with a family. When out with her husband,she was generally considered the brighter of the two and was certainlyno wallflower. “My mother had these great phrases,” Romney wrote inTurnaround, “though I didn’t always know what they meant.Nothing Mom said made lots of sense to me. […] One of her favoritequotes was something she was fond of saying when confronted with anopportunity to serve: ‘If not me, who? If not now, when? If not here,where?’” (If these sound at all like lines from a campaign kickoffspeech, Lenore Romney did ultimately run for a Michigan Senate seat in1970. She lost by a rather wide margin.) Perhaps best encapsulatingRomney’s admiring view of his parents — certainly one of thebest descriptions of his own campaign style — is something hesaid to Hugh Hewitt for his book: “I learned a lot from [my mother]about connecting with individuals person to person. My dad was betterstanding up in front of a podium you know, pounding his fist andsaying how things ought to be. […] In my better self, in my bettermoments, I try and capture a bit of both of them.”