Obama Draws on the Audacity of Mom

Reminiscing comes in profile about his time in Indonesia

(NEWSER) - Barry Obama was just 6 years old when Ann Dunham decided to take him to war-torn Indonesia, and Sunday’s New York Times Magazine examines the reverberations of that decision. On the surface the answer is simple: She was following her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian native who’d been called back to serve in the army. But the article offers a revealing look at Dunham’s life there. Some tidbits:

• The young Barack (then Barry) was subject to constant racial discrimination; once, when other children threw rocks at him, Dunham told a friend, “He’s OK. He’s used to it.”
• When Lolo got a job with a US oil company, Dunham refused to socialize with the wealthy American wives of the other execs. She once complained to a friend that Lolo “was becoming more American every day.”
• One former servant for the couple says that Dunham once emerged from an argument with her husband with a bloody nose—though author Janny Scott notes that no one else even hinted at any abuse in the relationship.

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng is moving with her family from Hawaii to Washington for the next several months, reports the New York Times. Soetoro-Ng, the daughter of Obama's mother Stanley Ann Dunham and an Indonesian father, has quit her job as a high school teacher to write a book. Her stay in DC will mark the first time brother and sister have lived in the same city in years. More»

Study of Indonesian craftsmen will hit shelves 14 years after her death

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama's mother died before she finished revising her Ph.D dissertation for publication, but two of her fellow anthropologists have now completed the job, reports the Chicago Tribune. Stanley Ann Dunham's Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia—the study of blacksmiths and other rural craftsmen she completed after 14 years in the country—is being published by Duke University Press, and is due out this fall. More»

How a single white woman from Kansas shaped a presidential contender

(NEWSER) - In Barack Obama’s stump speeches, his mother is little but a single mom, a cancer victim, a white woman from Kansas. But in life, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro was a fascinating figure, a globe-trotting free spirit desperate to help the world. Soetoro never lived to see her son’s political ascendance, but friends see in Obama his mother’s intelligence and morality, the New York Times reports. More»

His mother had health insurance when she died, and it paid up

(NEWSER) - A recent book on President Obama’s mother undermines his oft-told story that his mother spent the final years of her life battling insurance companies over her medical bills. The book, by New York Times reporter Janny Scott, reveals that Ann Dunham actually had health insurance that readily paid her claims. She did have a dispute, but it was with her disability insurance, the Times reports. And Obama must have known that, because in one letter she turns the case over to “my son and attorney, Barack Obama.” More»