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December 4, 2008 5:52:05 PM CST

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Meet Obama's Free-Spirited Mom

Posted Mar 14, 08 10:23 AM CDT in Politics 

(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.

Seotoro was unconcerned with society’s view of her, twice jumping into then-taboo inter-racial marriages. “She had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different,” one friend recalls. Raising Obama in Indonesia, she would play for him speeches by Martin Luther King and Mahalia Jackson. “What is best in me, I owe to her,” Obama once wrote.

Source New York Times

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This undated photo shows Barack Obama and his father, also named Barack Obama. Obama's father left the family to study at Harvard when Barack was just two, returning only once.   (AP Photo)
Maya Soetoro-Ng of Honolulu, half sister of presidential candidate Barack Obama, listens to reporters' questions after speaking to supporters of her brother in this May 12, 2007, file photo.   (AP Photo/Lucy Pemoni)
Barack Obama's father (also named Barack Obama) stands with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in this photo, taken during the elder Obama's last visit with his son.   (AP Photo/Obama for America)
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama D-Ill., speaks to press on the plane as he headed from Chicago to Washington, Thursday, March 13, 2008.   (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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Barack Obama • Election 2008 • Indonesia • Stanley Ann Dunham Seotoro


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