Obama Tells Me All

by Cathy Macleod, 1 February 2009

I met Barack Obama on my back verandah early morning, while sitting with a pot of tea at my elbow and honeybirds crooning. Such is the start to my day in the southern hemisphere.

The President was a few thousand miles away, because our meeting came from the pages of his book “The Audacity of Hope”, published in 2006. This recounts his early struggles in a race-conscious community.

He’s a good writer, with skill that directs his thoughts to one’s inner psyche. I felt he was  chatting beside me. In fact I was reading, on my laptop, the digital version of his book, downloaded from mobipocket.com. Mr Obama convinces me he shares the same dream that rests in most people, the desire to live without stress and relish family joys.

Dedicated to Grandmother Tutu and to his mother, it relates his striving to achieve. It also confesses frankly his motivations. And his despair when things seemed impossible.

“It’s been almost ten years since I first ran for political office,” he begins. “I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life.”

 As a human-rights lawyer, he found himself nudged into politics.

“Where’d you get that funny name?” people asked, and then queried why a nice guy would choose to take part in something dirty and nasty like politics. He gives his answer in this memoir, namely that there is another tradition in politics, stretching back to the founding of America. “We have a stake in one another.”

I reckon you could apply identical philosophy to the world and its many woes.

Campaigning for a seat in the US Senate was tough for Barack Obama. I like his anecdote about the annual St Patrick’s Day Parade in Chicago, which his team saw as a promotion opportunity. “We  were assigned the parade’s very last slot, so my ten volunteers and I found ourselves marching just a few paces ahead of the city’s sanitation trucks, waving to the few stragglers who remained on the route while workers swept up garbage and peeled green shamrock stickers off the lampposts.”

There were other campaign hurdles. Sometimes, after driving several hours, he found only  two or three people waiting to hear his credo. There were also press conferences to which nobody came.

As we know, the big successes came at last, and now greater challenges loom ahead. I for one look forward to more writings by author Obama.

Audacity of Hope is not his first book. The initial effort was in the 1990s during law school. “Dreams From My Father, a story of race and religion” gives interesting personal background and an insight into what makes Obama tick. Sales were underwhelming then but will certainly soar now.

This first book answers a puzzle many people ask. Being of mixed race – mother white, father black – why is Obama portrayed as black? He tells us.

“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”

There are more revelations here and in the more recent book “Change We Can Believe In”. What he calls “the American idea” (I think others have it) is a chance to progress if you really try.

Says the new president: “It’s the promise that led my father, who grew up herding goats in Kenya, to cross the ocean just for the chance to study in America. It allowed my mother, who raised my sister and me as a single parent without much money, to send us to some of the best schools in the country with the help of scholarships.”

So good luck to America’s new boss. All his writings are available as ebooks, including his inspiring inaugural address.

Happy reading from Cathy at www.booktaste.com