Obama’s grandmother dies

November 4, 2008 by 2 Comments

This is sad, coming just the day before the election: Obama’s grandmother dies of cancer in Hawaii.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s grandmother died of cancer, he said in a statement on Monday, a little more than a week after he interrupted the White House campaign to say goodbye to her in Hawaii.

“It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer,” Obama said in a joint statement with his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. “She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength and humility.”

Dunham, 86, helped raise Obama from the age of 10 while his mother was working in Indonesia, and Obama took an emotional 22-hour trip to Hawaii to visit her on October 23 and 24.

What it would have meant to her to see her grandson elected president! If he is elected president, that is. But I’m thinking destiny is on his side.

Filed Under: Politics 2 Comments
About Gene Veith

Professor of Literature at Patrick Henry College, the Director of the Cranach Institute at Concordia Theological Seminary, a columnist for World Magazine and TableTalk, and the author of 18 books on different facets of Christianity & Culture.

  • FW

    what would it have meant for all of us? obamas mom and grandmother and grandfather were all poor or working class whites from Kansas. These are the people who raised him.

    he is half white and culturally his influences growing up were practically 100% white. he had to discover what all his “blackness” meant as a young man going off to college. see where exactly a man of mixed race would fit in somehow.

    we still have alot of racism. proof:

    Imagine if obama had chosen to marry an attractive cindy mc cain lookalike.

    he would have lost the black vote. really. and he would also have probably lost alot of white votes.

    when we think of the word “all american” this usually conjures up the image of a young athletic WHITE american. It does for me anyhow (so yes, I am including myself in all of this.). “Joe sixpack” also does not conjure up a picture or your typical latino, or asian or black now either does it? So even those seemingly (to us white folk) neutral expressions carry with them a coded baggage. this is all the worse for being invisible to most whites like me…. and so blaringly obvious to latinos, blacks, asians……

    Obama and his wife in the whitehouse will change alot of this. assuming that the “right” stops their statements pushing the idea that “he is not like us” “he is not one of us”.

    is it any surprise that I, as a gay man, talked about as “one of those” or included in the rather lurid innuendo behind post-modern-emotionally-manipulative-yet-contentless words like “gay agenda” “recruiting our youth” ” gay lifestyle”,would welcome this development and a man who says that there is not a “red” america or a “blue” america but rather the united states of america?

  • J

    A bittersweet day for Obama.

    I heard that his grandmother voted for him absentee a few weeks before she died. At least she had that joy.

    May she rest in peace.


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