When Barry Became Barack

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Barry's white grandfather and several other Hawaiian friends take Barry Sr. to a Waikiki bar. It's a joyous scene, everyone eating and drinking "to the sounds of a slack-key guitar," when a white man with a booming voice announces to the bartender that he shouldn't have to drink "next to a nigger." The stunned clientele expects a fight. But Barry Sr. smiles and quietly lectures the man "about the folly of bigotry, the promise of the American dream, and the universal rights of man." In response, the shamed white man gives Barry Sr. $100, in apparent payment for his sin of racism. Even the young Obama found the tale hard to believe. But many years later, he recalls in "Dreams From My Father," he got a phone call from a Japanese-American man who had been a classmate of Barry Sr.'s in Hawaii. Unprompted, the man told Obama the same story. Obama says he was struck by the man's tone of "disbelief—and hope."

Obama has collected similar stories over the years—like the one he told in his Philadelphia speech about the young white woman who pretended to love mustard-and-relish sandwiches to help her sick mother through a time of financial stress, and the older black man who felt political kinship for her. The punch line is generally the same: blacks and whites have more in common than you might think, and he knows it because he is it: black and white, together as one. Or so his story goes.

This story was reported by Richard Wolffe, with Obama; Jessica Ramirez and Eve Conant in Washington, D.C.; Sarah Kliff in New York; Andrew Murr in Los Angeles, and Miyoko Ohtake in San Francisco.

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Hillary Clinton's father was the descendant of coal miners who became a small business entrepreneur. Her mother was an office worker who supported herself before she became a homemaker.

The year Hillary Rodham graduated from college, instead of all expense paid travel abroad, she went to work. She worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).

In the summer of 1970, she aoplied for and was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, researching migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.

In law school, instead of lobbying to become editor of the Law Review, Clinton went to work. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973). She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free advice for the poor.

Who would you rather have as president? A super smart guy, so smart he didn't have to study and spent his time fooling around in gyms and strange men's rooms doing cocaine (that's from his book) and then backpacking around the middle east, who now thinks he should be POTUS, or someone who has been working for the working people and children of this country for her whole life?

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Posted By: bittertypicalwhiteperson @ 04/14/2008 9:54:03 PM

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Posted By: bittertypicalwhiteperson @ 04/14/2008 9:50:03 PM

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Posted By: Not stupid in Alabama @ 04/14/2008 2:29:37 PM

Hillary Clinton's father was the descendant of coal miners who became a small business entrepreneur. Her mother was an office worker who supported herself before she became a homemaker.

The year Hillary Rodham graduated from college, instead of all expense paid travel abroad, she went to work. She worked her way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming salmon in a fish processing cannery in Valdez (which fired her and shut down overnight when she complained about unhealthy conditions).

In the summer of 1970, she aoplied for and was awarded a grant to work at Marian Wright Edelman's Washington Research Project, where she was assigned to Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, researching migrant workers' problems in housing, sanitation, health and education.

In law school, instead of lobbying to become editor of the Law Review, Clinton went to work. During her second year, she worked at the Yale Child Study Center, learning about new research on early childhood brain development and working as a research assistant on the seminal work, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973). She also took on cases of child abuse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and volunteered at New Haven Legal Services to provide free advice for the poor.

Who would you rather have as president? A super smart guy, so smart he didn't have to study and spent his time fooling around in gyms and strange men's rooms doing cocaine (that's from his book) and then backpacking around the middle east, who now thinks he should be POTUS, or someone who has been working for the working people and children of this country for her whole life?