Obama’s Grandmother Passes

I’m sure more than a few wingers will claim the campaign timed it.

Barack Obama’s Grandmother Dies [BBC]
26 Comments

Like I said about Studs last week: God had better make some popcorn and give Toot a nice comfy couch in front of the big screen.

After my parents divorced, my dad took off and my mom raised me on her own most of the time. However, we could always count on my grandmother. She would watch me while my mom was at work in the summer and on school breaks. She took me on trips with her. I’ll never forget how she acted as if there was nothing unusual about a little brown girl walking around the small towns of west Texas with a pale old woman, no matter how much people stared. She was a tough woman who didn’t take any shit from her kids and scrimped and saved to provide the best she could for them. She set aside money for my education and loved to talk about how she couldn’t wait to see me graduate from high school and college.

Unfortunately, she was too ill to attend my high school graduation and she passed on before I completed college. Reading some of the stories about Barack’s grandmother, I couldn’t help but feel like I knew Madelyn Dunham. I wanted so badly for her to be able to see her grandbaby become the President of the United States.

I feel like I just lost my grandmother. How weird is that?

How long before Limbaugh or O’Reilly accuses him of poisoning her with some slow-acting agent when he went to visit her. I give it another 2 hours.

@FlyingChainSaw: Gateway Pundit classiest so far: “Earlier this year she came up in the campaign when Barack Obama compared her to his racist anti-Semitic “G-Damning America” preacher.”

@Jamie Sommers:
i so get your weirdness, i so am the same weird sister jamie. both my grandparents were enormous influences on my life and never saw the dreams they had for me come to fruition. i’m reliving that now too.
oh tutu, one day, ONE DAY!

@FlyingChainSaw:

@blogenfreude:

We won’t have to wait long for the hate-in…already commenters over at the Malkin-thing site have been wishing that Obama “be reunited with her soon”.

It is going to feel SO good to beat these bastards.

@Jamie Sommers: That must have been tough for you. You must understand better than most what he’s going through. I feel so sad for him that there’s no one left to see him do this. But God how decent and fortunate that he went home when he did.

This morning I was settling in at my desk when I saw that my rolodex was opened to the card of a very dear friend from a nearby Pueblo that I worked with on several campaigns throughout the years. She was one of those quietly powerful but modest Indian women who was equally at home performing the Corn Dance, advising a campaign, serving on a board, running her own division at the state Department of Education or lobbying the legislature or a member of Congress. She knew the political process, was calm amidst chaos, and loved a glass of wine after the floor battles were over for the day. She spent much of the summer in the hospital and died the day Barack was to have accepted the nomination. The day I saw RFK Jr here, I saw our county chair and one of Richardson’s deputy cabinet secretaries, two Hispanic women who also fought many, many campaigns with her. I said the first thing that came to mind “We lost a strong Democrat when Rena Salazar died.”
I really, really miss her right now.

How can anyone who has ever lost a parent or a parental figure not completely sympathize. How difficult to be poised to gain so much and yet lose so much at the same time.

@blogenfreude: One of the commenters wondered if this could swing the election to Obama. Cuz you know McCain really has had the momentum going his way for so long now.

@Jamie Sommers: You were so lucky to have a grandma like that, as was Barack.

One day, fuck!

My St. Francis shrine will get another candle for Tutu. (Said shrine is kicking off the Stinque election jam tomorrow morning).

Joe.My.God. is reviewing Freep so we don’t have to, and he’s finding very little sympathy — though there were some rebukes.

@Jamie Sommers: I was fortunate to have a grandmother who lived only 3 miles away and helped take care of us as kids as my mother worked. She never got to see me graduate from high school as she was too sick with ovarian cancer, but she tape recorded a message for me, with her voice breaking because she was upset that she was missing the event; she did not live long enough to even hear about my college graduation. God, this is opening up memories.

@SanFranLefty: They are going to hell.

@rptrcub: @SanFranLefty: @Lyndon LaDouche: @ManchuCandidate: @baked: Thanks guys. It didn’t really occur to me until a couple of weeks ago that I might have anything in common with teh Unicorn, but maybe I do. It’s not so unusual now but there weren’t a lot of mixed race kids in his day (or mine) so it’s bizarre knowing that there is someone out there who “gets it.” Knows what it is like to have been raised in between worlds. I totally identified with that story he told about Madelyn’s reaction to the black panhandler. My grandma was like that too, but I never once doubted her love for me and I know that she was like that for Barack. You can see it in that picture of her hugging him.

Fuck. I’m not usually like this about people I’ve never fucking met.

I got slammed at work, so didn’t hear this until I turned on NPR in the car. GODDAMMIT!! Nononononono. No! It’s so fucking unfair. The day before, fer chrissakes. Sorry, I’m a little upset.
@Jamie Sommers: I was raised by my mother’s mother, after my very young parents split and decided to go back to partying. She was the only person in the world I could count on as a child, and I loved her more than anything. When she died, the law firm I worked for didn’t even send flowers,because she wasn’t my “parent.” I never forgave them.
She was a huge fan of JFK and RFK — I wish she could be here now.

@SanFranLefty: I should have never read the comments at the end. I feel stabby now. Why are they even bothering, BTW? All your 55 EV are belong to Hope.

@baked: Speaking of weird connections, I’m fairly certain that I canvassed with your doppelgaenger yesterday. She’s in her 40s, Jewish, originally from New York (huge Broadway fan, kinda mouthy, etc.), spent part of her childhood in Puerto Rico, met her husband in law school, practiced securities law for twenty years, and just recently quit to start her own dog training business. She was a complete riot, and one of the women in the campaign office even mistook me for her daughter. That plus the out-and-out enthusiasm of everyone we met made the two-and-a-half hour drive down to Petersburg (where we were redirected after being told they didn’t need any more help in Richmond) well worth it. The one letdown was when no one answered at the home of the 107 year-old. We could barely contain our excitement at meeting the guy, but sadly it wasn’t to be.

@Jamie Sommers: I have had a hard time listening when Obama talks about his mom. My mom died at age 53 from cancer too.

@homofascist:
my sister died at 36 from pancreatic cancer. many times are hard for us. she would be working those polls today for sure. i think i told this story before but it bears repeating here for jnov.

when my oldest niece was coming to my house for a visit, (in philly) unbeknownst to her, i had her first voter registration card that had been mailed to me
(she was in school in atlanta) i had the HBO movie “iron jawed angels” cued up to watch first. it was the story of the suffregettes, and what they endured for the right to vote. when it was over, i presented her with her card, which was so meaningful having just watched the biopic.
waterworks! “scratch a stinquer and you’ll find a depressed idealist”
jnov, too many women suffered and died and were tortured for YOUR right to vote. think of the ghosts of the suffregettes.
walk tall into that place like you’re susan fucking b. anthony.

jnov, just thought of something else. jnov jr. has the same dna color chart as That One. a gorgeous shade for HOPE(tm). be PROUD!
NO FEAR! he’s the color of change, of the future, a better future.
you can’t let the igno’s harsh this glorious day for both of you.

@mellbell:
that is weird! the weirdest part is i was planning a doggy spa at one time. have i mentioned that?
you prob are right in pegging me. i’m so transparent. the few stinquers i talk to on the phone all said the same thing the first time, ‘you are exactly as i imagined, exactly the way you write’.
hope you had fun with my stunt double!

@Jamie Sommers: @Mistress Cynica: My parents divorced when I was two. Things got too impossible for my mother in the small town she had grown up in, and she went to California for a couple of years, leaving me with her parents. When I was four and a half, she married her high school sweetheart, and I went to live with them. However, my grandmother was widowed soon after, and from then on, she spent about six months of every year living in my mother’s household and the other six living with my unmarried aunt in Kansas. In my heart of hearts, it’s my grandmother who was my mother. The best of me was nurtured by her, and I feel very lucky that she was there with me and for me. I hear you both.

@baked: Indians have had the right to vote in New Mexico since 1948, after becoming citizens in 1924. I don’t miss even a school board or bond election.

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