Joe Klein has a nice tribute to Barack Obama’s grandmother, who died one day before seeing the likely election of her grandson as President of the United States.
The timing is ridiculous. But think, for a moment, if you will of Madelyn Dunham, a white woman from Kansas, strolling the aisle of a supermarket, or having lunch in a coffee shop, with her grandson–way back at the turn of the 1970s, when such sights were uncommon, even in Hawaii. Think about what her friends might have thought, or said, about her…situation. Think about what she poured into the child during the years when her daughter was in Indonesia and she was the closest thing to a mother that Obama had; think about the impact that she and her husband had on creating the man we’ve come to know, and the satisfaction she must have felt in her dying days.