The XX Factor: What women really think.

Obama's Cool Mama

Today’s NYT cover story on Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, contains one passage that gave me a sinking feeling:

In Hawaii she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the poor.

Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley. They’re Barbaras and Dorothys; they wear pearls and host charity events. At the most, a presidential mother might, like Bill Clinton’s mother Virginia, be a working-class Southern widow abused by a rotten second husband. But that image still fit into a familiar American narrative of bootstrap pluck (and allowed Bill to keep telling that story about threatening his wife-beating stepfather with a golf club). Stanley Ann doesn’t sound like someone who needed that kind of help.

Obviously, people don’t cast their votes based on the biography of a candidate’s parent. But they do care about his or her familial story. (Indeed, as Hillary’s campaign has shown, sometimes that story can be hard to escape.) And the huge swath of the electorate that believes in a much more traditional notion of family (including not only evangelicals but Hispanic and white working-class Democrats) would no doubt balk at the very details in this piece that made me hoot “Right on!” One friend of Ms. Soetoro’s, discussing her two divorces, muses,  “She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important.” Another friend, an anthropologist, references a “Javanese belief” that if a couple is unhappy, “It’s just stupid to stay married.” Word up, sister—but I wonder if those beliefs won’t ring an alarm bell for family-values voters already wary of Obama’s complicated racial and cultural back story.

Elsewhere in the article (which is a font of killer quotes), Obama’s Kansas-born grandmother, Stanley Ann's mother, is cited as saying “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.” That skeptical xenophobia sounds like a much closer match to the worldview of most Americans than does Stanley Ann Soetoro’s brand of brainy bohemian globetrotting.