Obama Makes Visit to a Most Beloved Supporter (NYT)

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Fri Oct-24-08 10:10 PM
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Obama Makes Visit to a Most Beloved Supporter (NYT)

Obama Makes Visit to a Most Beloved Supporter
By JEFF ZELENY

HONOLULU — For the last 21 months, she has followed the odyssey of his presidential campaign like a spectator on a faraway balcony.

She underwent a corneal transplant to see him on television. She reluctantly agreed to film a political advertisement when he urgently needed to reassure voters about his distinctive American roots. She told him during one of their frequent telephone conversations that it might not hurt if he smiled a bit more.

And on Friday, Senator Barack Obama spent the day here saying goodbye.

At the Punahou Circle Apartments, a place of his own childhood, Madelyn Dunham, his grandmother, lay gravely ill. For weeks, Mr. Obama has talked to doctors and tracked her condition. When she was released from the hospital last week after surgery to repair a broken hip, he received word that he should not wait until after the election to make what he believes is most likely a final visit.

It was an unusual departure from the tug-of-war of the presidential campaign, particularly with only 11 days remaining in the race. But his advisers say he told them that the trip was not negotiable. He was absent when his mother died here in 1995, a mistake he said he did not intend to repeat with her mother, a stalwart in his life.

Mr. Obama has reached the closing days of his run for the White House without embarking on a formal biographical tour. In a candidacy built on biography, and criticized for its celebrity, his advisers believed that substance, as well as an overseas trip in July, was a wiser course.

But a biographical tour of sorts has unfolded around him here on the one-day visit to see the woman who was a guiding force in his life and who played a supporting role in his candidacy, from the Iowa caucuses to his marquee speech on race in Philadelphia to his general-election effort to win over voters in red states.

The moment Mr. Obama stepped off the plane here late Thursday evening, after a nine-hour flight from Indianapolis, his motorcade drove directly to his grandmother’s 12-story apartment building, on a residential section of South Beretania Street.

His return to Hawaii was carried live on the local news, but his arrival was subdued. He did not wave to the cameras. There were no leis to welcome him on the breezy airport tarmac. “Somber Obama returns home” was the banner headline in The Honolulu Star-Bulletin on Friday.

Thursday night’s visit to Mrs. Dunham, who will turn 86 on Sunday, lasted a little more than an hour. Mr. Obama then returned on Friday to her 10th-floor apartment, where he lived from the age of 10. Also present was his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who lives in Hawaii. The apartment was flooded with flowers and good wishes from strangers who wrote that they had come to know her from his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25obama.html