Day Forty-five, May 14

Alright, so anybody who's been paying attention to this blog (who is anybody, really) may have noticed that I haven't updated my posts since last Friday, giving a sense of false advertising to the journal's very name. This is because 'real life' stuff has recently had a tendency of getting in my way of posting on here on a regular basis, and since this isn't the first time I've fallen behind on my daily commitment, I've decided to cut back a little bit on the blogging. The downside is that I won't be as informed or rapidly up-to-date on all things Obama. The good news is that each post will return to the original intent of the blog: to post something inspiring about the candidate as they come along. So for at least a while, it's going to be the Bi-daily Dose of Hope or the As-Often-As-I-Can-Manage Dose of Hope, but like I said, the content should hopefully improve* as a result.

* This also means a lot less picking on Hillary or McCain, which quite a few of my most recent posts were thinly-veiled diatribes against.

As for today's content, I'd like to include a lengthy but revealing article from last month's Time magazine. I'd originally planned this feature to coincide with Mother's Day on Sunday (love you, mom!), but the , written by Amanda Ripley, is certainly worthwhile enough to post it a few days after the holiday. You can click here to start reading the article.

In the midst of Obama's almost certain claim as the chosen nominee for his party, the media is giving more air to the candidate's issues, less attention is being paid to the people that surround him. In certain cases, like Reverend Wright, this is allowing Obama to continue picking up political speed uninhibited. However, this also means that a part of the more human side of Barack is getting lost in the politics of today. Much has been made of Obama's Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama Sr., who returned to Africa without his family when Barack was only a child, but that more tender, human side to the Obama family story is there: the tale of Obama's mother, S. Ann Sutero. At a time where Obama is still (unbelievably) being typecast as an 'elitist', one needs look no further than the story of his mother's life to see just how rocky life has been for Barack. Speaking about his mother in the article, Obama told Ripley, "When I think about my mother. I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box."

Throughout the article, Ripley traces the course of the rest of Stanley's (her father had wanted a boy, she soon settled on the name 'Ann' instead) life, and the values she imparted in her son. From the Sutero family's move to Hawaii just after Ann graduated from high school to falling in love with Barack's father to the impetus that took the family to Indonesia just a few years later, Ann Sutero's story is a compelling one. It also an eye-opening glimpse into some of the core values that her son still carries today: generosity, education, tolerance, devotion and (you guessed it) hope. In the article, the author quotes one of Ann's friends Nancy Peluso. "When Barack smiles," says Peluso, "there's just a certain Ann look. He lights up in a particular way that she did." From collecting food stamps in Indonesia to finishing her 1,000 page dissertation in the field of anthropology in her 50's, this is easily the most rewarding as well as surprising article I've included in this blog thus far. If you want to know where Obama got some of the inspiration that pushes him forward today, I can't recommend it enough.