RALEIGH, N.C. — If Michelle Obama is her husband’s “rock,” his grandmother is a big part of the ground beneath it.
Madelyn Payne Dunham gave young Barack Obama a place to call home while his mother traveled the world. When he needed money for school, she went without new clothes to help pay his tuition.
And when the Illinois senator decided to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Dunham provided the “Kansas heartland” pedigree he needed to appeal to conservative white voters — and a personal anecdote about racial prejudice that helped the man with the foreign name and Ivy League resume connect with the African-American experience.
The 85-year-old former bank executive is said to be gravely ill after falling and breaking her hip, and some reports suggest she might not live to see the results of the Nov. 4 election.
Whatever happens, she already has lived long enough to see her “Barry” achieve what she’d wanted for him, her brother says.
“I think she thinks she was important in raising a fine young man,” Charles Payne, 83, said in a brief telephone interview Tuesday from his Chicago home. “I doubt if it would occur to her that he would go this far this fast. But she’s enjoyed watching it.”
Although he made his mark thousands of miles from the Honolulu apartment where she helped raise him, Obama and others credit Dunham — whose birthday is Sunday — with instilling in him an appreciation for education and hard work, and with setting an example of thrift, practicality and tolerance.
“I think there’s nobody more important than her, except his mother, in shaping his character,” said David Mendell, who interviewed Dunham in 2004 for the Chicago Tribune and later wrote the book “Obama: From Promise to Power.”
“His grandmother was a real no-nonsense, no-frills woman who was far more skeptical of human nature than his mother,” Mendell said Tuesday. “And in politics, he has to rely on both of those characteristics.”
Obama often speaks fondly of “Toot” — his version of the Hawaiian word “Tutu,” or grandparent.
But an incident that occurred when he was a teenager also reminded him just how deep the mistrust between whites and blacks goes in this country.
In the book, he recalled overhearing Toot ask her husband for a ride to work, because a particularly aggressive panhandler had accosted her for money at the bus stop the day before. When Stanley Dunham refused, his grandson couldn’t understand why.
“Before you came in, she told me the fella was black,” his grandfather explained, according to the memoir. “That’s the real reason why she’s bothered.”
Obama said the words were “like a fist in my stomach.” “Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would,” he wrote. “And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”
Obama revived the story in March, when comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright prompted Obama to publicly address race relations in America.
“I can no more disown him,” he told an audience in Philadelphia of his former pastor, “than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Charles Payne said his sister’s reaction to being made a campaign issue was “no more than just sort of raised eyebrows.”
Although she was too ill to travel for the campaign, she followed it closely on TV — even undergoing a corneal transplant this year so she could watch the coverage.
