Why Barack Obama Would Be A ‘Pacific President’
By Gerard A. Finin, HONOLULU

This story originally ran in July 2008 at PacificMagazine.net. We are running it again in light of Sen. Barack Obama's historic win of the U.S. presidency.

On the Saturday preceding the U.S. state of Virginia’s presidential primary vote, the C-SPAN cable television channel covered a large campaign rally during which a weary and slightly hoarse Barack Obama spoke for over 30 minutes to an enthusiastic crowd. He then welcomed numerous questions from the audience. However, it was the third questioner’s Hawaiian greeting of “Aloha Kakou” that brought an immediate smile to Obama’s face. He responded with a popular greeting of his own that is unique to Hawaii: “Howzit!” (How is it going?), together with a friendly Hawaii-style thumb and pinky greeting gesture known as the “shaka.”

Seeing that the woman, originally from Hawaii, was accompanied by her son, Obama invited the young boy up to the stage for a photograph. He then listened as she said her husband was not present because he was out campaigning for Senator Hilary Clinton, and that she was still finding it difficult to decide whom to support on primary day.

Without a trace of exasperation, Obama reiterated in some detail why she should see him as the best candidate to lead the United States forward then, with a slight pause for emphasis he concluded, “So those are four good reasons aside from the fact that I’m a local guy from Hawaii; that’s the fifth!”

While on the campaign trail, it is rare for Obama to discuss his days growing up as a “local” islander in urban Honolulu. Perhaps because he now represents Illinois in the U.S. Senate and calls Chicago home, or because some Americans still do not think of the 50th state as a part of the United States, there appears to be some hesitancy to say much about Hawaii. Yet it is clear that Obama’s generous nature, optimism and civility, often captured by the term “aloha spirit,” as well as his international outlook and views on race relations are very much the result of influences that came from growing up in Polynesia with an unusually cosmopolitan family that stretches from North America to Southeast Asia to Africa.

In attempting to understand Obama’s personal qualities, it is clear that a multitude of influences and experiences coalesced to shape his values and worldview. His own elegant memoir Dreams from My Father at once reveals and obscures the path that has taken him from “local Hawaii kid” to U.S. presidential contender. Dreams tells a poignant story with an honesty that few political leaders have ever achieved with the written word. At the same time, it seems to neglect some of the institutional and larger societal influences that were important in his formative years. Perhaps to a greater extent than the candidate himself realizes it is through the lenses of the Hawaii experience that Obama’s parents came to see the world and later, the young Obama, influenced by his family and the larger society in which he came of age, acquired his hope-filled view of the United States and its role internationally.

The Hawaii in which Obama grew up was a society that was different from, and by numerous measures ahead of, many other parts of the United States in terms of social relations. Hawaii in the 1970s was the nation’s only multiethnic state where no single census group constituted a majority and where Pacific Islanders were a significant presence in everyday life.

During Obama’s youth, Hawaii was already long known for its acceptance of social and cultural diversity. Interracial marriages had been common for over a century and Obama’s birth in Honolulu on August 4, 1961 was hardly remarkable inasmuch as the majority of newborns were of mixed heritage. The term “hapa” or half had long been used to describe individuals having ancestry that generally included white and some combination of Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or other Asia-Pacific ancestry. While by no means flawless, with native Hawaiians a marginalized people in their own homeland, the divisive racial tensions that existed in other parts of the United States were largely absent in Hawaii.

Although the African American population was extremely small, Hawaii in the 1960s was seen by national leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King, as progressive. In an essay published in 1999, Obama observed, “I realize how truly lucky I was to have been raised here….The opportunity that Hawaii offered -- to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect -- became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."

Yet that is not to suggest any romanticizing or blindness by Obama to Hawaii’s historical realities as he made clear in his autobiography: “The ugly conquest of native Hawaiians through aborted treaties and crippling disease brought by the missionaries; the carving up of rich volcanic soil by American companies for sugar cane and pineapple plantations; the indenturing system that kept Japanese, Chinese and Filipino immigrants stooped sunup to sunset in these same fields; the internment of Japanese Americans during the war—all this was recent history. And yet, by the time my family arrived (in 1959), it had somehow vanished from collective memory…”

To be sure, the Hawaii of Obama’s youth was not completely free of typecasts about African Americans, influenced by the media and movies of this era. Despite these experiences, Hawaii in the 1970s was a place where whites did not dominate, and openness to cultural give and take was generally the norm.

To a greater extent than most other parts of the U.S., high school in Hawaii is an important dimension of one’s class status and identity. Relatively little attention has been given to the social dimensions of Punahou School where Obama studied and graduated in 1979. Its elite origins as a school for the children of New England Congregational Church missionaries in the 1840s (who also founded Hiram Bingham High School in Kiribati) belies the fact that during Obama’s years there, it had become considerably more reflective of Honolulu society as a whole. Standard English spoken in the classroom mixed easily outside the classroom with Hawaiian Creole English, originally developed on the sugar and pineapple plantations and colloquially known as pidgin. The ability to speak Hawaiian Creole English informally among friends was usually more important than one’s ancestry as a means for establishing local islander identity.

With a diverse K-12 student body of over 3,000 and scholarships for deserving students, the Punahou School of Obama’s day was more akin to an upscale North American suburban public high school than the New England-style boarding institutions associated with “prep schools.” Indeed, a significant proportion of the students were drawn from the public school system. Enrolling in Punahou on a scholarship at age 10 after four years in Indonesia, the transition by his own account presented challenges, but also allowed Obama to acquire a solid educational foundation for the future. Long before he met Chicago’s Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s knowledge of Christianity was, no doubt, influenced by the required weekly Punahou chapel service that was broadly ecumenical in its message.

He is recalled as a young man who generally embraced Hawaii’s informal rubber slipper attire and thoroughly enjoyed local culinary favorites such as “plate lunches.” Living in a modest Honolulu apartment with his grandparents and working part-time at an ice cream shop, everyday life was infused with experiences suggesting people who do not look the same or who come from different parts of the world can be part of the same generally harmonious community working for the common good.

Obama was born just two years after statehood at a time when Hawaii’s vibrant Democratic Party was fast replacing long-tenured Republican oligarchic rule and money that was tied to plantation agriculture. The new force in politics during the 1960s was in large measure led by much decorated World War II American veterans of Japanese ancestry who worked closely with local whites of middle class origins. Aligned closely with a strong labor union movement, the Hawaii of this period regularly accommodated candidates of mixed ethnic heritage who were part of election tickets that made a conscious if unstated effort to embrace inclusiveness.

In Obama’s youthful world, the “natural” political environment was one where harsh racial divisiveness was largely unknown. Up to the present time while ancestry is acknowledged, it is virtually unheard of in Hawaii for a candidate to be criticized as “not ethnic enough” or “too ethnic.” Ethnically based caucuses in Hawaii’s Legislature are nonexistent.

Since statehood in 1959 Hawaii has elected a governor from nearly every major ethnic group—Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, and haole (white), and today is served by the state’s first woman governor. In looking for examples in the United States where it has been possible to largely move beyond race in favor of focusing on the problems such as health and education, Hawaii appears to reflect the model Obama has in mind.

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen describes Obama as potentially “the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins.” To be sure, much of this internationalism is influenced by his parents, who were students at the East-West Center, a Honolulu-based federally supported experiment in international education.

Obama never studied or spent much time at the East-West Center, but his parents were very much part of the dynamic international East-West Center community. His mother and Kenyan-born father spent considerable time at the Center’s cafeteria, and are said to have enjoyed time mixing with other international students in the expansive Japanese garden. Moreover his Kansas-born mother and stepfather from Indonesia were each selected to participate in the East-West Center’s highly competitive graduate Scholarship Program. As part of the center’s talented international student body, they benefited from the University of Hawaii’s graduate programs in anthropology and geography, respectively.

It was through this exceptional endeavor in public diplomacy and international education that Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and future stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, met. In 1966 Lolo was forced by the Soharto’s government to return from Hawaii and work as a geologist for the Indonesian Army. Obama and his mother eventually followed, and for the next several years the family resided in Indonesia. By 1974 Barack and his mother had returned to Honolulu, with Mr. Soetoro remaining behind.

Later trips to Africa to spend time with his birth father’s relatives would again broaden and deepen his credentials as an internationalist who has the ability to truly appreciate the diversity of not only the United States, but the entire globe. Yet Hawaii and the Pacific more generally has remained part of Obama, as evidenced by his eldest daughter’s name, Malia, Hawaiian for Mary. It is said that the number of islanders from Hawaii visiting Obama’s Washington D.C. Senate office is nearly as large as the number of residents from Illinois. Annual visits to see his grandmother, sister, brother-in-law and niece in Honolulu, frequently include trips to places that Obama knew well as a youth.

Obama’s vision of America as a “magical place” rising above traditional divides, celebrating and building upon broad egalitarian and pluralistic principles, is based in significant measure on his experience growing up in Hawaii. At a time when values that are viewed as so quintessentially American have been recklessly abandoned, and when United States’ standing in the world is at an historic low, the possibility of Obama leading the United States stirred a record number of Hawaii’s voters to give Obama some 76 percent of the state’s caucus votes. Election Day is still months away, but if Hawaii is able to take at least some credit for influencing Obama’s worldview and helping to elect the United States’ first globalized leader, it will be with a sense of humility, building on the positive principles, values and ideals which Polynesia has long embraced.