Obama's Grandmother Dies on Eve of Election

Fox News ^ | 11/3/08 | FOX Staff

[nmh]

Madelyn Dunham -- the grandmother of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama -- died Monday after a prolonged battle with cancer.

...

Dunham was "a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world but who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street."

Still, much of who Obama is comes from his grandmother, said his half sister.

"From our grandmother, he gets his pragmatism, his levelheadedness, his ability to stay centered in the eye of the story," she told The Associated Press. "His sensible, no-nonsense (side) is inherited from her."

Madelyn Lee Payne was born to Rolla and Leona Payne in October, 1922, in Peru, Kan., but lived much of her childhood in nearby Augusta.

She was the oldest of four children, and she loved to read everything from James Hilton's "Lost Horizon" to Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd."

Dunham and her husband were "vicious" bridge players, according to her brother Jack. After retirement, the two of them would take island cruises and do little but play bridge and a more difficult version called duplicate bridge.

[ApplegateRanch]

I knew he broke her hip when he threw her under the bus, but I didn’t think he would actually go the ‘sympathy vote’ route when he visited her in Hawaii last week.

So many questions; so few left to answer them.

May she rest in peace.

[Revolting cat!]

Cynically timed, counting on people’s common decency and trust, and the kind of hypocrisy expressed here by the prayees who condemn the rest of us to hell, while so certain that this Stalinist grandma has gone to heaven.

[ApplegateRanch]

Not everything in the world is about politics

If anything looks like it isn't about politics, then you just have to dig a little deeper.

[gargoyle]

...God bless you, for your compassion, above the politics...