Obama puts campaign on hold to visit ailing grandmother

BARACK Obama is breaking off his election campaign this week to visit his ailing grandmother, arguably the most important influence in his life.

Madelyn Dunham, 85, who lives in Hawaii, took the leading role in raising Mr Obama from the age of ten until adulthood and was a major influence in his ideas and politics.

She was released from hospital last week and returned home, with aides saying her health was deteriorating.

Mr Obama's great-uncle, her brother Charles Payne, 83, last night said she has not been well for a long time. "Then she fell and broke her hip fairly recently."

Speaking from Chicago, he added: "She's unhappy with the condition that she's in, I can tell you that." Mr Payne declined to speculate on whether his sister had the strength to see her grandson through to the election on 4 November.

"I think, of course, it's been terribly important to her," he said. "And she would like nothing better than to see that."

"The decision to suspend the campaign with only a fortnight remaining until the election underscores the seriousness of the situation," said a senior Obama aide, Robert Gibbs.

Mr Obama has cancelled campaign stops in swing states for Thursday and Friday for the visit to Hawaii, with his wife Michelle due to fill in for him until he returns to the trail on Saturday.

Mrs Dunham's role in bringing up the young Obama is highlighted in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, in which he recounts that she and his late grandfather, Stanley, stepped in when his own mother proved unable to give him her full attention.

More recently, Mrs Dunham, who he nicknames Toots, became a central feature of Mr Obama's primary election campaign, when he alluded to her occasional racism to explain how whites often harboured suspicions of African-Americans.

In a speech earlier this year he talked of how, taking him for walks as a child, she would make discriminatory remarks about blacks.

"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbours any racial anomisity," he said during the primary campaign. "But she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know there's a reaction in her that doesn't go away and it comes out in the wrong way."

The visit highlights Mr Obama's unusual life story: His father, Barack Obama snr, a Kenyan exchange student, met and married his white mother, Ann Dunham from Kansas, after they met in Hawaii.

Two years after Mr Obama was born, his father returned to Kenya and later divorced, meeting his son only once more before dying in a car crash in 1982.

His mother remarried and moved with her young son to her husband's native Indonesia in 1967 and died from cancer in 1995. Mr Obama moved back to America in 1971 to stay with his grandparents, who took the lead role in raising him with his mother frequently away on business.

In Dreams of My Father, he praises his grandmother as suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense, and says her character did much to form his own.

In a campaign advert this year, Mr Obama described Mrs Dunham as the daughter of a Midwest oil company clerk who "taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland" – things like "accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses. Treating your neighbour as you'd like to be treated."

Mr Obama recognised Mrs Dunham when he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination at the party's convention in Denver. "She's the one who taught me about hard work. She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me," he said.

BACKGROUND

BARACK Obama's absence from the campaign trail comes as John McCain begins to narrow the polling gap between the two candidates with attacks on Mr Obama's tax policy which he says amounts to "socialism" for favouring more tax for the rich and less for the poor.

Mr Obama remains ahead in many swing states, but polls now show both Florida and Ohio have swung back by narrow margins to Mr McCain. An absence from the campaign trail at a crucial time could harm Mr Obama's momentum, but he may also gain a sympathy vote for his visit to Hawaii.

And it is likely that Mr McCain will feel obliged to tone down any negative attacks on the days when Mr Obama is by his grandmother's bedside.

Last month, Mr McCain suspended his campaign saying it was necessary to deal with the financial crisis.