Barack Obama in The FAITH of Barack Obama, by Stephen Mansfield

On Homeland Security: Grandfather served in Patton's tank corps in WWII

Stanley Dunham has been described as a kind of Willy Loman, the tragic, broken character in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. There are similarities. Returning from war and grasping the promise of the GI Bill, Stanley moved his young family to California, where he enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley. Obama would later recount kindly of his grandfather that "the classroom couldn't contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family moved on." It was the pattern of a lifetime. There was first a return to Kansas and then years of one small Texas town after another, one dusty furniture store after another.

On Principles & Values: First American president not raised in a Christian home

On Principles & Values: 1999 Congressional loss: "I got my rear end handed to me"

Whatever moved Obama to run, it was not a pleasant experience for the younger man. From the outset Rush's approval rating was more than 70%. Then, not long into the campaign, Rush's son, Huey Rich, was tragically shot on his way home from a grocery store. The young man hung between life and death for four days. The outpouring of sympathy galvanized support for Rush.

Even President Clinton entered the fray and supported Rush, breaking his own policy of not endorsing candidates in primaries. Rush won 60% to 30%--and Obama was forced to admit that "[I got] my rear end handed to me."

On Principles & Values: Religious Left calls Obama "called" and "anointed"

Rush is not alone in this. Increasingly, words such as called, chosen, and anointed are being used of Obama. Though these terms have long belonged to the native language of the Religious Right, they are now becoming the comfortable expressions of an awakened Religious Left, of a faith-based Progressive movement. Moreover, they are framing the image of Barack Obama in the minds of millions of Americans.

Perhaps this is what comes from a need to paint politicians in messianic terms. Perhaps this is what comes, in part, from a people believing themselves a chosen nation.

On Principles & Values: Grandmother raised as strict Methodist, but saw hypocrisy

These hypocrisies were not lost on Madelyn Payne. She would tell her grandson often of the "sanctimonious preachers" she had known and of the respectable church ladies with absurd hats who whispered hurtful secrets and treated those they deemed beneath them with cruelty. What injustice, she would insist, that men who sat on church boards should utter "racial epithets" and cheat the men who worked for them. Barack regularly heard such bitter sentiments in his grandparents' home, sentiments that profoundly shaped his early religious worldview.

On Principles & Values: Mother raised in Unitarian Church with secular values

The Unitarian Affirmation of Faith does serve to hint at what the Dunhams accepted as true: "the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of mankind onward and upward forever." However, they were likely skeptics--Barack says that Madelyn espoused a "flinty rationalism"--regarding the divinity of Jesus, whom they would have accepted as one good moral teacher among many but certainly not a god.

On Principles & Values: Mother declared herself an atheist during high school

During after-school gab sessions in the coffee shops of Seattle, her friends began to realize how fully Ann had thought through her beliefs. "She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," remembers Dunham's best friend in high school. "She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't." Another friend explains, "[Ann was] a fellow traveler.... We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."

On Principles & Values: Father rejected Muslim faith and witch doctors of his youth

Though he now spent weekends with Ann, listening to jazz, drinking beer, and debating politics and world affairs with their friends, he had only a few years before lived a Kenyan village life, herding goats and submitting to the rituals of a village witch doctor. Now, in the West, he had rejected the Muslim faith of his youth just as he rejected the babblings of all witch doctors. Religion is superstition, he insisted. It falls to man to fashion his own fate and the fate of his nation. This was what he intended to do when he finished school and returned to Kenya.

Things moved quickly for Ann and her new love. Sometime late in the fall of 1960, she conceived a child. Several months into 1961, she and Barack married.