On the day I was born, the mother of the 44th President of the United States was a 12-year-old in El Dorado, Kansas.

Even Stanley Ann Dunham might have found the fact that she would be the mother of the nation’s first Black president bewildering. 

But she did. On Groundhog Day in 1961, she married Barack Obama Sr., a classmate at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and the first African student in the school’s history. That summer they had a son.

How did Barack Obama become president?

In 1954, a Black man wouldn’t have had a chance. The idea would have seemed impossible – even to Black people themselves, who weren’t able to use unsegregated public facilities in much of the country.

Black men and women had run before. But their candidacies were more about advocacy than actually getting the nomination. 

Shirley Chisholm was a congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking to make a statement about a new generation of Americans. Jesse Jackson won some primaries but couldn’t overcome the dominance of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Gary Hart in 1988. Al Sharpton ran a spirited campaign in 2004 in an effort to advance the policies he advocated.

It was in 2004 that America was introduced to Obama. He had graduated from Harvard Law and published the least likely book any future president ever wrote, “Dreams from My Father,” about his struggles as a boy in Hawaii and Indonesia. 

But his main gift was his ability to speak. If Barack Obama isn’t the greatest orator in American history (yeah, I know about Lincoln), he’s certainly the greatest in our lifetime. He’ll always hold a special place in my heart as the commencement speaker for my son’s graduation in 2016.

Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston propelled him. He was elected U.S. senator from Illinois and, four years later, he stunned presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton to win his party’s nomination.

There were other things going for him.

He was lucky. Obama came to the fore when the nation was going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and after George W. Bush dragged the nation through an unnecessary military action in Iraq. 

Obama was relatively young. He was 47 when he ran and seemed a lot younger; not many men his age in public life are willing to be photographed bare-chested in the Hawaiian surf. He was in terrific physical condition and that vitality spread to his campaign. And he knew how to talk to young people in contrast to the awkwardness of most politicians.

He also understood how the world was changing. In particular, Obama and his campaign had a feel for the emerging world of social media – Facebook and Twitter were in their first years.

My Mom, after initial disappointment that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t become America’s first female president, came to love Obama. She watched him every time he showed up on MSNBC and had a huge campaign poster in her bedroom.

What seems wistful now is how optimistic people who supported him were in 2008. I downloaded a bunch of songs from iTunes extolling his virtues. Their theme is the joy that this man would unify the country and show that the nation was moving past the bigotry of the past.

But, instead, it almost seems as though the forces of backwardness dozed in 2008, perhaps numbed by the financial crisis, and woke up with a venegance the next year. The Tea Party. Denying that Obama was born in the United States. The phony fiscal concern. 

As amazing as it is that Barack Obama became president, it’s almost more shocking that his successor was someone so completely different and anathema to what Obama represented.

The path from the audacity of hope of 2008 to the fear of democracy’s end in 2024 is painful and urgent. Stanley Ann Dunham would hope we would choose the optimism she instilled in her son.