Friends here say the country's first island-born president-elect has long carried more than a touch of the aloha spirit in his temperament. During the campaign, many admirers questioned whether Obama was too passive in his battles against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. John McCain.
"That's Hawaii," declared Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a contemporary of Obama's parents who has known the president-elect since birth. "You take negative energy and you process it through you and it comes out as positive energy. . . . Every time Obama comes on television now, the collective blood pressure in the United States goes down 10 points. He cools the water. He's sober and he speaks sensibly in a calm manner that breeds confidence."
As Obama's wife, Michelle, has said, "You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii." But to understand Hawaii is to make sense of America's most exotic outpost. It's the nation's last frontier, the 50th state, a string of volcanic mountains that rose from the sea to be settled first by Polynesians and later by a cultural melange of Asians and Anglos ...
The traditional Hawaiian way is to hold back rather than assert oneself, said Jerry Burris, a longtime columnist at the Honolulu Advertiser who co-wrote "The Dream Begins," a book about how Hawaii shaped Obama ... As Michael Carney, a Honolulu implant from the U.S. mainland, observed, drivers in Hawaii rarely cut you off in traffic. "You don't hear honking here," he noted.
Hawaii is no utopia, of course, despite its stunning natural beauty. Tourism drives the state's economy, but many of the jobs it provides are low-wage and low-skill. Pockets of poverty are spread across Oahu, which with nearly 1 million residents is the state's most populous island.
"Many people have two or three jobs to make ends meet because it's a very expensive cost of living," said Geoffrey White, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Hawaii. That high cost of living has resulted in a growing homeless population. The state also struggles with a relatively high rate of crystal methamphetamine abuse.
There are consequences to living on a small land mass surrounded by the ocean. There is a theory of behavioral science that islanders behave differently than mainlanders, that on an island competition is not rewarded as well as it is elsewhere.
"When you live on a rock, on an island, you learn to understand that everyone is critical to the success and survival of that space," said Ramsay Taum, a Honolulu native and administrator at the University of Hawaii. "You have to get over your quibbles quickly." ...
On the campaign trail, Obama rarely talked about how growing up in Hawaii influenced his personal or political values. The politician's narrative has always been firmly rooted in Chicago, where he got his start as a community organizer and cut his teeth in the city's rough-and-tumble politics.
But in one set of remarks in 2004, he told a Honolulu audience of his love for his home state.
"No place else could have provided me with the environment, the climate, in which I could not only grow but also get a sense of being loved," he said. "There is no doubt that the residue of Hawaii will always stay with me, and that it is a part of my core, and that what's best in me, and what's best in my message, is consistent with the tradition of Hawaii."
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