"'She was a very strong person in her own way,' Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother."

Writes Janny Scott at the end of a long NYT Magazine article about Stanley Ann Dunham:

“Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”

Did you have a flash — reading that — that he's like his mother, and we, the taxpayers, are like the grandparents? We'll come through. We'll provide the floor through which the country cannot crash.

But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of un conditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”

Please, America. Don't cramp my style. I'm a unique spirit, here to give that special gift that I have brought into the world. It's all for the best, if you'll be that floor.