If many Americans in the Continental 48 states and the District of Columbia suddenly perceive in President Barack Obama’s demeanor and fortunes a confident and eloquent figure they haven’t seen in a long time, some prominent citizens of the 50th state where he was born say they recognize a fellow they’ve known forever: a Hawaiian.

After all, it was Hawaii that more 40 years ago became the first state in the nation to require employers to provide health benefits, and that has long enjoyed near-universal insurance coverage. It was Hawaii — whose university football team is the Rainbow Warriors — that jump-started the modern movement for same-sex marriage when its state supreme court ruled in 1993 that denying gay people the right to marry might violate the state constitution’s due process and equal protection provisions.


“The rainbow with its many facets, its many colors blending together, is the definition of what constitutes the spirit of Aloha,” said the state’s former Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who has known Obama since the president was a baby. “A sense of harmony, or humbleness, of gentleness, of encouragement. These are attributes that are easily cited, but very, very difficult to meet in everyday life and everyday experience. But it’s the simple truth that he grew up in this context — and everybody accepts we have our difficulties living up to our aspirations — but in Hawaii our diversity defines us, rather than divides us.”

It was no accident that when the Supreme Court declared that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry, the White House was bathed in the symbolic rainbow spectrum of not only the gay rights movement but of Obama’s native state itself. When Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and Kansan mother not quite 54 years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in 22 states on the mainland.

Perhaps no other state in the union could have produced the particular blend of parentage, upbringing and attitude — diverse, tolerant, accepting — that propelled Obama to the presidency. And at the end of what may have been Obama’s single best week in office — with another Supreme Court decision upholding his signature health care plan, and the president delivering a soaring eulogy for the victims of the racist massacre in Charleston, South Carolina — the rest of the country suddenly looked a lot more like the Aloha State, if only for a moment.

In fact, the nation’s two-decade-long evolution on gay marriage parallels that of Hawaii, where mixed-race ancestry is taken so for granted that residents refer to their own heritage as “chop suey” or “poi dog,” hotel rooms stock not only the Gideon Bible but the Teachings of the Buddha and the Book of Mormon, and failure to return a grocery shopping cart to its designated rack, letting it instead drift through the parking lot, is seen as a deeply anti-social act.

The state high court did not permit gay marriages immediately in 1993, instead bucking the issue back to the lower courts. In the meantime, in 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, limiting federal recognition of marriage to opposite sex couples, and two years later, Hawaiians passed a ballot measure providing that only the state Legislature had the power allow gay marriage — which it finally did, in 2013. Obama’s own conversion on the question was nearly as gradual.

As the bluest of blue states — and the most isolated land mass on the face of the earth — Hawaii has often struck mainland America as an exotic outlier, a tourist destination of grass skirts and Tiki drinks, rather than a living, breathing polyglot society with deep cultural traditions all its own. But to Hawaiians themselves, the Aloha spirit is much more than a chamber of commerce slogan.

“We’re an exceptionally diverse group,” said Randall Roth, a longtime law professor at the University of Hawaii who, like the president’s mother, was originally from Kansas. “Hawaii’s always been a little bit different. I suspect that there are a lot of factors that combine to make that so, but I think that most people who live here feel that it’s an exceptionally accepting culture.”

Beyond the technical questions of social policy like health care and marriage, some prominent islanders also said that Obama’s stirring eulogy in Charleston — and his invocation of Christian grace — reflected not only the homiletic heritage of his longtime worship in the black church and African-American spiritual traditions, but the Hawaiian oral tradition of “talk story,” the communal exchange in which narratives explaining the human condition are passed down from generation to generation.

“Trust me, people in Hawaii are paying attention, and I think they’re very, very proud of that eulogy,” said Donne Dawson, a descendant of a longtime Hawaiian family who attended the prestigious Punahou School with Obama and now heads the State Film Commission. “He was in his element in every sense of the word, and it seemed it was a giant epiphany, and for the first time in probably a very long time — maybe since his presidency began — I think he felt truly free to speak his mind, and speak what was on his heart. It’s not to say that we don’t have our own racial issues here in Hawaii. We have very strong opinions on all sides, but I do think there’s a greater level of acceptance in Hawaii than any place I’ve ever seen.”

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama walk to the motorcade after being greeted in the traditonal Hawaiian way upon their arrival at the Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 24, 2009 for Christmas vacation.

In his first memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote candidly about his search for racial identity while he was growing up, often in the care of his white grandparents. He recalled avoiding the only other black boy in his fifth-grade class, “as if direct contact would remind us more keenly of our isolation,” and bristled at the use of the N-word by an ignorant coach. He signed the yearbook of one of his high school classmates with a squiggly cartoon of a mound rising off the edge of the paper and the inscription, “My Afro stickin’ up over the top again.”

Eventually, Obama found his place in Chicago, the capital of the American black diaspora, but his connection to Hawaii remains deep and enduring. It is there that he returns with his family — his ohana — each Christmas vacation, body surfing and playing golf with old friends. It is there that his grandfather is buried, and the ashes of his mother and grandmother were scattered. In his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote that in a real sense, he had no choice but to try to believe in Martin Luther King’s vision of an America in which people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

“As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii,” he wrote, “with a sister who’s half Indonesian but usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.”

It is, of course, this sheer diversity of ancestry and influences — a diversity generally celebrated in Hawaii, if not always elsewhere — that some pockets of the country find so deeply disorienting and disturbing about Obama’s ascendancy. The Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, was by his own accounting among such Americans.

But Abercrombie — one of a handful of people still living anywhere in the world who knew both of the president’s parents — said he found reason for hope in Obama’s handling of the latest challenges of leadership.

“Oh, I think they would be absolutely delighted — — there’s not a doubt in my mind,” Abercrombie said of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. “His mother, even as a young woman, was way ahead of her time in terms of her interest in, her respect for, and her commitment to civil rights. And part of the reason his father came to the University of Hawaii from Kenya was because of Hawaii’s reputation for the Aloha spirit. He wanted to see if it was real, because he felt very strongly that Africa in general, and Kenya in particular, were going to make a transition from colonialism to freedom, and he was worried and concerned that tribalism would be a great obstacle to democracy in Africa, and that Hawaii offered a possible guide to how you could subsume race, ethnicity, tribalism in a way that was positive.”

“This combination of being an African-American and also having a Hawaiian tradition behind him stood the president in excellent stead last week,” Abercrombie said. “He spoke not just in the Aloha spirit, but in the American spirit.”