Brush with Obama hinted he was going places

The recent photographs of President-elect Barack Obama enjoying a pre-inauguration vacation in his old Honolulu stomping grounds took me back to the nine years I lived in the Hawaiian Islands.

I, too, had swatted little white balls around Olomana Golf Links. I also spent my share of time bodysurfing the sometimes punishing break off Sandy Beach on Oahu's east shore.

Those images of Obama at play in paradise jogged loose another distant yet powerful island memory, one that's been knocking around in my head for nearly two decades: a chance one-on-one chat over beers with the nation's next commander in chief.

'Pau hana'

Serendipity brought me face to face with the man who would be president. I landed on sun-splashed Oahu with the Air Force in the mid-1980s and chose to hang out in the islands after my military stint was up to finish college at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

Through a local rugby club I was playing with, I befriended an affable New Zealander named Gary. It was through him in the early 1990s that I met a remarkable young woman he was courting at the time — Maya Soetoro, now Maya Soetoro-Ng. Maya, as anyone who's studied Obama's somewhat complicated family tree knows, is the president-elect's smart-as-a-whip half-sister.

Fast forward to 1991. Obama was back in Hawaii to see family and decompress after graduating from Harvard Law School. His return flight to the mainland would take him to a new chapter in his life in Chicago to work as a community organizer, to marry Michelle, to enter politics and to make a long-shot run at history.

But before all that, Maya organized a "pau hana" gathering (Hawaii lingo for an after-work party) on his behalf at Gary's place. I was there when Obama — some still called him Barry at the time — walked into the living room in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops.

He made a good first impression. Polite. Engaging. Charismatic. Comfortable being the center of attention. And he had smarts to boot.

Hindsight

But after a while it became clear he wasn't your regular above-average Joe. He was far more self-assured, driven and opinionated than most 29-years-olds. He had presence.

My most vivid memory was his unflinching, intensely focused stare as he peppered me, then a rookie reporter, with questions about how the news business works. I'm still unsure if he was truly interested in what I had to say, or if he was just trying to see if he could rattle my cage, or both.

Over the years, I've had the privilege of meeting plenty of smart, ambitious young adults under similar circumstances. So why did my brush with Obama stand out above the rest?

For starters, a name like Barack Obama isn't easily forgotten.

He also had piqued my curiosity. Not only had he been elected as the first African-American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, he already was at work in 1991 on his autobiography, which I can only presume later became "Dreams of My Father."

The list of accomplishments he had racked up before the age of 30 left me wondering about where someone with his kind of chops would wind up someday.

It's a no-brainer to say now that Obama harbored big-league political ambitions way back then. As my Kiwi chum Gary said after meeting him for the first time, "Barry's going places."

John McDermott, business editor of The Post and Courier, lived in Honolulu from 1984 to 1993. He can be reached at 937-5572 or jmcdermott@postandcourier.com.