by John McCormick
Despite occasional family jokes that he might be president someday, Maya Soetoro-Ng said Monday evening in Chicago that her big brother, Sen. Barack Obama, was not serious about it until very recently.
“There’s a big difference between a childhood story…and real plans,” she said. “I can assure you that he had no intention of running for quite some time.”
The comment came a day after Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign suggested Obama was being disingenuous about when he first started thinking about running for president.
That charge from the campaign of the New York senator came after Obama said he had “not been planning to run for president for however number of years some of the other candidates have been planning for.”
Soetoro-Ng, meanwhile, was in Chicago to kick-off a phone banking effort on the part of Obama volunteers from Illinois working out of the 10th floor of a Loop high-rise.
She told the roughly 75 volunteers gathered that her older brother of nine years is someone who can “translate idealism into action.”
Asked what her favorite memory of her brother was, she pointed to his help in raising her.
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“Our parents died young, too young,” she said, as four television cameras recorded her appearance. “He really took over the parenting and he did a really good job.”
Soetoro-Ng said her brother had taught her how to cook “the three dishes he knows how to cook” and that he made chili for a family gathering in Hawaii last Christmas when a dinner reservation fell through.
She said she is cautiously happy about recent news that Obama received 28 percent of support in a widely respected poll of likely caucus participants in Iowa, compared to 25 percent for Clinton.
“I just want to make sure we don’t stop working,” she said.
After speaking to volunteers, Soetoro-Ng tried her hand at making phone calls to possible voters in Iowa. She kept getting phone machines (caller ID is popular in Iowa these busy political days) and eventually gave up to instead answer a few questions from reporters.
Soetoro-Ng said she plans to campaign for Obama in Iowa and elsewhere between now and Jan. 2 – the day before the Iowa caucuses — when she must return to her teaching job in Hawaii.