Obama's Mamas Weigh In

" Yesterday, I called two of the Obama Mamas -- the women who hired Barack Obama to work as a community organizer on the Far South Side. They were the first to see Obama’s leadership qualities, so I wanted to know how they thought he’d met the test of leading an entire nation.

The Developing Communities Project, the group that hired Obama as an organizer, was formed as a response to the closure of Chicago’s steel mills. One of Obama’s first projects was interviewing laid-off steelworkers for a job re-training program. The steel crisis of the 1980s was a situation similar to what Obama faced coming into office, when the auto industry was about to go bankrupt, Loretta Augustine-Herron said.

Augustine-Herron, who was given the pseudonym “Angela” in Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father, is now a substitute teacher in Calumet City.

“The interviews with the laid-off steelworkers were so sad,” she remembered. “The people couldn’t understand that these jobs weren’t coming back. Barack understood that. His perceptions were really, really good "

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