his father was a kenya socialist, anticolonialist, and that much of the argument is undenial. his mother was a dreamy flour child who eventually earned a doctorate in anthropology. for obama, the 1960s ran until 1980s until the success of ronald reagan was clear. as a young man, obama suffered a kind of 60s envy. he missed out on the civil rights movement, and on the new left, but he determined to experience them vicariously, and so he tried drugs, as he confess es, cannily, in his book, "dreams of my father," rallied against south africa, gave speeches, community organized, tried to get in touch with the black speerns, and, in general, he searched for meaning to use a formulation that he would not reject. in other words, he very much shared the 60s existentialist mood that everyone must find his own meaning in life, and find his own way in life because there's no meaning out there. there's no objective source of meaning that one can point to or rely on. he shared, also, the civil rights movements determination to make history rather than to let it happen or trust it to redeem