Hawaii Looks Back, and Ahead, as Its Presidential Spotlight Dims (Published 2016)
- ️https://www.nytimes.com/by/thomas-fuller
- ️Fri Oct 21 2016
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- Oct. 21, 2016
In Hawaii to monitor two hurricanes barreling across the Pacific, I took a detour to the neighborhood where President Obama grew up.
HONOLULU — Drive 10 minutes inland from the high-end shops and fancy hotels of Waikiki Beach and you get to a part of Honolulu that feels less homogenized than the made-for-tourists beachfront. There are pawnshops just steps away from old stone churches, and fast-food restaurants down the street from majestic lawns shaded by the giant canopies of tropical rain trees.
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This is the neighborhood where President Obama grew up. The leader of the free world once worked at the Baskin-Robbins on King Street.
As the Obama presidency winds down, I toured Honolulu to get a sense of whether the city’s residents were feeling wistful. For nearly eight years, the state had a native son in the White House, a special connection to an American mainland that can otherwise feel quite far away. It’s a shorter flight to Tokyo from here than it is to Washington.