To reach the home of George Obama, the president’s youngest half-brother, you skirt around the skyscrapers of central Nairobi and head north twenty minutes toward Huruma, one link in a necklace of slums that encircles the Kenyan capital. Turning off a half-built highway, you plunge into a warren of honking cars, minibus taxis, stray cows, and open roadside sewers. In the afternoon, Huruma’s alleys flood with children in neat school uniforms who skip past clapboard kiosks selling cigarettes, sodas, eggs, and detergent. You stop at a soccer field, an uneven red-dust pitch with netless goals, and ask one of the young men who are standing around in knots whether they’ve seen George. Everybody knows him: He used to be a quite a soccer player. You get directions to his house, a single-story tin-and-cinderblock structure, and finding it empty, manage to cadge his cell-phone number from a neighbor. You call George and then you wait.

Eventually, he appears with an entourage of young men, who fan across the gravel alley, like a street gang readying for a rumble. George is the tallest and the skinniest and clearly the leader, striking a 27-year-old’s cocksure pose, his elbows jutting, his long slender fingers delicately holding a cigarette. In his height, slim build, and long, expressive face, you can catch a glimpse of his half-brother, Barack. But the resemblance is obscured by evidence of a harder life: George’s eyes are misty, narrowed into slits by heavy lids, and his arms are flecked with scars. The product of a relationship between Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and a Kenyan woman named Jael Otieno, George never knew his father, who died when he was 6 months old. You hold up a hand in greeting as you walk across swirled scraps of paper and discarded plastic, and explain why you’d like to talk. A barefoot child scurries over to hand George another couple of smokes, bought individually for a few shillings from a nearby kiosk. As he clamps one between his lips and lights up, George shivers despite the midday warmth. more

Fraser Robinson III and his wife, Marian, with their children, Craig and Michelle, now the first lady.WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

“Ever since the election of Andrew Jackson, having the common touch has been essential,” says H.W. Brands, author of the FDR biography “Traitor to His Class.” “These days, no one in politics claims to be of the upper class. Everybody wants to be part of the middle class.”

But not many recent presidents have been able to pull it off. George W. Bush tried to be down-home, with a modest ranch in Crawford, Texas, but he could never quite escape representing both East Coast old money and Texas new money.

OAK BLUFFS, Mass. — He picked a Fed chairman and lost a close political friend, but through it all, President Barack Obama has tried to carry on with the vacation he set out to have here — strolling the beach, taking his daughters for a bike ride, playing golf.

More duties await — he’s working on the eulogy he’ll deliver for Sen. Ted Kennedy on Saturday. And there’s a chance Tropical Storm Danny will bring him back to Washington a day early. The White House is already saying Obama needs a “break from his vacation” — a way of explaining his third trip this month, on Wednesday, to Camp David, where he'll stay through the weekend.

They've been having a grand time since arriving in the White House, mostly out of the public eye. So far.

The O's decending Air Force One, on their way to Blue Heron Farm for August 2009 vacationPresident Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are trying to make their daughters' experience in the White House as educational and broadening as possible, taking them along on trips this summer with expressly didactic intentions.

"I want to teach them that Italy isn't just pizza," Michelle remarked in Rome in July during an official visit in which she and the girls toured the Eternal City's ancient sites, such as the Pantheon, the Colisseum and the Vatican's St. Peter's Basilica.

Barack Obama’s vacation so far has been mainly golfing and spending time with family and friends, but he ventured into town Tuesday night – finally giving Martha’s Vineyard the kind of brush with its most famous vacationer that’s been buzzed about for weeks.

The president and Michelle Obama went out to dinner here as onlookers crowded streets and sidewalks to get a glimpse. The couple dined at a restaurant called Sweet Life with the president’s sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, Chicago friend Eric Whitaker and Valerie Jarrett, an Obama senior adviser who has a house on the island.

Political opponents and devoted fans alike seemed intent on catching the US president's attention over the next week as he takes the first holiday of his presidency on a secluded $35,000-a-week, 28-acre private estate with its own horses, golf tee and private beach access.

President Barack Obama and his family arriving at the Cape Cod Coast Guard Air Station in Bourne, Massachusetts Photo: EPA Awash with the shingle-clad homes of the super-wealthy, including Hollywood stars, politicians and captains of industry, the 23-mile-long island - which vies with nearby Nantucket to be America's most exclusive resort - prides itself on its nonchalent attitude to visiting celebrities.

WASHINGTON — The girls have toured the Eiffel Tower and ogled the stone majesties of the Pantheon. They have swooned over the Jonas Brothers, giggled over wax likenesses of their parents and romped with friends at Camp David, all in the span of two blissfully school-free months.

Welcome to Sasha and Malia Obama’s fabulous summer vacation, a hodgepodge of foreign travel, concerts, birthday parties and just plain fun carefully organized by the president and first lady. (The first lady has dubbed it Camp Obama.)

WASHINGTON — The far-flung Obama clan is coming closer together. President Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is moving her family here from Hawaii and will spend the next several months living in the nation’s capital, White House officials say.

President Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, center, at inauguration with husband, Konrad Ng, Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, and Malia and Sasha Obama. The extended stay means that the siblings will live in the same city, at least for a while, for the first time in years.

Ms. Soetoro-Ng, who has given up her job as a high school teacher in Hawaii, has a book contract and a new baby. Her husband, Konrad Ng, a professor at the University of Hawaii, will become the scholar-in-residence at the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Pacific American Program here next month.

Tribune photo by Alex Garcia / November 22, 2008GEORGETOWN, S.C.—Tiny wooden cabins line the dirt road once known as Slave Street as it winds its way through Friendfield Plantation.

More than 200 slaves lived in the whitewashed shacks in the early 1800s, and some of their descendants remained here for more than a century after the Civil War. The last tenants abandoned the hovels about three decades ago, and even they would have struggled to imagine a distant daughter of the plantation one day calling the White House home.

But a historical line can be drawn from these Low Country cabins to Michelle Obama, charting an American family's improbable journey through slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement and a historic presidential election.