KEY POINTS:
Bob is fretting. The small steel thermometer he has dipped into the smoking oil is telling him it's too hot to start cooking the small blobs of batter that will soon be malasadas.
Burned malasadas - the name Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii gave to what are essentially doughnuts
- don't taste so good.
His stall in Kapiolani Park on the edge of Waikiki soon attracts a long queue of takers. But it is not just a good appetite that is drawing them. Everyone in this corner of the park this morning has come for another reason: to show support for a local boy who may be about to do something extraordinary; win the Democratic Party's nomination to be the first black (and first surfer) American President.
"Hot Obamasadas," exclaim two large signs strung over the table where Bob is working. A lawn sign is planted in the ground next to him with a life-sized black-and-white headshot of a middle-aged African-American guy with familiar big ears and wide smile.
A flower lei is hung around the photograph above the words, written in bright felt-pen colours, "Hawaii's Native Son".
By rights, Barack Obama should prevail in caucus voting in Hawaii and fatten slightly his delegate lead over Hillary Clinton.
The remarkable early narrative of Obama's life - the child of a white woman from Kansas and a Kenyan father who abandoned the family when the boy was just 2 - mostly played out here in the Pineapple State, save for four years between the ages of 6 and 10 in Indonesia.
Hawaii imbued in Obama the quality that may be the most compelling of his candidacy: his promise to transcend racial and social differences.
Few places better qualify as a true melting pot than Hawaii, its streets still teaming with a cosmopolitan mix of whites, Asians, Chinese, Japanese and (a few) blacks.
"The opportunity that Hawaii offered - to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect - became an integral part of my world view," Obama himself wrote in the 1999 issue of the newsletter published by the elite Punahou School, where he was a pupil from 10 until college.
Or as the US representative Neil Hargreaves, a close friend of Obama's parents, more pithily put it while addressing the crowd of 100 supporters here in Kapiolani Park: "Our diversity defines us, rather than divides us."
Obama's attachment to the archipelago survives. His surfing and fish-spearing days may be done but he spends most Christmases here. If he becomes President, Waikiki could be his Crawford, Texas. (Which would make for a tanned but sadly jet-lagged White House press corps.)
Yet not everything about Obama's formative years here - particularly as one of only a few black students at Punahou, a cradle of academic privilege that led him to a financial scholarship - were glorious. It's maybe why "Obamasada" Bob resists being interviewed in any detail about his memories of the young Obama even though they were friends who loved shooting hoops on the basketball courts on the school campus. "I have been let down by the press," he says, refusing to reveal his last name.
"We've been told not to talk to reporters," volunteers John Cheever, himself an old boy of Punahou and now a sociology teacher there.
"He wasn't that much of a distinguished student but everyone will tell you he was a good guy, very popular, someone who was always comfortable with the other kids."
Cheever knows though that there are some not so comfortable memories for Obama from his Punahou years, the kind of stuff that gets the media digging.
In searching for the real Barack Obama - or, as they used to call him at school, "Barry O'Bomber", because of his elegant hook shots on the basketball courts - the murk is more likely to be about drugs, including marijuana and cocaine, and slipping grades.
But Neil Abercrombie emphasises the multicultural, multi-ethnic influences. "The culture of Hawaii, the values of Hawaii, these are things that shaped his life."
- INDEPENDENT
