Obama sees ill grandmother on somber Hawaii trip

HONOLULU (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama made a detour from the presidential campaign trail to see his ailing grandmother in Hawaii on Friday, taking a somber trip to make perhaps his last visit to the woman who helped raise him.

After a 10-hour flight from Indiana to Hawaii on Thursday night, Obama hustled straight from the plane to 85-year-old Madelyn Dunham's bedside in the Honolulu apartment where he lived as a teenager.

He was back at the apartment again early on Friday. Obama decided to see her less than two weeks before the November 4 election, fearing that if he waited any longer it would be too late.

"I want to give her a kiss and a hug," Obama told ABC News before he left Indiana, in an interview aired on Friday on "Good Morning America." "Without going through the details too much, she's gravely ill."

The woman he calls "Toot" -- short for "tutu," the Hawaiian word for grandmother -- helped raise him from the age of 10 while Obama's mother was working in Indonesia. Dunham is often featured in his campaign-trail speeches.

"She's really been one of the cornerstones of my life," he told ABC, adding she had been inundated with flowers and e-mails and calls from total strangers since news of her illness became public.

Dunham recently broke her hip and "she had some other problems that were getting worse. You know, we weren't sure, and I'm still not sure, whether she makes it to Election Day. We're all praying and we hope she does," Obama said.

Obama has said he did not want to repeat the mistake he made with his mother, who died of cancer a decade ago before he could reach her bedside.

Obama saw his half-sister, who lives in Hawaii and has helped care for Dunham, at the apartment on Thursday night. A small crowd watched from across the street, including a woman with a handwritten sign reading "Best Wishes Obamas!"

A SHORT WALK

The Illinois senator, who leads Republican rival John McCain in national opinion polls 11 days before the election, cut short a planned walk around his old neighborhood on Friday after a small group of reporters and photographers rushed up.

Obama had made it about two blocks from the building before the media caught up to him. An unhappy Obama, wearing a black shirt, jeans, sandals and sunglasses, hopped in his Secret Service vehicle and rode back to the apartment complex.

Obama will fly back to Reno, Nevada, on Friday afternoon, where he will resume the race for the White House on Saturday morning.

Obama's campaign hardly went dark in his absence. The relentless advertising fueled by his record-smashing fund-raising rolled on in the dozen or so battleground states that will decide the election. His wife, Michelle, and running mate Joe Biden stayed on the campaign trail.

Obama's grandfather was a World War Two veteran and his grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line. They later moved to Hawaii, where she became a bank vice president.

"She's the one who taught me about hard work," he said in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination. "She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life."

But Obama featured his grandmother most prominently in a March speech on race prompted by a budding controversy over the views of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother," Obama said. More than once, he said, she had "uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

(Editing by Philip Barbara)