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Barack Obama – An American Story

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Is the story Barack Obama tells about his upbringing an American story? When you look at his background, it would seem that it isn’t so much an American story, but a story he has manipulated to make him appear more American. This is the theme that is being explored by a Fox News story about Obama’s autobiography and another book that examines some of the stories told by the President in Dreams From My Father. As it turns out, many of those stories have been changed, purportedly for the narrative flow. That may be true, but I can’t help but wonder if some of the facts were changed to help Barack Obama in his rise to the top.

That process has now reached a kind of zenith, with the publication last month of Barack Obama: The Story, a deeply researched, 600-page study of the president’s ancestry and early life by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post editor David Maraniss. The result reflects the hyper-scrutiny that attaches to our chief executives. It also offers a window into how much of the life story of this self-made man may have been made up.

By some counts, The Story presents more than three-dozen instances of material discrepancy where Dreams fails to align with the facts as Maraniss reports them. Case in point: Maraniss confirmed that Mr. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, left his father, Barack Obama, Sr., a volatile bigamist, and not the other way around, as related in Dreams.

Dreams also related the tale of Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango, who was said to have been detained and tortured in a prison outside Nairobi for six months because of his brave defiance of British colonialists. But after a half-dozen interviews and other research, Maraniss deemed the tale “unlikely.”

Maraniss did not respond to several calls requesting an interview, but Fox News caught up with him outside a Washington book signing.  “I think there’s a difference between a memoir and the serious, rigorous factual history of a biography,” he said. “Some of what he did was the result of mythologies that were passed along from his family, and some were for the purposes of advancing themes in his book which had more to do with finding his racial identity.”

David Maraniss isn’t accusing the President of lying, but more than three dozen instances of factual error seems to be more than just changing the flow of the narrative. The book written by Barack Obama is supposed to be an autobiography, not a work of fiction. The lines between the two have been more than a little blurred by the President.

I am not well versed in how things are done in the literary world, but I find it odd that so many people make so many excuses for the factual errors that are contained in the American story that supposedly belongs to Barack Obama. From what I can gather from reading about the errors, Barack Obama realized his story wasn’t black enough, so he changed the narrative.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine and author of a previous biography, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, published in 2010, judged Dreams to be “a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping.”  Remnick concluded that Author Obama wanted his life story to fit into a long tradition of African-American literature: a “narrative of ascent” discernible in early slave memoirs right up through contemporary classics like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).

But Obama’s early life, while sad in many respects, was too marked by privilege — recreational drug use, a Hawaii upbringing with financially comfortable white parents, enrollment in elite private schools and universities — to mesh neatly with the aggrieved black literature in which the young author was so well read and conversant. “Obama seems to sense this problem and, at the very start of his book, darkens his canvas as well as he can,” Remnick wrote.

Even Henry Ferris, the editor who helped Barack Obama get his book in order, makes excuses for the man who would become America’s first Barack Obamablack President. He says the departure from the facts isn’t uncommon for a memoirist. Really? Why wouldn’t a person writing their memoirs not want to tell the truth? Could it possibly be that Barack Obama changed his story just enough to make it more appealing to the very people he needed to be in tune with?

I can’t speak to the aspirations and dreams Barack Obama may or may not have had in his early adulthood. Did he grow up wanting to be the first black President of the United States? I doubt anyone can answer that question, unless it is Obama himself. However, it does seem that he was shaping himself into the American story early on. By doing so, he not only avail himself of the black voters he would need to win the White House, but he managed to win over a lot of liberal, white voters along the way.

The question remains. Exactly who is Barack Obama? I suspect we may never know the full answer to that question.


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