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A Theory on Obama's Family History Misstatements

By Jeralyn

Barack Obama escaped hot water over his mistaking Auschwitz for Buchenwald. Fair enough. But I have a new theory now -- one that's more a curious observation than a criticism, or perhaps a little of both.

He makes a lot of mistakes about his family history. It's like he's retelling stories he's heard from third parties, including campaign staff who looked the stuff up. Maybe, aside from his grandparents with whom he lived for several years, he didn't know their side of the family that well -- including the great uncle who was one of the first at Buchenwald. In other words, he's telling stories he's learned on the campaign trail rather than ones he grew up hearing.

It probably wasn't his father who mistakenly told him the Kennedy family paid for his travel to the U.S. to study in Hawaii. It probably wasn't his mother who told him the 1965 March in Selma, AL allowed her to marry his father (he was born in 1961). More likely, I think, campaign researchers and aides came up with it.

Just like the Boston Globe reported the campaign came up with the story about his Indiana "homestead." I doubt he even knew there was a family homestead before going to Indiana to campaign: [More...]

On Saturday, Obama made his first visit to an Indiana house built by a great-great- great-grandfather for a potluck dinner with neighbors. Obama's local patrimony was recently uncovered by campaign researchers, an aide said, and the candidate was uncharacteristically short on words about it. "Look at this: the Dunham, uh . . ." he said, bounding off his bus toward the white clapboard house. After a long silence, he described it as a homestead. (my emphasis.)

Why would Obama do this -- tell family stories he's only recently learned from others? According to the same Boston Globe article, the campaign decided Obama was better off touting his mother's family than his father's Kenyan roots.

Entering tomorrow's primaries for the first time defensive about his identity - against charges that he is an elitist, distant from everyday concerns - Obama's campaign is placing new attention on some overlooked biographical points.

"The bio is our central focus," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist. "The bio is valuable because he is not a faux advocate for working folks."

Previously, the Obama strategy was to focus on his multiculturalism and the Kenyan side of his family:

While Obama's self-introduction in his famous 2004 Democratic convention speech also began with his parents, he told it then as a serendipitous romance whose unlikely participants - a Kenyan black man and Kansan white woman - spawned a "skinny kid with a funny name" uniquely able to bring people together.

Having written a memoir, "Dreams from My Father," about the search for his father's Kenyan relatives, Obama's focus in recent days turned to the roots of his mother, Ann Dunham. Out is the paternal grandfather who cooked for the British as a domestic servant. In is the one who enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor and served under General George S. Patton in Europe. (He married the woman Obama described last month as a "typical white person.") (my emphasis.)

The reaction they got in Indiana to his mother's family was positive.

Obama's attention to the less exotic component of his biracial makeup appealed to Irene Evans, who watched him from a picnic blanket in Noblesville. "I think white people can identify with the white background of his family," said Evans, 60, a social worker from Indianapolis who is white.

Obama has used his new biographical initiative to reassert his patriotism. "My belief in America," said Obama, is grounded in the support his mother's family received from federal programs, such as the GI Bill, Federal Housing Authority loans, and food stamps. He did not mention the Kennedy-era government scholarship that Obama has said was responsible for his "very existence," by bringing his father to the United States as a foreign student.

"When I met my wife, it turned out she had the same story," Obama said Friday. Economic hardship is "part of what we've been," he said, citing their challenges as a couple paying for day care, gas, and student loans.

Obama continued:

"We didn't recognize, I think, the caricature that's been painted of us over the last couple of weeks," Obama said Friday, citing the image of "elitist, intellectual pointy-head types" at an Indianapolis press conference. "The fact is our lives, if you look back over the last two decades, more closely approximate the lives of the average voters than any other candidate."

In other words, he's not repeating the memory-challenged words of an elderly grandfather or great-uncle. He's repeating what he's been told about them, because his campaign decided they should be the focus of his biographical narrative.

Still not convinced? Here's one more example. In West Virginia a few weeks ago, Obama said his grandfather enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, which was December, 1941. [Charleston Gazette (West Virginia) April 8, 2008, Tuesday, available on Lexis.com]

"My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

Here is the WWII Kansas Veterans Index. His grandfather, Stanley A. Dunham, enlisted in the Army on June 18 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor. [Hat tip Baldilocks.)

There's no requirement in my mind that a presidential candidate have close family ties. But if a candidate is going to tout his family values and family history as a reason voters should view him as "just like us," his stories should at least be genuine, not something he learns from campaign staffers.

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Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 28, 2008 (boomark / email).