🚀 go-pugleaf

No sooner did the literary agency brochure in which Barack Obama 
was said to be Kenyan-born surface than the media went to work 
to deep-six it.

"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me - an 
agency assistant at the time," Miriam Goderich, now a named 
partner in the literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, wrote in an 
emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC 
News.  "There was never any information given to us by Obama in 
any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in 
any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can 
communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and 
nothing more."

This confession rings false to the point of preposterous for any 
number of reasons.  Let us start with the obvious.  At the time, 
1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among 
its least significant.  How likely is it that Goderich would 
have remembered enough about a 1991 "error" to know it was hers, 
especially since it went uncorrected through several revisions 
until changed in 2007?  To make this claim credible, there would 
have to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama 
submission in which he lists an Hawaiian birth.  I am confident 
that there is no such submission.

Former publisher Tom Lipscomb does not buy Goderich's 
explanation for a New York minute.  "As someone who has run a 
number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing 
MIRACLE," writes Lipscomb emphatically on Power Line.  "It is 
the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an editorial 
assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, 
wrong dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird 
country of origin like Kenya for an author?"

The Breitbart people followed up with a piece by Steve Boman, a 
Jane Dystel client in the mid-1990s, who noted,  "All material 
she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing 
partner."  This is standard.  In the eight books I have written 
under my own name, I have reviewed all biographical information 
sent out about me either by agent or publisher.  Like most 
authors, I have let a little fluff pass, but not much.

The most interesting "tell" in the 1991 Acton & Dystel brochure 
relates to what was said about Obama's career in the business 
world.  Obama, the reader learns, "worked as a financial 
journalist and editor for Business International Corporation."

In Dreams from My Father, Obama inflated his stint at Business 
International even more and transformed it into a faux moment of 
racial awareness, one of at least a half-dozen concocted racial 
melodramas in the book.  As Obama tells the story, a "consulting 
house to multinational corporations" hired him and promptly 
promoted him to the position of "financial writer."

Here, he felt like "a spy behind enemy lines," and a guilty one 
at that.  "As far as I could tell," he adds, "I was the only 
black man in the company."  He does not boast of his racial 
uniqueness.  Rather, in full grievance mode, he considers it "a 
source of shame."  Indeed, the whole experience troubled him:

I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. 
Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers 
or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the 
elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my 
hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain 
of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I 
remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and 
felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.

As early as July 2005, however, former co-worker and Obama fan 
Dan Armstrong revealed Obama's whole account to be a "serious 
exaggeration."  Obama worked at not a multinational corporation, 
but a "small company that published newsletters."  He was not 
the only black person who worked there.  He did not, as claimed, 
have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview 
international businessmen, or write articles.  He mostly just 
copy-edited business items and slipped them into a three-ring 
binder for the company's customers.

Are we supposed to believe that Goderich not only changed 
Obama's birthplace from Hawaii to Kenya, but also transformed 
him from a grunt filling three-ring binders into a "financial 
journalist and editor"?

When this discrepancy surfaced years later, pundits in either 
camp were confused as to why Obama would lie about such 
seemingly irrelevant details.  There are two good, non-exclusive 
possibilities.  For one, the exaggeration enables the reader to 
see Obama as he would like to see himself -- "a spy behind enemy 
lines."  For another, Obama's co-author, Bill Ayers, once again 
took the framework of Obama's life and roughed in the details.

In Fugitive Days, Ayers' 2001 memoir, he uses the phrase "behind 
enemy lines" almost literally to describe his and his comrades' 
quiet infiltration of the opponent's position.  Wife Bernardine 
Dohrn has said the same in public.  When the Weather Underground 
declared its state of war with the United States in May 1970, 
Dohrn warned that people fighting "Amerikan imperialism" all 
over the world "look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic 
position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of 
the empire."

The bottom line is this: Obama has been creating and shifting 
identities his entire adult life.  If the agency brochure was a 
snapshot of the 1991 Obama, Dreams captured him in his 1995 
pose: hip, black, progressive, wounded by racial slights but 
able to overcome them, just the man to lead Chicago into the 
21st century, then the extent of his and Ayers's ambition for 
him.

"I met [Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s[,]"  Bill Ayers would 
tell Salon, likely pushing the actual date back several years.  
"And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically 
ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is 
so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago."

Friend Cassandra Butts traced that ambition back at least to 
Harvard.  "He wanted to be mayor of Chicago and that was all he 
ever talked about as far as holding office," she would tell 
early Obama biographer David Mendell.

No one would have challenged Obama's biography had he not gone 
beyond Chicago, but he did.  And so where he was born matters, 
and whether he even wrote his own biography matters, too.  As 
much as I know about Obama, I don't know pretend to know the 
answer -- at least to the first of those two questions.


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