Is President Obama preparing to change his birth narrative?

 

The official Barack Hussein Obama II narrative, as told in "Dreams From My Father", leaves the reader believing Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham Obama lived together for two years in Hawaii as a family unit.

At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told. They all had their favorites, each one seamless, burnished smooth from repeated use. I can still picture Gramps leaning back in his old stuffed chair after dinner, sipping whiskey and cleaning his teeth with the cellophane from his cigarette pack, recounting the time that my father almost threw a man off the Pali Lookout because of a pipe….

The newspaper birth address often cited as proof Barack Obama was born in Hawaii actually appears to have been Ann's parents address. Ann Dunham Obama left Hawaii a month after the birth for school in Seattle. She remained there for almost a year. Barack Obama Sr. stayed behind.Their is no evidence Ann and Barack Sr. ever lived together as a family unit.

She took classes at the University of Washington from September 1961 to June 1962, and lived as a single mother in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle with her son while her husband continued his studies in Hawaii.

President Obama seems to have changed his birth narrative in remarks made at the National Prayer breakfast on February 3rd..

The president and his writers choose their words carefully for an occasion as public as the Prayer Breakfast. Obama could have safely left the relationship at "barely knew," and no one would have taken notice. Instead, he said he "met" his father, and then only once -- a locution that makes no sense for a boy who had allegedly lived more than two years with the man.

What Boyles believes -- and I think he's right -- is that Team Obama is preparing the media for a shift in the official Obama saga. To this point, the core of the Obama origins story has been that he and parents lived together as a family in Hawaii until Obama was two.

The marriage "might have worked out," Obama's mother tells her son as reported in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. When, however, Harvard offered Obama Sr. a fellowship to finish his Ph.D., he anguished his way to acceptance. "How can I refuse the best education?" he lamented. "It wasn't your father's fault that he left, you know," Ann tells Obama. "I divorced him."

Obama repeated this fiction as recently as September 2009, when he addressed the nation's schoolchildren. "I get it," he told the kids about childhood struggles. "I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother."

The purpose behind this birth narrative change is anyone's guess, but isn't likely to be an accidental slip of the tongue.