Is Obama's selective memory a positive qualification for President

(Barry Obama with Grandma & Grandpa)
By JANNY SCOTT
Published: October 30, 2007
Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.”

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”

Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.

“He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”

Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with ashtrays.”

Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report.

“It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,” said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination. I remember the first time I interviewed someone from Morgan Stanley and I got cheese on my tie because I thought my tie was a napkin.”

Mr. Obama arrived in New York in August 1981, at age 20, from Occidental College in Los Angeles. According to his memoir, he passed his first night in an alley near 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, unable to get into his apartment. The next morning, he bathed at a hydrant alongside a homeless man. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/politics/30obama.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

 

What selective memory are we talking about?
(I can hardly wait for this one.)

 

Read the article for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

 

He's not muslim. But his name sounds muslim-ish. So, heyabbot is suspicious.

 

He's not all the way __________ [/Sheffield]

 

Strange that you would change the cutline for that photo -- and cut-and-paste it in -- being the race-neutral person that you are.

"Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. "

(Mushy writing at best. Say what you mean.)

"He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”
(A "training ground for the elite"? Someone's got Ivy envy, and he was there for two years.)

"Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now."

("Suggests"? Again, say what you mean.)

 

No one knew him as Barack in those days. According to other reports he went by Barry until he ran for office.

 

who cares?

 

Another hatchet job by the Ultra-Conservative Mainstream Media!

 

"According to other reports..."
I am convinced.
What's your point, 'yab? That he's exaggerating his blackness for political advantage?
Yeah, that'll fly.

 

Seriously, can anyone tell me what this is about?

 

"Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now."