Literary agent's bio says Obama was born in Kenya

In all likelihood. ... we have someone who has created different narratives throughout his lifetime to suit whatever his purposes were at that moment.

It sucks now that he's president and he has a spotlight on him all the time, and every so often those reminders of the narrative he painted while chasing past ambitions pop up inconveniently.

I think we all have kind of done it to one degree or another. He's always been really ambitious; he's probably done it to a great degree. The difference is that his ambition carried him to the presidency of the U.S. And that is a huge spotlight to have following you.

 

Not saying it. Because I don't know.

I have no idea for sure if he ever overtly claimed it, if he let others believe something without claiming it, whether he let something like that get mistakenly written without correcting it, or whether things like this are just some kind of inconvenient coincidence. I can only guess.

While I can't say fore sure, though, I don't believe the conflicting info -- some of which goes back to when Obama was in law school, so before he had any reason to think about what would trail him around when he decided to be president -- came out of nowhere.

We have there a relatively unknown Obama, trying to peddle a book called "Journeys in Black and White," in which his "commitment to social and racial issues" would be evident.

What is more likely? That someone wrote that bio of him without ANY input from Obama -- just made up a background about him; decided to place his birth in Kenya without Obama ever having said it or given the impression? Or that Obama might have been complicit -- in either a small way or maybe a very big way -- in creating the narrative he wanted of himself at that time in his life?

He wouldn't be the first person to embellish on a background, and if anything, we have a bunch of instances that we know of with him in which he seems to have done that a lot as he has chased his ambitions.

 

With her total recall from 1991 when she was a "literary agent assistant," it would be interesting to see her explanation in 2012 for who decided to make up that he was born in Kenya in the first place, and why they made that up without knowing it.

Either way, I guess it's swell of her to come clean about her fact checking error 21 years later. I wouldn't imagine she might have a personal agenda in putting the blame squarely on herself.