CHAPTER 4

The Audacity of Myth

Obama sounded “like great fiction”—and that’s what he wrote.

The media’s sneakiest dirty trick in the book is bias by omission, because it is so hard to find, when journalists decide “what the people don’t know won’t hurt them,” or more precisely, “what the people don’t know won’t hurt our candidate.”

Back in 1992, CBS correspondent Betsy Aaron made a blunt statement at a journalists’ conference. “The largest opinion is what we leave out,” she said. “I mean, it sounds simplistic, but I always say worry about what you’re not seeing. What you are seeing, you can really criticize, because you’re smart and have opinions. But if we don’t tell you anything and leave whole areas uncovered, that’s the danger.”¹

In Barack Obama’s case this omission emerged in 2012 over his biographical narrative: his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, which became a huge bestseller as he prepared to run for president and enriched him with an estimated $1.3 million in royalties (not to mention almost $4 million for his campaign book The Audacity of Hope), and that’s just through 2007.²

Reporters loved this book. In an October 23, 2006, cover story in Time magazine, Joe Klein oozed about Obama’s parentage: “He told the story in brilliant, painful detail in his first book, Dreams from My Father, which may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”³

Chris Matthews was even more effusive, to the point of slobbery, on MSNBC, which is to say, typical. The book was “unique because he’s a politician and not since U.S. Grant has a politician written his own book, and that is refreshing.” It was great literature. “It’s almost like Mark Twain. It’s so American, it’s so textured. It’s so, almost sounding like great fiction because it reads like us. It’s picturesque. Is that the right word, ‘picturesque’? I think it’s got that quality.”⁴

Matthews was exactly right. It sounded like great fiction because so much of it was fictionalized. The warning was right there in the preface to his 1995 memoir, where Barack Obama admitted the chapters to come were taking liberties with the truth: “Although much of this book is based on contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me.” Even the people weren’t entirely real: “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.”⁵

Ask a journalist if he supports the notion of a president whose life story is one part mythology, like George Washington and the cherry tree. Some media people have been stunned when they are told of this paragraph, as if they never read this book, or skipped the preface. But that has never nicked the larger legend that’s been created. The nation’s so-called guardians of factual accuracy don’t even expect honesty from Obama on his own life story.

Liberal journalists—especially hacks like Matthews at MSNBC—routinely disparage conservatives for the “birthers” and their conspiracy theories that Obama couldn’t be president because he wasn’t born in the United States. They enjoyed the circus around Donald Trump’s demands for Obama’s birth certificate as proof that conservatives can’t accept a black man as president. When Romney clinched the Republican nomination in late May, NBC’s Matt Lauer wondered on the Today show, “will his ongoing relationship with Donald Trump overshadow his big moment? As Trump plays the birther card once again.”⁶

But the public should see the entire national media as a pack of “mythers”—people who blithely accepted Obama’s concocted life story without challenging the factual reliability of any of it. It should be called Fever Dreams from My Father. Or Day Dreams From My Father. Anything to underscore that this should not be seen as a biography.

Instead, Obama was honored for his narrative-mangling skill. In 2008, New York Times reporter Janny Scott oozed, “Senator Obama understands as well as any politician the power of a well-told story. He has risen in politics less on his track record than on his telling of his life story—a tale he has packaged into two hugely successful books that have helped make him a mega-best-selling, two-time Grammy-winning millionaire front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at age 46.”⁷

Liberals occasionally tried to preserve a fraction of their dignity as journalists with a few uncomfortable facts. But they were quiet about it.

For example, on July 13, 2011, in a story published on page 16, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack explained, “The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book that suggests that President Obama, in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother’s deathbed dispute with her insurance company.”

The headline said the book “challenges” the Obama story, and in the story they used the word “mischaracterized.” It was a whole lot more misleading than that.

That new book was titled A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. The author was Janny Scott, the same Times reporter who was so impressed with Obama’s storytelling in 2008. But she found holes in the narrative. Scott quoted from correspondence from Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy. Her actual health insurer had reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument. The Times noted that although candidate Obama often suggested Dunham “was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition, it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage.”⁸

So he was lying. Indeed, reporters could have held Obama accountable for lying repeatedly on his way to his first presidential victory and beyond, obscenely using his own deceased mother as a prop:

•   He lied to an entire stadium of supporters in his August 28, 2008, convention speech. “As someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer,” he announced, “I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.”

•   The same lie was repeated in the October 7, 2008, presidential debate, carried live from coast to coast by all the networks, like the convention speech. “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in a hospital room, arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a preexisting condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

•   He lied as president in a town-hall-style meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 2009. “I will never forget my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for her treatment.”

Obama also mentioned her in a 2007 campaign TV ad: “In those last painful months, she was more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well. I hear stories like hers every day.”

Kevin Sack of the Times turned to liberal Harvard professor Robert Blendon to pronounce the obvious: if Obama’s phony story line had been discovered during the 2008 campaign, “people would have considered it a significant error.” But it was not an error. It was a bald-faced lie, repeated over and over.

Blendon added: “I just took for granted that it was a pre-existing condition health insurance issue.” So did the entire American news media.

But the suppressing media not only failed to find this deception in 2008. They ignored it when it was exposed in 2011. Network coverage of this new jaw-dropper on ABC, CBS, and NBC? Zero in 2011, and zero in 2012.

This suppression of Janny Scott’s most damaging anecdote was even true for the Times itself. When the paper first ran an excerpt of her book in their Sunday magazine on April 24, 2011, it came with a cover photo of Barack as a preschooler in a pirate costume standing by his mother. The article was a flowery bouquet of prose about “the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elastic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism . . . he had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder.”⁹

This is the same set of newspapers and networks that had devoted multiple heavy-breathing stories to “correcting” noncandidate Sarah Palin’s historical knowledge of Paul Revere or mocking Michele Bachmann for confusing the birthplace of John Wayne. But Obama didn’t stumble, and wasn’t confused. He lied repeatedly about his mother—a shameless, pandering appeal to emotion, using his mother to enact socialized health care, and the media—how can we deny this?—deliberately abetted that dishonesty.

After Obama was safely reelected, David Axelrod insisted that the voters prized Obama’s authenticity and disdained Mitt Romney’s apparent plasticity. “Barack Obama’s very authentic. They knew what drove him. They were comfortable with him.”¹⁰ Authenticity was hardly Obama’s strong suit, but how could voters know otherwise when the national media were censoring news?

Obama’s “Composite” White Women

David Maraniss of The Washington Post was another reporter flying all over the world trying to separate the real Obama from the phony memoir of Dreams—but in the friendliest possible way. Maraniss told Vanity Fair that Obama’s memoir had value despite its pack of lies: “I say that his memoir is a remarkably insightful exploration of his internal struggle, but should not be read as rigorous factual history. It is not, and the president knew that when he wrote it and knows it now.”¹¹

This was a bombshell. Maraniss had spent months exploring Obama’s past and held a prestigious editor’s post at the dominant paper in the nation’s capital, and was overseeing campaign coverage as Obama faced a difficult reelection. But the bombshell never exploded.

In mid-June, his book Barack Obama: The Story came out. On June 5, deep inside the paper, New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani noticed several factual problems with Obama’s memoir. She called the book a “forensic deconstruction” of Obama.¹²

For example, Obama wrote about “a woman in New York that I loved.” But while the physical description of this character closely resembles a white Obama girlfriend named Genevieve Cook, Maraniss wrote Obama “distorted her attitudes and some of their experiences, emphasizing his sense that they came from different worlds.” Maraniss relayed that during an interview at the White House on November 10, 2011, Obama acknowledged his description of his New York girlfriend was actually a “compression” of events “that occurred at separate times with several different girlfriends.”¹³

Obama didn’t just dump his old girlfriends. He then added insult to injury by blurring them into a fictional composite. If a memoir can’t be honest about something as trivial as “ a woman in New York that I loved,” how can it be considered accurate with matters that are profound?

The glossy magazine Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Maraniss but didn’t focus very seriously on the “compression.” They were fascinated by excerpts from Cook’s diary, and letters Obama wrote to another white girlfriend, Alex McNear. On May 2, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer swooned as she quoted Obama’s letters, and pretended it was somehow a “peril” for ABC to discover them and praise them.

“One of the perils of being President: Everything you ever wrote will become public. And today, Barack Obama, age 22—long before he met Michelle—new letters and diary entries revealed in Vanity Fair from a biography out soon,” Sawyer announced.

“He had college girlfriends, two women . . . Genevieve Cook and Alex McNear. And in a love letter to McNear, the President writes adoringly about life in New York. Quote, ‘Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways. Birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks.’ Oh, we were all so romantic when we were young. The book relies on a trove of letters and journal entries that Obama and his friends created during the 1980s.”¹⁴

So much for “peril.” Sawyer and ABC never showed the slightest interest in Obama compressing and mangling his college sweethearts in his book.

There was more distortion. One weekend, Cook and Obama took a bus to her stepfather’s country estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. He described it this way: “The family knew every inch of the land. They knew how the hills had formed, how the glacial drifts had created the lake, the names of the earliest white settlers—their ancestors—and before that, the names of the Indians who’d once hunted the land.” Obama’s point was “I realized that our two worlds were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany,” and “I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”

This Obama passage had one factual error: the estate didn’t belong to Cook’s father, but to her stepfather, Phil Jessup. That can be overlooked as an innocent mistake. Less innocent: Cook complained to Maraniss that the notion that the Jessups had been among the earliest white settlers and that they knew the names of the Indians was a “gross exaggeration.” Cook also felt Obama misled readers in that she felt just as alienated from the place—and the old-money establishment—as Obama claimed he did, and then, “The ironic thing . . . is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have.”¹⁵

Obama also told a story about taking a girlfriend to a “very angry play” by a black playwright and she came out “talking about why black people were angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. And we had a big fight, right in front of the theater.”

Again, Maraniss reported, “None of this happened with Genevieve.” She said they attended the theater just once together, to see the British actress Billie Whitelaw performing from the work of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. The one time they were in the midst of a black audience was a trip to the movies in Brooklyn to see Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. Cook told Maraniss, “I was the only white person in the audience,” and “It was such a wonderful, uplifting, mind-blowing experience.”

There was no fight. There was no crying in the car (neither person had a car). There was no scene where Obama’s girlfriend asked about angry black people.

Maraniss asked Obama about this at the White House. Obama acknowledged the scene did not happen with Cook. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression. I thought that was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions I had in the relationship. And so that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all.”¹⁶

Stop. Rewind. He’s saying “it would be dishonest of me” not to make up a story about a black-white lovers’ quarrel? To Obama, real life was merely raw material for manufacturing the “larger truth” of his mythology. His story was false—period.

In another stunning passage from the same chapter of the Maraniss book, a passage that Vanity Fair did not excerpt—perhaps because it wasn’t about Obama’s love life—Obama describes his brief tenure after graduation from Columbia at a place called Business International, which produced newsletters and updates for corporations seeking to do business abroad. Obama boasted, “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 wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.”

Maraniss found these recollections were “seen as distortions and misrepresentations by many of the people who had worked with him.” They said Obama had no secretary, and his office was the size of a cubicle, barely large enough to fit a desk. The dress code was informal and people in his position rarely wore suits. “He dressed like a college kid,” said his supervisor Lou Celi.

Ralph Diaz, the company’s vice president for publications, thought Obama was embellishing his role for dramatic effect “in a book that reads more like a novel.” He said “Obama worked at a very, very low position there. . . . The part about seeing his reflection in the elevator doors? There were no reflections there. . . . He was not in this high, talking-to-Swiss-bankers kind of role. He was in the back rooms checking things on the phone.”

Another colleague characterized it with equal distaste: “He retells the story as the temptation of Christ . . . the young idealistic would-be community organizer who gets a nice suit and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”¹⁷

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Maraniss admitted that he bent his usual rules to make his interview with the president more advantageous. What’s the harm in a little collusion?

“I did something I rarely do: I gave him a copy of the introduction to the book so he would understand its parameters. I also gave him the table of contents, knowing that some of the chapter titles, such as ‘Genevieve and the Veil,’ would mean something to him but not to his staff. The interview was scheduled for 45 minutes. It went on for more than an hour and a half. He answered all of my questions, sometimes took issue with my interpretations, but was fairly forthright.”¹⁸

Here’s how he was forthright. When Maraniss was interviewed on NBC’s Today on June 18, 2012, substitute host David Gregory noted, “You point out inconsistencies. You talk with greater depth and detail about his pot smoking as a young person. You unearth letters from former, you know, loves. Genevieve Cook. How did he react to all of that?”

Maraniss: “Well, he’s a writer himself. When I first interviewed him, he said, ‘David, your introduction’—[which] I let him read—‘is interesting, but you called my book fiction.’ And I said, ‘No, Mr. President, I complimented it. I called it literature.’ There’s a big difference between memoir and biography. And it wasn’t that I was trying to fact-check everything that he wrote in his biography, but I just wanted to get the story right. So, he didn’t—he didn’t really fight with me about it. But it was an interesting conversation.”

In the book’s introduction, after he praised Dreams as “unusually insightful,” Maraniss wrote that “it is important to say it falls into the realm of literature, and not of history and autobiography, and should not be read as a rigorously factual account.”¹⁹

Gregory asked, “Was he forthcoming about these additional details?” Maraniss understood Gregory’s roundabout inquiry and said Obama didn’t put up a fight to the charge he’d mangled his own life story:

“In most cases he said, you’re probably right. You know, a lot of the mythology of the family was passed along to him that he didn’t check. Like, that his step-grandfather in Indonesia he thought died fighting the Dutch in the anti-colonial war. In fact, the man died of a heart attack falling off an ottoman changing the drapes in his living room. You know, that sort of story is something that the president did not check. And when I told him the reality of so many of those things he said, you’re probably right.”²⁰

These “journalists” were tying themselves into pretzels to avoid calling this a fabrication.

Maraniss faced a tension between his self-perceived role as a historian versus his role as a journalist. The historian wanted to present with some objectivity and detachment a reliable record for the ages. The journalist living in the present was much more circumspect about his findings.

The Punahou Hoops Scoop

Here’s the most remarkable discovery of media omissions on Obama’s behalf: The Washington Post, the journalistic home base of Maraniss, never touched on the memoir lies. All these passages on Obama’s self-made mythology were never republished in the newspaper.

The Post ran massive exposés trying to ruin first Rick Perry, then Mitt Romney, but published nothing about Obama’s blatant myth-making. Instead, on June 5, the Post published a rave review of the Maraniss tome on the front page of the Style section, headlined “A masterful portrait of a guarded politician.”

Shamelessly, Post reviewer author T. J. Stiles oozed, “Every biographer knows how difficult it is to render an actual human being with the depth of a fictional character. . . . A character should be capable of surprises without seeming inauthentic or arbitrary.”²¹ But Stiles never mentioned Maraniss exposing Obama’s fictionalizations. He even wrote Maraniss “makes the fringe skepticism of Obama’s birthplace seem even more ridiculous, if possible,” but utterly ignored how the Post editor found Obama lied about his mother’s almost-immediate departure for the homeland after his birth.

What did Maraniss think of this whitewash? Maraniss didn’t mind. He linked to the rave review on Twitter, with the words: “TJ Stiles says ‘no review can convey this book’s breadth and depth,’ but his review of Obama: The Story not 2 shabby.”²² Not shabby? Stiles had ignored the most damaging part of the book’s depth.

After running very large investigative pieces on the front page trashing Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, Maraniss and the Post provided the perfect contrast of anti-Republican bile with pro-Obama goo. The only Maraniss book excerpt appearing in the newspaper was placed at the top of the Sunday sports section on June 11. The 5,500-word excerpt carried the headline “President Obama’s Love for Basketball Can be Traced Back to His High School Team.” The story took up two whole pages inside the sports section.²³

The Post apparently found nothing about Obama’s life more illuminating or substantive for readers than repeating that Obama loved basketball—about which Maraniss had also written syrupy passages in 2008. As always with Maraniss, it was all about lovingly toying with Obama’s racial identities:

“To say that President Obama loves basketball understates the role of the sport in his life,” the excerpt began. “He has been devoted to the game for 40 years now, ever since the father he did not know and never saw again gave him his first ball during a brief Christmastime visit. Basketball is central to his self identity. It is global yet American-born, much like him. It is where he found a place of comfort, a family, a mode of expression, a connection from his past to his future. With foundation roots in the Kansas of his white forebears, basketball was also the city game, helping him find his way toward blackness, his introduction to an African American culture that was distant to him when he was young, yet his by birthright.”

All this because Obama likes basketball.

Strangely, the excerpt wrapped up with Maraniss laboring to suggest Obama’s use of marijuana in high school was very typical for the Disco Era. “If there is a representative teenager’s life, Barry Obama lived a version of it in Hawaii in the late 1970s. Several things stood out—he went to a prestigious school, he lived with his grandparents, his father was gone, his mother was infrequently present, he was a hapa black in a place where most people were a lighter shade of brown—and those traits helped shape his particular character, but they did not make his life odd or mysterious. He smoked pot with his Choom Gang and goofed around outside the classroom, where he came across as smart and mature if not notably studious, but the central activity of his high school life was basketball.”

The “choom” in “Choom Gang” was a verb meaning to smoke pot. Maraniss found Obama was an enthusiastic pot smoker, but it was mentioned in passing in the Post. This paragraph was lifted out of a chapter that began with Maraniss reporting the future president and his friends believed in “TA,” or “total absorption,” as in “[w]asting good bud smoke was not tolerated.” Barry championed “roof hits,” that when they were pot-smoking in the car, all the windows had to be rolled up, and when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads upward to suck in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling. Barry was also known for “intercepting” the rotating joint.²⁴

Try not to be shocked. Those evocative details were left out of the 5,500-word basketball excerpt.

Maraniss and the Post also milked the hoops angle to sell Obama in 2008. As might be expected, a Nexis search of the words “Obama” and “Punahou” brings out mostly laudatory references to his high school basketball career. The seven stories in the sample offered zero criticisms of young Obama, but plenty of oozing sympathy for his fatherless plight. Here are the headlines, to give you a flavor:

1.  “A Rusty Toyota, a Mean Jump Shot, Good Ears” (Outlook section collection of positive quotes from friends and classmates, February 11, 2007)

2.  “The Ghost of a Father” (December 14, 2007)

3.  “BARACK OBAMA WAS DRAWN TO BASKETBALL AS A KID, AND HE HAS NEVER LET IT GO” (same day, December 14, 2007)

4.  “For Obama, the Sport Is Much More than a Game” (Sports, April 16, 2008)

5.  “Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible,” by David Maraniss (August 24, 2008)

6.  “Obama Visits Grandma Who Was His ‘Rock’; Candidate Hopes She Will See Election Day” (October 25, 2008)

7.  “What School Sports Taught These Political Contenders” (Sports, October 30, 2008)

That last story before the election, by Preston Williams, made sure to throw in some negativity toward opponent John McCain: “Obama was sometimes called ‘Barry Obomber,’ even though the left-handed small forward was known more for his long arms and quick first step on slashes to the basket than for his shooting touch. He favored a street-ball style; Coach Chris McLachlin preached fundamentals.”²⁵

But for the Republican, “McCain, a self-described rabble-rouser at Episcopal, at the time an all-male boarding school, was one of the smaller boys on campus—he wrestled in the 127-pound class as a senior. But he was also one of the feistiest, earning such nicknames as ‘McNasty’ and ‘The Punk.’ ”

In 2008 as in 2012, the Post would strongly suggest the Republican challenger was a teenaged bully.

Slouching Toward Selma

There’s another example that demonstrated that the major media never cared about Obama’s reckless disregard for the truth, especially when he was pandering to black voters. Maraniss reported that Obama’s account of being separated from his father when he was two was “received myth, not the truth.” Maraniss explained Obama’s father was “married in name only. Within a month of the day Barry came home from the hospital, he and his mother were long gone from Honolulu,” as Ann Dunham returned to the mainland to attend the University of Washington.

In Obama’s mythical version, “the family breach did not occur until 1963, when his father left the island. That version of events is inaccurate in two ways. The date: his father had gone from Hawaii in June 1962, less than a year after Barry was born, not 1963. And the order: it was his mother who left Hawaii first.”²⁶

No one reported on this, or questioned Maraniss about it, never mind questioning Obama himself. Five years before, on March 4, 2007, Obama made a speech saluting the 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, and claimed his parents were inspired by Selma before he was born. “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama.”²⁷

This is a pretty bizarre claim for a man who was born in Hawaii and whose parents never had a real marriage, and were literally on different continents by the time of the Selma march of 1965. Selma didn’t bring his parents together; they were officially divorced in 1964, and Obama’s father left Harvard in 1964 and returned to Kenya with another white American woman, named Ruth Baker, and they married there in 1964. His mother married Lolo Soetoro in 1965. The real story in no way resembled Obama’s mythical narrative that Selma inspired two people to fall in love and conceive a future president.

Obama had no claim on Selma, Alabama.

Obama was never mocked for his shameless attempts at burnishing his legend. NBC anchor Brian Williams could devote attention on three straight nights in June 2011 to how noncandidate Sarah Palin’s account of Paul Revere’s ride allegedly “differs with history,”²⁸ but with candidate Obama in Selma, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell used this uncorrected clip: “Don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama.”

On ABC, John Cochran said Obama “seemed to address accusations that he is not black enough because of his mixed ancestry,” and used the same clip. ABC’s Jake Tapper repeated the tactic in the morning, adding some gush: “Obama’s eloquent piety is seldom received better than in a church full of Democrats, especially black ones.”

On CBS, correspondent Gloria Borger at least made a small nod to reality, without correcting Obama. “In March of 1965, Barack Obama was just three years old. Even so, he says, he’s still the product of Selma.”²⁹ Then came a clip of Obama: “This is the site of my conception. I am the fruits of your labor. I am the offspring of the movement.”

CBS This Morning offered a warm anniversary story from Selma on March 4, 2012, but no one explored Obama’s absurd claims of 2007. On the day of Obama’s second inauguration, the Post published a special inaugural section, where Post reporter Wil Haygood highlighted quotes from Obama’s Selma speech again—including “My very existence might not have been possible had it not been for some of the folks here today”— a claim now clearly debunked. It was only one of several “cultural touchstones related to African-American history” greeting Obama’s second term, like the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the new movie on Lincoln.³⁰

Daily Fake Campaign Anecdotes

Obama has never stopped using poetic license when telling his life story. So where are the reporters to point out where he doesn’t tell the truth? Let’s take just one typical Obama stump speech, on July 5, 2012, in Sandusky, Ohio, and identify the fibs and stretches. They’re not hard to find.

There are tall tales about his ancestors. He claimed, as he has many times, “My grandfather fought in Patton’s army.” In 2009, AP’s Nancy Benac noted that the president’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was in a supply and maintenance company, not in combat. That’s noble work, but “fought in Patton’s army” implies something else. Moreover, Benac reported Dunham’s company was assigned to Patton’s army for two months in 1945, and then quoted Obama’s own self-boosting memoir: “Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat.” Why was Benac alone in exploring this blatant exaggeration?

There were also myths about Obama’s campaigns. Obama bizarrely told the crowd in Sandusky that “back in 2008, everybody said we couldn’t do it because we were outspent, we weren’t favored.” Did Obama mean in the primary race? By a slim margin, he outraised Hillary Clinton, who was the early favorite. But this spin is comical if it refers to the general election, where Obama outraised McCain $779 million to $347 million.

Then Obama added: “That first race that I ran as a state senator, Michelle and I, we were going around knocking on doors, passing out leaflets. Nobody gave us a shot. Everybody said, ‘Nobody can pronounce your name, how are you going to win?’ ” But Obama ran unopposed in 1996 in both the primary and the general election.³¹

At first, state senator Alice Palmer urged Obama to replace her since she was going to run for Congress. But she lost that race to Jesse Jackson Jr. and then turned around to seek reelection. In a burst of Chicago-style politics, Obama removed three primary opponents (including Palmer) from the ballot by challenging their signatures. A bitter Palmer refused to endorse Obama in the primary or the fall election. To the gut-punchers in Chicago, it meant Obama had arrived. But none of the networks have ever breathed Palmer’s name.

Obama’s years in the Illinois Senate, from 1997 through 2004, were a part of his life story the national media never found interesting. It was a bit shocking that CBS reporter Steve Kroft would pile up five friendly interviews with Obama on 60 Minutes before the 2008 election, and two more right after the victory, and yet completely, shamelessly avoid Obama’s record in Illinois. It might seem less surprising that his Chicago past didn’t come up in the seven interviews Obama gave to Kroft since becoming president. Kroft has never asked about his radical Chicago friends like the Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers and his anti-American minister Jeremiah Wright.³²

It’s not really unusual for CBS to catch up on ancient controversies in a presidential reelection campaign . . . or at least it wasn’t when the president was George W. Bush. In 2004, CBS spent untold hours, days, weeks, months, chasing a story about George Bush and the Alabama Air National Guard in 1973 because that was important. But Obama palling around with terrorists, associating with hate-mongers? No one at 60 Minutes cared what Obama did when he was in his mid-twenties. He was “finding himself.”

The liberal assumption was that everything on George W. Bush’s résumé was handed to this lightweight by Daddy. This is never a problem when your last name is Kennedy, only if you’re an Old Money Republican. Obama, on their other hand, was their poster child, their heavyweight champion—sympathetic, cosmopolitan, progressive, racially mixed, and eternally conflicted about it. Every prize and privilege handed to Obama—including a contract to write a semifictional memoir fresh out of Harvard Law School—was somehow owed to him, a small fraction of America’s racial sins being cleansed.

Steve Kroft did find one Obama scandal figure back on April 23, 2008—Tony Rezko, a Syrian-born housing developer, when he was on trial for corruption in Chicago. But CBS never mentioned Obama in the piece. Instead, Kroft was doing a story on how the Bush administration was implicitly allowing corruption in Iraq, and how the former Iraqi electricity commissioner’s name came up in Rezko’s corruption trial.³³

Kroft mustered no mention of Rezko’s contributing and bundling hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign financing for Obama, or his scandalous help in helping the Obamas as they bought a fancy six-thousand-square foot Georgian Revival house with seven bathrooms for $1.65 million in June 2005. (Rezko’s wife, Rita, bought an adjoining parcel to the Obamas for $625,000, and both sales closed on the same day.) At the time, Rezko was already being investigated for bribery and fraud. Obama later told the Chicago Tribune the deal was “boneheaded,” but the national media weren’t repeating that.

The Rezko scandal even emerged again during the Republican primary season. On November 22, 2011, as the networks were pounding away on Herman Cain’s treatment of women, Rezko was sentenced to ten and a half years of prison time for corruption and extortion. ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS said absolutely nothing. CNN offered one sentence to Rezko on this day, as John King ironically announced the “news you need to know.”

USA Today and The Washington Post both reported the news briefly inside their papers, listing Rezko in their headlines as an ally of corrupt governor Rod Blagojevich—not Obama. The Associated Press headline also touted “Blago ally Rezko.” Obama’s name came up just once, in paragraph 21.³⁴

This was merely the latest proof that even on the most personal matters, Barack Obama could count on the media to act like another set of corrupt business partners. Team Obama could make fun of John McCain’s seven homes or Mitt Romney’s car elevator and chuckle in the knowledge that Obama’s “news” buddies would never mention his Rezko-assisted home purchase. After all, he was perfect.