February 2007

I missed this story when it was published in January. Unlike the romanticized picture Barack Obama has drawn of his Kenyan father, the elder Obama was a drunk and a bigamist. Interesting.

(As a former drunk myself, I’m well aware that any book or investigative article written about me will include that sorry chapter of my life.)

You know, I never thought much of Obama’s father in the first place because he abandoned Barack and his mother. I had no idea he’d abandoned his first wife and children, too. I haven’t read Obama’s book about his father, Dreams From My Father, but I suspected it probably didn’t contain the whole truth about the kind of man he was. For instance, Obama says “racism” tore apart his white mother and black father, but in reality, his mother divorced his father after she found out he was still married to someone else, whom he’d abandoned back in Kenya. (Daily Mail) His first wife was pregnant with their second child when he left.

According to the Daily Mail, Obama’s father married a third time to a woman he’d met while married to Obama’s mother. A nephew told the paper that polygamy is part of African culture, implying that there’s nothing unusual about an African having multiple wives. I’m no expert on African culture, but I believe would-be wives in polygamous cultures know about previous wives, and Obama Sr. hadn’t told his second wife about his first wife. Deception and bigamy.

Well, when you’re running for office, your life and the lives of people you know are scrutinized. Since Barack “He speaks so well!” Obama is positioning himself as someone overcoming racial obstacles and claiming that his parent’s divorce and his father’s “issues” were caused by racism, his story is ripe for nitpicking.

Addendum: Believe me, I have plenty of “issues” in my family as well (understatement alert), and I’d hate for my loved ones’ lives to be on display. But if I wrote a book about one of them without telling the whole story (and blamed their bad behavior on white or black racism, which I’d never do, even to sell a book), I’d expect detractors and people with grudges to pick the book apart. You can’t have it both ways. Ideally, Obama’s father’s life would be irrelevant, but one’s family is relevant if you’re running for public office. That doesn’t mean the person running for office is held accountable for what someone else did, but he/she should expect scrutiny.