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The white girlfriends Obama erased from his past:
How the President airbrushed his romantic history to burnish his credentials as a black leader
Daily Mail, Online
Tom Leonard
6/22/2012
Excerpt:
When Genevieve Cook first met Barack Obama in the kitchen of a mutual friend’s New York flat, he was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a dark leather jacket.
It was 1983, and she was impressed when this cool, self-assured young man could tell immediately she was Australian.
In those days most Americans, even supposedly cosmopolitan New Yorkers, couldn’t tell a Cockney from a Kiwi.
But Obama had met many Aussies while living in Indonesia as a young boy with his mother and stepfather, and it turned out he and Cook — the daughter of a prominent diplomat — had lived in the country at the same time.
As the night wore on, they sat close together on an orange beanbag in the hall while Cook swigged Baileys Irish Cream straight from the bottle.
They were amazed at how much they had in common: both were children of divorced parents, both had lived all over the world and had never felt truly at home anywhere.
They exchanged phone numbers and the self-assured Obama didn’t waste time. Within days, he was cooking her dinner at his apartment.
‘Then we went and talked in his bedroom,’ Cook recalled. ‘And then I spent the night with him.
‘It all felt very inevitable.’
The U.S. president and his First Lady sometimes seem so well-suited to each other that it’s hard to imagine there ever having been any woman in his life other than the formidable Michelle, whom he met while working for a Chicago law firm in 1989.
Obama has reinforced this notion by making only fleeting mention of ex-girlfriends in his carefully calibrated memoirs, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
He gives the impression of a man in such a hurry to save the world that he had no time for such distractions as romance.
But now, in a blistering new biography, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has pulled his exes out of the shadows.
In so doing, he has revealed an unflattering picture of a president so desperate to sell an image of himself as a pioneering race warrior that he has air-brushed many of the ‘white’ elements from his life — including that string of well-heeled, well-educated white girlfriends.
Obama’s version of events, in his autobiography, is a moving story of a mixed-race child struggling to find his black identity after being deserted as a young child by his Kenyan father.
It tells how his grandfather was imprisoned by the British for helping the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya — an assertion that Obama’s step-grandmother later embellished with claims he was also tortured — for which Maraniss found no evidence.
Delighted Republican opponents are picking over the inconsistencies (38 at the last count) between Obama’s own memoirs — published in 1995 as he prepared to launch his political career — and the facts uncovered by Maraniss.
Time and again, Obama, who has had to fight hard to convince other African Americans of his ‘black credibility’, appears to have burnished his radical credentials, not least by playing up the roles of black people in his life and playing down the roles of the white.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in his romantic life.
For Genevieve Cook — to whom admittedly the President alludes in his memoirs — wasn’t the first white girlfriend in his life, nor the last."
.................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ased-past.html
How the President airbrushed his romantic history to burnish his credentials as a black leader
Daily Mail, Online
Tom Leonard
6/22/2012
Excerpt:
- Blistering new biography studies Barack Obama's relationships with well-educated ex-girlfriends including Genevieve Cook and Alexandra McNear
- President makes only fleeting references to former partners in his memoirs
- Book by Pulitzer-winning journalist David Marannis paints unflattering picture of Obama's drive to be seen as a pioneering race warrior
- Republican opponents are picking over inconsistencies between the Marannis book and Obama's own memoirs
When Genevieve Cook first met Barack Obama in the kitchen of a mutual friend’s New York flat, he was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a dark leather jacket.
It was 1983, and she was impressed when this cool, self-assured young man could tell immediately she was Australian.
In those days most Americans, even supposedly cosmopolitan New Yorkers, couldn’t tell a Cockney from a Kiwi.
But Obama had met many Aussies while living in Indonesia as a young boy with his mother and stepfather, and it turned out he and Cook — the daughter of a prominent diplomat — had lived in the country at the same time.
As the night wore on, they sat close together on an orange beanbag in the hall while Cook swigged Baileys Irish Cream straight from the bottle.
They were amazed at how much they had in common: both were children of divorced parents, both had lived all over the world and had never felt truly at home anywhere.
They exchanged phone numbers and the self-assured Obama didn’t waste time. Within days, he was cooking her dinner at his apartment.
‘Then we went and talked in his bedroom,’ Cook recalled. ‘And then I spent the night with him.
‘It all felt very inevitable.’
The U.S. president and his First Lady sometimes seem so well-suited to each other that it’s hard to imagine there ever having been any woman in his life other than the formidable Michelle, whom he met while working for a Chicago law firm in 1989.
Obama has reinforced this notion by making only fleeting mention of ex-girlfriends in his carefully calibrated memoirs, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
He gives the impression of a man in such a hurry to save the world that he had no time for such distractions as romance.
But now, in a blistering new biography, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has pulled his exes out of the shadows.
In so doing, he has revealed an unflattering picture of a president so desperate to sell an image of himself as a pioneering race warrior that he has air-brushed many of the ‘white’ elements from his life — including that string of well-heeled, well-educated white girlfriends.
Obama’s version of events, in his autobiography, is a moving story of a mixed-race child struggling to find his black identity after being deserted as a young child by his Kenyan father.
It tells how his grandfather was imprisoned by the British for helping the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya — an assertion that Obama’s step-grandmother later embellished with claims he was also tortured — for which Maraniss found no evidence.
Delighted Republican opponents are picking over the inconsistencies (38 at the last count) between Obama’s own memoirs — published in 1995 as he prepared to launch his political career — and the facts uncovered by Maraniss.
Time and again, Obama, who has had to fight hard to convince other African Americans of his ‘black credibility’, appears to have burnished his radical credentials, not least by playing up the roles of black people in his life and playing down the roles of the white.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in his romantic life.
For Genevieve Cook — to whom admittedly the President alludes in his memoirs — wasn’t the first white girlfriend in his life, nor the last."
.................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ased-past.html