“My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya,” Illinois State Senator Barack Obama said in his July 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. “He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.”
As Michael Corleone would say, it was the kind of story people might like. Its sole source was the speaker’s own autobiography, Dreams From My Father, published in 1995 and billed as “a story of race and inheritance.” The cover bore the senator’s photo, between pictures of a black woman and child on the left and a white soldier and small girl on the right.
“We have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union—a black man and white woman, and African and an American, at face value,” Obama explained. “As a result, people have a hard time taking me at face value.”
Obama normally goes by Barry and was in fact Barry Soetoro, stepson of the Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, whom his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Barry speaks of “a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny.” Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from writing a widely publicized book about his life.
MORE:
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/barack-obamas-fake-life-story-20-years-later/
