We DO know Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Right now pundits are all atwitter about Mike Huckabee's unconscionable behavior on Monday when he falsely asserted on WOR's Steve Malzberg Show that President Barack Obama grew up in Kenya with his Kenyan father and Kenyan grandfather. The two men spoke as though Obama's life were a great and deep mystery. But it is not. And they know better. Obama has written two memoirs and numerous biographies have been written about him.

When I hear the host interviewing Huckabee express a desire to know more about Obama, I want to scream: "READ!" Huckabee didn't say that; he, too, claimed to feel the mystery.  He said, "I would love to know more. What I do know is troubling enough." Then Huckabee said that the president's growing up in Kenya would have given him a perspective on the British colonials that is very different from the average American's view. Huckabee mused that Obama probably "grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather" by learning of the Mau Mau Revolution from his father and grandfather and other Kenyans in his childhood environment.

How can so little be known about a man about whom so much has been written and said? Willful ignorance. It allows the right fringe, which is now almost the entire right, to make Obama "The Other." He's not like "us." He's alien, foreign, exotic, dangerous. He's Muslim. He's Kenyan. He's not one of us. He wasn't born here. He's Black. And he has no right to sit in the Oval Office. This is the motive to stay ignorant. Or play ignorant.

Let's look at a brief sketch of a normal American man.

Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, to an eighteen-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. His parents had met in a  Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1960 and married February 2, 1961, when his mother was three months pregnant. His father was a foreign student from Kenya on scholarship. The small family continued to live in Hawaii until Obama's father went for graduate study at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and left his wife and child behind. Obama was two. Obama's parents divorced in 1964, when he was three years old. When Barack was ten, in 1971, his father visited him in Hawaii for the only time. By then Obama, Sr., had remarried and had returned to live in Kenya. But the son would not see Kenya for many years to come, and by then the father would be dead.

After the divorce, Obama's mother married Lolo Soetoro, who was from Indonesia and was studying at the University of Hawaii. In 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were called to return to Indonesia when Suharto came to power. Lolo took his family, including his 6-year-old stepson back to Indonesia with him. There the young boy attended an Indonesian public school and the St. Francis of Assisi School, a Catholic, not Muslim, school. The Indonesian school was Muslim only in the sense that most of the students were Muslim, which is to be expected in Indonesia. The school was not an indoctrination program. It was not a madrassa. Obama NEVER attended a madrassa. Four years later, Barack returned to Hawaii without his mother. He went to live with her parents, his grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He attended Punahou School, a top private school from grades five through twelve, graduating in 1979. An American college prep school in the United States from grade 5 through grade 12.

In the fall of 1979, Barack Obama left Honolulu, Hawaii, for Los Angeles, California, to attend Occidental College. 1981 was a big year for Obama. He traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and half-sister, making stops in India and Pakistan. Upon returning home, he transferred from Occidental to Columbia University in New York City, graduating with a B.A. in political science with an emphasis on international relations in 1983.

From 1983 to 1988, Obama worked, spending two years at Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group. In 1985 he became Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago, the beginning of his career as a community organizer. In 1988 he took a trip to Europe and Africa, including Kenya, for the first time. Also in 1988, Obama was baptized at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

In the fall of 1988, Barack Obama entered the School of Law at Harvard University, and he was named editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, the first black to earn that honor. He spent his summers in Chicago. He worked as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. There he met Michelle Robinson.  In 1991, he had begun teaching at the law school at the University of Chicago and was working on his first book.  Barack and Michelle married on October 3, 1992. He joined the law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland in 1993. The couple had two daughters, and Obama served on many boards in the Chicago area.

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, where he served until he was elected to represent Illinois in the United States Senate in 2004. That summer, before the election, he was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Barack Obama served in the U.S. Senate until he was sworn in as President on January 20, 2009. On October 9 of that year, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. His primary place or worship is now the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David.

Huckabee compounded his original sin by lying again yesterday and again today, saying that Obama didn't have a normal American childhood with Boy Scouts and Rotary Clubs and ball teams. WRONG. Obama was a member of the a Boy Scout troop in Indonesia. There have been Rotary Clubs in Hawaii for a hundred years, and Obama played on his high school championship basketball team. Most of us didn't go to madrassas, said Huckabee. Neither did Obama, Mike. It's dishonest to imply that he did.

There are no gaps in Barack Obama's biography. There's nothing sinister here.

Where is the mystery?

What is the mystery?

The mystery is a made-up weapon used by the right fringe to bludgeon our president, but it won't work. It's made up. He's as American as you or I.