In the End They Traded Their Tired Wings for the Resignation that Living Brings

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has an interesting column today on Barack Obama. In the column, Cohen notes that the Chicago Tribune's extensive research of the figures and stories detailed in Obama's Dreams from My Father revealed that one of the pivotal moments in the memoir may not have happened in quite the manner that Obama explained.

Specifically, Obama recounts the story of seeing an article in Life magazine during the time that he lived in Indonesia as child which described how a black American had attempted to bleach his skin in order to become "white". Obama describes this event as one of his first encounters with the ugly consequences of racism, but as the Tribune's research revealed, no such story ever existed. When asked about this fact, Obama stated that perhaps the magazine was Ebony, but alas, no such article ever appeared in Ebony either.

Now, I'm not going to call Obama a liar. It would be very interesting to sit down with my friends and family and to ask them about their perspectives regarding certain events from my past that I believe I have a total grasp of. I'm sure that there would be certain instances where my recollection of what took place in a given instance would differ from what my sister or friend would recall, but shouldn't there be a higher standard when you are putting something into print?

It would seem that if you are going to put a story, which is portrayed as incredibly pivotal to Obama's racial awareness, into your first published work, wouldn't you want to determine whether or not that story had any factual inconsistencies? I agree with Cohen's point that sometimes we reach a point where we believe that something is absolutely true or occurred in exactly the way that we believe it occurred, even if that is simply not the truth. Obama may have dealt with that memory so extensively that he believed that it was the gospel truth and did not give the act of placing the story into his memoir a second thought.

If anything, such a story demonstrates that those who choose to run for President in the United States are consenting to a process that will run through their entire life with a fine-toothed comb. Welcome to the vetting process Senator Obama.