Hearing Obama speak today about Nelson Mandela, I was wondering what Obama’s legacy would be.
I am not convinced that the US requirement that only those born in the US can become President makes any sense in today’s world. It may have had a purpose once upon a time but it seems to me to be particularly inappropriate to “The American Dream”.
In any event the requirement is on the books and if it could have been shown that Barack Obama had not been born in the US before he was elected President, he could have been ineligible and his candidature would have ended. The convolutions of the “birthers“ who have tried to make their case with strange and exotic conspiracy stories about his birth in Kenya or of not having been born in Hawaii or of being an Indonesian citizen or of being a dual citizen, have been very entertaining but have not developed much traction. Their strident and often racist tone has not helped them much.
In two years Barack Obama will complete his two terms and go down in the record as the 44th President of the US. Probably he will be remembered most for having promised much but for not having been able to deliver. He will be remembered more for his risk aversion and not so much for Osama Bin Laden having been killed on his watch. I have a feeling that he may not wish to be remembered for how Obamacare finally turns out. He will not be remembered as we remember Nelson Mandela today.
Where he was actually born – one would think – is a little irrelevant now.
But a little story in the Washington Post makes me think that he has not been completely transparent about his early life.
After denial, White House now says Obama lived with uncle
The White House acknowledged Thursday that President Obama lived with his uncle for a brief period in the 1980s while he was a student at Harvard Law School — despite previously saying there was no record of the two having met.
“The president did stay with him for a brief period of time until his apartment was ready,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement. “After that, they saw each other once every few months, but after law school they fell out of touch. The president has not seen him in 20 years, has not spoken with him in 10. “
Onyango “Omar” Obama faced a deportation hearing earlier this week following a drunk-driving arrest. During the hearing, he said that the president had lived with him while he was a student at Harvard.
The Boston Globe reported in 2012, after Omar Obama’s arrest, that the White House said he had “never met his famous nephew.” The White House now says it only told the Globe that there was no record of the two having met — not definitively that they hadn’t met.
In its report Thursday, the Globe confirmed that the White House initially said that there was no record that they had met. It said the White House never asked for a correction. ….
Omar Obama comes from his father’s side of the family and is a Kenyan national. Obama was not close to his father, who left the family when the president was very young.
Obama’s relationship with his uncle is also news to scholars of the president, who also found no evidence that the two had met, according to a 2011 Washington Post report.
Omar Obama, 69, was allowed to stay in the United States following his hearing. The White House emphasized that it did nothing to assist him in his deportation case. He had said following his arrest that the president would help him out.
It all strikes me as a little odd. Why would Obama/the White House deny knowing or meeting his uncle? Was he so scared of being accused of interfering in his Uncle’s case that he was prepared to lie? Or was he/is he afraid that the Omar connection could lead elsewhere? And the current explanation that nobody had asked Barack Obama before making the previous denial does not seem very credible. If that denial, about such a personal event, had been issued without Obama’s knowledge, then somebody at the White House was pretty incompetent.
But it makes me wonder as to what would happen if, after Obama has completed his two terms, it comes to light that he was – in fact – ineligible to have been elected President under Article Two of the U.S. Constitution? After all Pope Joan is now legend!
Would the record of his Presidency be expunged? Would all legislation signed by him fall? Would the next President then become the 44th President? Would he lose his pension? Could he be prosecuted? for what?