The Washington Post, 2008: Obama Raised in “Kansas Heartland”

HOW ARE INCONSISTENCIES IN OBAMA’S BACKGROUND EXPLAINED?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Dec. 27, 2014) — In clicking through links found in two Wikipedia articles on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and alleged “citizenship conspiracy theories,” The Post & Email discovered a link leading to an article dated June 30, 2008 in The Washington Post by columnist Eli Saslow claiming that Obama was raised in the “Kansas heartland.”

The article was originally published on the front page of The Washington Post and described the town of Findlay, OH, where doubts about Obama’s background, professed Christianity and preparedness for the presidency reportedly abounded in 2008.

Saslow received the George Polk Award for National Reporting and the American Society of News Editors’ award for non-deadline writing.  He also reportedly earned a Pulitzer Prize in the area of “Explanatory Reporting.”

Saslow recently reported on Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s plans to file a lawsuit over Obama’s memoranda instructing DHS to defer deportation for potentially millions of illegal aliens meeting certain criteria.

On December 20, Saslow wrote about a Guatemalan family allegedly divided by the timing of Obama’s November 20 announcement changing immigration policy.  Both parents are illegal aliens who “wrote to” one another in frequent exchanges after the husband, Javier, was deported, implying that they have computer or I-Phone communication ability.  The mother, Marilu, does not speak English and reportedly drives her children to school without a license on an irregular schedule. One of the children reportedly “kicked her foot right through” their apartment wall, creating a hole, in frustration after being disruptive at the private Catholic school she attends on scholarship and threatened with suspension.

Javier calls his wife “three times a day,” and the children have Nintendo games to amuse themselves, a luxury many struggling U.S. citizen families cannot afford.

Obama’s typical life narrative does not state that he was raised in Kansas.  Obama’s White House biography states that he was “born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961” to “a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas.” That narrative, which omits where he allegedly attended school and the various places he lived while growing up, falsely states that “In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families…”

While Obama may have voted in favor of ethics reform and tax cuts, no state representative or senator can “pass” legislation alone.

Obama’s Wikipedia life story states:

“Obama was born on August 4, 1961,^[1] at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,^[2][3][4] and would become the first President to have been born in Hawaii.  His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry.^[6] His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya. Obama’s parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.^[7][8] The couple married in Wailuku on Maui on February 2, 1961,^[9][10] and separated when, in late August 1961, Obama’s mother moved with their newborn son to attend the University of Washington in Seattle for one year. In the meantime, Obama, Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at Harvard University on a scholarship. Obama’s parents divorced in March 1964.^[11] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971.^[12] He died in an automobile accident in 1982 when his son was 21 years old.^[13]

“In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.^[14] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet subdistrict of south Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng subdistrict of central Jakarta.^[15] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.^[16]

“Obama returned to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.^[17] Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.^[18] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother and sister returned to Indonesia in 1975 so his mother could begin anthropology field work.[19]”

Some versions of Obama’s life story say that his parents married in 1960, while some say the marriage occurred in 1961.  However, Obama Sr. was reportedly already married in Kenya before arriving in the United States to study.

Bigamy and polygamy are illegal in the United States. In 1878, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. United States that the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act signed by President Abraham Lincoln was constitutional.

No documentary evidence has been presented that Obama’s alleged parents were ever joined in a marriage ceremony.  Obama has said both that his parents were married when he was born and that he was “born to a single mom.”

Former Breitbart and The Blaze journalist Charles C. Johnson, who launched his own news service earlier this year, reported in 2012:

Enrollment documents viewed by TheBlaze confirm that a young Barack Obama was listed as an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim on school registration in the 1960s. And while the document has been reported on before, albeit lightly, TheBlaze has compiled the most complete view thus far of the document and the circumstances surrounding it – including an interview with the president’s first-ever principal while he was in Indonesia.

TheBlaze repeatedly photographed the document in the office of the current headmaster of Santo Fransiskus Assisis, a Catholic school that Obama attended from January 1968 to December 1970 in Jakarta.  The record shows that Obama (or his parents) – at least for the period of his life – claimed to be an Indonesian citizen, that he took the last name Soetoro (the last name of his step-father, Lolo), that his religion was listed as Islam, and that he was born in Honolulu.

Obama’s school records from Indonesia, Hawaii, Kansas or anywhere else he might have lived during childhood have never been released, nor have his college or passport applications as requested by Donald Trump in October 2012 in exchange for a $5,000,000 donation, later raised to $50,000,000, to the charity of Obama’s choice.

Last month, Trump told a national television audience that Obama’s original name was “Barry Soetoro.”  Atty. Stephen Pidgeon, who wrote Articles of Impeachment last summer for the U.S. House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against Obama, contends in the first article that Obama committed “Usurpation of the Oval Office via criminal identity fraud.”

Various news sources, including the mainstream media, have reported on at least three of Obama’s relatives who were or are residing in the U.S. illegally.  Former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor Atty. Larry Klayman has asked immigration authorities to hold an evidentiary hearing as to whether or not Obama himself is an illegal alien subject to deportation.

From 1991 to April 2007, Obama’s official biography published by his literary agent stated that he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii” as reported exclusively by Breitbart in May 2012.  The agent explained in 2012 that the biographical statement was made as a result of a “fact checking error.”

It is generally understood by most Americans that a foreign-born person cannot serve as president, as he does not meet the Article II, Section 1, clause 5 definition of “natural born Citizen.”  However, many historians and legal scholars have cited evidence that the term referred to a higher standard of citizenship than simply “a Citizen,” as the Framers of the Constitution first proposed as a presidential requirement.  Upon the insistence of John Jay, who later became the first U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, George Washington and the other Founders agreed to insert the requirement of “natural born Citizen” solely for the presidency.

In early 2011, Donald Trump repeatedly demanded that Obama release his “long-form” birth certificate to prove that he was born in the United States and presumably eligible to the presidency.  Up to that time, only a “short-form” birth certificate image had been posted on Obama’s 2008 “FighttheSmears” website which contained a blacked-out certificate number and lacked the signatures of the delivery physician and local registrar.

FighttheSmears was taken offline after the 2008 election, and presently all links which had led to its content have been redirected to error messages generated by Obama’s political action arm, Organizing for America (OFA).  As The Post & Email reported, the Wayback Machine’s archive of FighttheSmears is similarly unavailable to those searching for its content.

In May 2009, then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stated that the “short-form” Certification of Live Birth was the only birth document which the Hawaii Department of Health could make available to Obama.  The “COLB” had appeared at The Daily KOS on June 12, 2008, with Politifact and The St. Petersburg Times/Tampa Bay Times following suit shortly thereafter.

On April 27, 2011, the White House released what it said was a scan of a certified copy of Obama’s original long-form birth certificate released by the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH) to Obama’s personal attorney, Judith Corley, who allegedly flew nearly 10,000 miles to retrieve it and return with it to the White House when it could have been sent by mail.  According to the HDOH, “certified copies” of birth, death and marriage certificates can be ordered online but may be released only to individuals meeting the criteria set forth in HRS 338-18.

After the April 27 press conference announcing the release of Obama’s more detailed birth document, the short-form image was posted in a different color scheme than that which had appeared at KOS and the other websites in 2008.  The image lacks a registrar’s stamp and notes Obama’s father as “African,” a term reportedly not used in the 1960s to denote a person’s “race.”

In August 2011, a group of approximately 250 Maricopa County, AZ constituents and Tea Party members approached their sheriff, Joe Arpaio, about reports that the image posted on the White House website was a forgery to request an investigation to ensure that their votes in the 2012 presidential election would not be disenfranchised.  Arpaio agreed to commission his Cold Case Posse to launch a probe of the image in order to “clear the president of the United States” and set his constituents’ minds at ease that Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii as he had claimed.

After nearly six months of work, including at least one trip to Hawaii, Cold Case Posse lead investigator Mike Zullo and Arpaio held a press conference to declare that there was probable cause to believe that the long-form birth certificate is a “computer-generated forgery.”  Unbeknownst to the public, the posse had also examined Obama’s purported Selective Service registration form which had been mailed to various FOIA requesters and found that it, too, is fraudulent.

The mainstream media reported on the press coverage in a limited way, without broadcasting the revelations on television.  “The media shut this issue down 24 hours after the birth certificate was released,” Zullo told a convention of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) on June 1, 2013.

The press conference conducted by Zullo and Arpaio was held on March 1, 2012, the same day on which 43-year-old Andrew Breitbart died unexpectedly, reportedly “from natural causes.”  Arpaio said he had spoken to Breitbart just hours before his death in Los Angeles.  Breitbart left behind four young children for whom a fund was established later that month as reported by National Review Online.

A citizen video released several days after Breitbart’s passing claims that Breitbart had been readying to release a series of videos in which then-Harvard Law School student Barack Obama appeared.  In one video, Obama is seen speaking in favor of “diversity” in support of Prof. Derrick Bell, a “civil rights” attorney and the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law.

Bell later held a sit-in at Harvard, after which he took a two-year “leave of absence” in protest that two black women were not hired as faculty members.  According to his official biography, “With student support, Derrick launched a protest movement at Harvard Law School that received national attention.”  Bell was ultimately dismissed from the faculty for having failed to return from the leave of absence.

Bell is considered the originator of “Critical Race Theory,” “a school of thought and scholarship that critically engages questions of race and racism in the law, investigating how even those legal institutions purporting to remedy racism can more profoundly entrench it.”

Harvard University describes critical race theory:

Not a set of abstract principles but instead a collection of people struggling inside and outside legal scholarship, critical race theorists are engaged in building a movement to eliminate racial oppression, and other forms of group-based oppression. The scholars pursue individual routes, methods, and ideas. Nonetheless, they converge around the belief that racism is endemic, not aberrational, in American society; that liberal legal ideals of neutrality and color-blindness have replicated rather than undone racism; that analysis should be informed by personal experience and contextual, historical studies; and that pragmatic and eclectic strategies should be pursued in the struggle for racial and social justice.

Breitbart described Bell as a “racialist” and “radical academic tied to Jeremiah Wright,” Obama’s former pastor at Trinity United Church in Chicago exposed in 2008 by Erik Rush for his “chickens coming home to roost” sermon.

It was Wright himself who declared Obama “steeped in Islam” when he first began attending the church in the early 1990s.

According to Fox News’s Sean Hannity, the website buzzfeed.com first released the Obama/Bell rally video which Harvard Prof. Charles Ogletree admitted on camera to having concealed from the public in 2008.

Ogletree’s biography states that he is founder of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and author of such books as Life without Parole: America’s New Death Penalty?, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America, and co-author of Beyond the Rodney King Story: An Investigation of Police Conduct in Minority Communities.”

The Cold Case Posse’s investigation has continued to the present day.  A second press conference was held on July 17, 2012 during which Zullo appeared to express doubt that Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. were, in fact, Obama’s biological parents.

Late last year, Zullo reported that Arpaio had launched his own criminal investigation on matters other than the birth certificate and Selective Service form. Last month, Arpaio told Fox News Radio host Alan Colmes that he is considering releasing information gleaned from his investigation if certain conditions appear to favor it.

Zullo recently told the Tea Party group which originally asked for the birth certificate to be investigated that additional information which lengthened the original probe over the last nine months “turned very dark.”

On December 26, The Malaysia Sun identified Saslow as being “known for moving into his characters’ lives and writing about them with intimacy and empathy.”  The article, reposted in part from Poynter.org, stated that as “A former sportswriter, Saslow depends on close observation, a sharp ear for dialogue, and writing that is powerful for its quiet eloquence and clarity.”  Saslow, whose name in the article is sometimes misspelled as “Salsow” and “Sallow,” is described as writing with “an authority that comes from deep reporting.”

Another George Polk award recipient is Barton Gellman, who authored “The Secret World of Extreme Militias” in 2010 in which the cases of CDR Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III (Ret.) and Darren Wesley Huff were presented inaccurately, never corrected, and the two men never interviewed.

Of his experience in writing the prize-winning series on food stamp usage, Saslow advises:

No matter how much time you have to do a story, the biggest key is for the people you’re writing about to feel like it matters as much to you as it does to them. And that you are going to do everything you can in the amount of time that you have to get it right and to tell the fullest story possible…

The Post & Email can find no other reports stating that Barack Hussein Obama was raised in Kansas.  However, ten days before Saslow published his 2008 piece, the “SayAnythingBlog” posted Obama’s “new political ad” which reportedly depicted Obama stating, “I was raised with values straight from the Kansas heartland.”  The video is now marked as “private” and does not play.

Other outlets reported on the advertisement in which Obama stated, “”I’m Barack Obama. America is a country of strong families and strong values. My life’s been blessed by both. I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn’t have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up. Accountability and self-reliance. Love of country. Working hard without making excuses.”

Following the video clip, the blogger opines:

Here’s the problem: Barack Obama isn’t from Kansas. He was born in Hawaii, lived most of his first ten years in Indonesia, and then graduated from high school back in Hawaii.
His only connection to Kansas is that his mother was born there, meaning Obama’s values have a tenuous connection to Kansas at best.
But I suppose “I have Kansas values” sounds a lot better than “I have values straight from Jakarta.”
Regardless, what does it say about Obama when he can’t even shoot straight about something as simple and non-consequential as this?

In his June 30, 2008 piece, which is still available at The Washington Post, Saslow contended that in Findlay, OH, a town known as “Flag City USA,” “nobody wanted anything to change.”

“Every newcomer to the block was white, working-class and Midwestern, and the neighborhood jelled easily. They babysat for one another. They complained to one another about their teenagers. They helped raise one another’s grandkids. In all, seven different families have lived on the same block of College Street for at least 35 years,” Saslow wrote.

Implying that voters there would not cast their ballots for Obama as a result of being “misinformed” that he was a Muslim in addition to other “rumors,” Saslow ended his piece on the note that even after two local college students reportedly “walked from door to door” to inform voters of Obama’s electability and Christianity, the locals go “back to the gossip on College Street” and “Back to the rumors again.”

On the same day, in response to Saslow’s article, the Cato Institute reported:

But of course Obama didn’t grow up in Kansas. He was born in Hawaii and grew up there and in Indonesia. And the ad doesn’t claim that he did. In the ad Obama says:

I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents….They taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up.

Talk about a guy who isn’t well known yet, on whom everybody can project both good and bad images. People all over America are hearing on the internet or at the beauty salon that he’s a Muslim born in Africa, and a Washington Post reporter somehow thinks he grew up in Kansas.

In a response to Saslow’s June 30, 2008 piece about Findlay and Obama, one writer in a neighboring town to Findlay asked:

• What warrants putting a story like this on the front page of a major metro daily like the Washington Post or any newspaper?

• Is it a coincidence that an Ohio city — one in a key battleground election state — was chosen as the setting for the story? Mr. Saslow couldn’t find somewhere closer to his own backyard to “fit” his story?

• Why is the Post fighting Barack Obama’s battles for him?

• The hierarchy of the Post is comprised of some very powerful and influential people, like Warren Buffet, who control what millions of Americans read, watch and listen to. Is there a subtle or not-so-subtle agenda behind the running of this piece and others like it? Not only from the Post, but from other major media conglomerates across the country?

On Saturday, The Post & Email sent the following message through The Washington Post’s “Contact Us” portal:

I am trying to reach Eli Saslow, who wrote on June 30, 2008 that Barack Obama “grew up in the Kansas heartland.”

The article published by your organization is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901871.html

with the specific page here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901871_2.html?sid=ST2008063000002

Since none of Obama’s biographies has ever made that claim, where did Mr. Saslow obtain his information?

Thank you.

Sharon Rondeau, Editor
The Post & Email
www.thepostemail.com
editor@thepostemail.com

We then received confirmation that our message had been transmitted.

In 2006, Hawaii Advertiser reporter Will Hoover reported that Obama was “born in Indonesia,” then changed the story to say that Obama was “born in Hawaii,” stating that he had conducted a cursory internet search of Obama’s background, hence his error.  MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, who has been an outspoken advocate for Obama beginning in 2007, also reportedly stated that Obama was born in Indonesia in December of that year while discussing Democrat presidential contenders.

That report is corroborated by the website 24ahead with a reference to Hoover’s article, which is no longer available “live” on the internet.

Matthews’s identification of Indonesia as Obama’s birthplace appears to have been omitted in a typed transcript of the program issued by NBC News.

Matthews’s statement may have contributed to the doubts in Americans’ minds which Saslow subtly denigrated when he wrote, “When people on College Street started hearing rumors about Obama — who looked different from other politicians and often talked about change — they easily believed the nasty stories about an outsider.”