Was Obama born in Kenya?
No. He was born in Hawaii.
But up until 2007, while he was trying to sell books, he was perfectly happy to pretend he was born in Kenya.
His -bio- from his literary agency, then called Acton and Dystel (now Dystel and Goderich) had this:
BARACK OBAMA is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, has been a long time New York Times bestseller.
This remained until -2007-, when it was changed to "born in Hawaii."
It also showed up in earlier printed agency material in 1991:
This is being spun as a "mistake." The agency calls it a "fact-checking error." Like a typo or something.
The problem with this is that most agencies ask authors to supply their own bios.
The second problem is that I can see no plausible mechanism for an agency to be provided a bio that says "born in Hawaii" and accidentally change or "fact check" that to "born in Kenya." That's a hell of a typo. As if some racist agency clerk looked at Obama and said "hell, man, that fella had to have been born in Africa. Get me the white-out."
The simpler conclusion is a case of biographical "embellishment." Obama, or whoever wrote his bio for him, thought "born in Kenya" would sell more books, so why not lie about it?
Even if it wasn't Obama's idea to fake his bio, he had to know about it. As an aspiring author, if I landed an agent and they put me in their printed bio pamphlet, I'd not only get copies for everybody I knew, I'd memorize my entry. Hell, I'd probably sleep with the pamplet under my pillow.
It's not the only example showing that Obama is amazingly protean on his treatment of facts and his own history, but it's a particularly ironic one.
Wonder how many other "embellishments" are out there.