As an aspiring senator in 2004, the greatest bamboozler of them all punched his ticket into the club, telling America in his
breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “My parents shared not only an improbable love. They shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” Not a word of this was true.
At the 2008 Democratic convention, Sen. Barack Obama once again mined the apocryphal family saga. “Four years ago,” he told his audience, “I stood before you and told you my story – of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren’t well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.”
Obama knew he was living a lie, but he had no choice other than to persist. He had built a highly successful campaign around what biographer David Remnick called his “signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.” The details, however, were manufactured.
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