Thanks, I realized I had the date wrong after signing off last night/early this morning. I knew someone would corret me :)
I question anything Obama says. He can't even get his own history straight. On the Barnes and Noble website you can use the "See Inside" feature to read selected pages from his book.
This is page 144:
If Obama was born August 4, 1961, his eleventh birthday would be in 1972.Chapter Eight I had been to Chicago once before. It was during the summer after my father's visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday, when Toot had decided it was time I saw the mainland of the United States. Perhaps the two things were connected, her decision and my father's visit - his presence (once again) disturbing the world she and Gramps had made for themselves, triggering in her a desire to reclaim antecedents, her own memories, and pass them on to her grandchildren.
We traveled for over a month, Toot and my mother and Maya and I--Gramps had lost his taste for traveling by this time and chose to stay behind. We flew to Seattle, then went down the coast to California and Disneyland, east to the Grand Canyon, across the Great Plains to Kansas City, then up to the Great Lakes before heading back west through Yellowstone Park. We took Greyhound buses, mostly, and stayed at Howard Johnson's and watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed.
We were in Chicago for three days, in a hotel in the South Loop. It must have been sometime in July, but for some reason I remember the days as cold and gray. The hotel had an indoor swimming pool, which impressed me, there were no indoor pools in Hawaii.
According to Wikipedia:
The hearings held by the Senate Committee, in which Dean was the star witness and in which many other former key administration officials gave dramatic testimony, were broadcast from May 17 to August 7, 1973, causing devastating political damage to Nixon. Each network maintained coverage of the hearings every third day, starting with ABC on May 17 and ending with NBC on August 7. An estimated 85% of Americans with television sets tuned in to at least one portion of the hearings.So, if the Watergate hearings were televised in 1973, and Obama turned 11 in 1972, how did he watch the hearings on TV every night before his 11th birthday? Of course as the Messiah he is not restrained by time as are us mere mortals.
If Obama was born August 4, 1961, his eleventh birthday would be in 1972.
I was thinking you had a really good point here concerning Obama's lack of memory for details, but on rereading your post I wonder if the error does not arise instead from Obama's poor sentence structure. Perhaps he meant to say that his father's visit was before his eleventh birthday, rather than the later trip.