I’m Barack Obama’s cousin says Raila Odinga
By Mike Pflanz in Nairobi
Last Updated: 2:49am GMT 11/01/2008
Kenya’s defeated presidential challenger Raila Odinga has claimed to be a cousin of Barack Obama and said that they had discussed his country’s post-election violence.
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Mr Odinga, 63, said that the US senator’s father, from western Kenya’s Luo tribe, was his maternal uncle.
Mr Odinga (right) says that Senator Obama’s late father was his uncle on his mother’s side
“He has called me to talk about the destabilising constitutional crisis in this country, despite being in the middle of the very busy New Hampshire primary,” Mr Odinga said yesterday.
Mr Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs confirmed that the senator spoke to the Kenyan opposition leader on Monday afternoon for about five minutes before going into a rally in New Hampshire, according to Associated Press...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/08/wkenya308.xml
From a Jan. Reuter’s article: http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL08727241.html
>>>Odinga also said he was a cousin of Obama, but Obama’s uncle [Said Obama] said that the two were not directly related.
“Odinga’s mother came from this area, so it is normal for us to talk about cousins. But he is not a blood relative,” he said.
Regardless of how the truth of the blood relationship eventually pans out, the cousin aspect of this is immaterial and should be dropped from the discussion. Even if they turn out to be relatives, it’s an accident of birth that has no bearing.
What IS salient here is that Obama has chosen to campaign for Odinga and endorses the man and his agenda.
The Obama campaign would like nothing better for people to focus on the cousin angle. Instead of addressing the alarming implications of Obama’s endorsements of Odinga, they get to argue the accuracy of the blood-relationship story.
It’s a sweet set-up. If the claim is true, they get to (rightly) point out that we can’t choose our relatives. If the claim is false, they get to play the old “discredit one small aspect of the story, discredit it all” ploy.