Another Look at Obama's Origins

The murky circumstances of Obama's birth invite attempts to make the known facts fit together. This article was prompted by two emails. The first asked me why I had never weighed in on the birth certificate controversy surrounding President Barack Obama.

I responded that although I was troubled by the lack of documentation regarding all phases of Obama's history -- I'd be content with his SAT scores -- I could not understand why any pregnant American woman would go anywhere near Kenya.

The second email was more interesting. It came from a Michigan entrepreneur named Don Wilkie, with whom I had not previously communicated. Knowing my interest in the authorship questions surrounding Obama's writing, he presumed that I was intrigued as he was by a cryptic poem the 19-year old Obama wrote called "Pop," the best thing that Obama himself has actually written. He was right.

"Pop" relates an encounter between Obama and a man most reviewers presume to be Obama's maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham. Dunham would have been in his early 60's at the time. In the poem, Obama has "Pop" wondering drunkenly about the boy, "What to do with me, a green young man."

The Obama of the poem is cynical, even a little bitter. He makes several allusions to the fact that he and the old man look and even smell alike, a fact that strikes Obama as more ironic than reassuring. The poem ends, however, with reconciliation when Pop stands and asks for a hug. Writes Obama:

I see my face, framed within 

Pop's black-framed glasses 

And know he's laughing too.

Wilkie offers a novel interpretation of "Pop." Says Wilkie, "I think the poem zeros in on that poignant moment when Obama was told that his grandfather was in reality his father."

Wilkie concedes his theory is "off-the-wall," but he also offers photographic evidence to show that Obama much more closely resembles Dunham -- especially the telltale ears --than he does Barack Obama, Sr.

Intriguing as the theory is, I t

hought it would be easy to disprove. I was wrong. For starters, in his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to his grandfather not as "Pop," but as "Gramps." If he were writing about his grandfather in this poem, the title "Pop" may very well be suggestive of a more direct kinship.

For another, there is little known about the marriage between Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama's presumed mother, and Barack Obama Sr. According to most accounts, Dunham and Barack Sr. were married on the Hawaiian island of Maui -- in some reports on February 2, 1961, in others on February 21.

Obama knows little about the wedding. He writes in Dreams, "In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I've never quite had the courage to explore. There's no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride."

In his fair-minded biography, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, Christopher Andersen concedes, "There were certainly no witnesses -- no family members were present; and none of their friends at the university had the slightest inkling they were even engaged."

Another conflicting bit of evidence is that at the time of his alleged marriage to Ann Dunham, Barack Sr. had a pregnant wife and a son back in Kenya. There is more. In July 2008, speaking at a university roundtable, Michelle Obama said of Barack's mother that she was "very young and very single when she had him." This could well have been a slip of the tongue, but it may not have been.

Obama was reportedly born roughly six months after the February wedding date on August 4, 1961. Andersen reports that Barack Sr. drove Ann to Honolulu's Kapiloani Hospital for Women and Children to have the baby.

Andersen's account, however, suffers from chronology problems. He relates that Ann told the Dunhams of her pregnancy in "late October." Even if she had she been impregnated in early October -- it probably would have been earlier -- Obama's official birth date came ten months later.

In any scenario, Obama had at least one black parent, and if it is not Obama Sr., who then is it? Obama offers a possible clue in Dreams:

I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes. The visits to his house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn't fully understand. The same thing I felt whenever Gramps took me downtown to one of his favorite bars, in Honolulu's red-light district.

The "Frank" in question is Frank Marshall Davis, a black communist, pornographer and poet who had abandoned Chicago for Hawaii. In "Pop," it should be noted, the Pop character "recites an old poem just before the reconciliation and reeks of whiskey. Davis would have been in his mid-70's at the time. Some have theorized that Davis, in fact, is Obama's father and the "Pop" of the poem. This theory, though tenuous, cannot be ruled out. A grandson can look more like his maternal grandfather than his father. That happens. And then too there is Davis's Chicago connection.

The "Frank" passage and the ones that follow, however, tell us something suggestive about Stanley Dunham, namely that he frequented otherwise all-black bars in an area rife with prostitution. That a black woman -- perhaps a friend of Davis's -- gave birth to a child of Dunham's may explain "the complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men." If this were the case, it would have caused far less societal stress for Ann Dunham to assume maternity of her little brother than for Stanley Dunham to assume paternity of his son.

We also know that Stanley Dunham so desperately wanted a boy that he named his only child "Stanley Ann." That he chose to raise the young Barack would not have been out of character.

Is it possible that Barack Sr. obliged the Dunhams and went along with the charade? If so, as Andrew Young attests in The Politician, he would not have been the last good friend to claim false paternity for a larger cause.

As a Kenyan, Barack Sr. would have given the boy more than a name. He would give him a distinctive identity as an "African," a more respected ethnicity in the America of the 1960's than "Negro." Indeed, Obama has built his career around his exotic identity. Were he named after an American father, say "Darnell Johnson," he may never have been elected president.

This hypothetical extended charade would help explain why Barack Sr. blithely blew off his new family when he headed for Harvard a year later, rejecting a reported opportunity to take both wife and child to New York, and began dating as soon as he arrived at Harvard. It would explain too why Ann Dunham felt free to leave young Barack with her parents for years at a time when her career beckoned.

Barack Sr.'s cooperation would also put Stanley Dunham's fondness for him in perspective. In Dreams, Gramps speaks so respectfully of his prodigal son-in-law that the whole opening sequence rings false to anyone who knows the larger story. A man, a black man at that, has knocked up Dunham's daughter. Ann and Barack Sr. marry despite reported opposition from both families. The man then abandons wife and child, and the grandfather can only sing his praises to the man's son. This makes no sense at all and would have made even less sense in the racially charged 1960s.

Jerome Corsi of WorldNetDaily has found additional evidence that argues against Obama's birth to Ann Dunham in August 1961. As the records clearly show, "Stanley Ann Dunham" enrolled for classes at the University of Washington at Seattle on August 19, 1961, fifteen days after Obama's presumed birth. It defies all logic--and logistics as well--that Dunham would have flown her newborn across the Pacific, found an apartment and a job and enrolled at class all within two weeks of the birth.

Most accounts put young Barack with Dunham in Seattle when she was attending college, but the sourcing on these accounts is suspect. One person cited often is Dunham's good childhood friend, Maxine Box. In February 2008, Box told the Seattle Times that the last time she saw Dunham was "in 1961," when, says Times reporter Nicole Brodeur, "[Dunham] visited Seattle on her way from Honolulu to Massachusetts, where her then-husband was attending Harvard."

"She seemed very happy and very proud," Box tells the Times of Dunham." She had this beautiful, healthy baby. I can see them right now."

There are any number of problems with this account beginning with the fact that Barack Sr. did not attend Harvard until the fall of 1962. Box also gives no sense that Dunham lived in Seattle or attended classes there through the winter and spring sessions of 1962 as records show she did. Whether Dunham was actually heading for Harvard, we have no real way of knowing.

A seeming hole in Andersen's account is that he missed the Washington adventure and has Ann remaining in Hawaii through Obama's first few years. He makes no mention of any trip to Harvard by Ann.

One other scenario makes sense out of a falsely assumed paternity by Barack Sr. This begins with the abrupt departure of the Dunham family from the Seattle area in the late summer 1960. In Dreams, Obama tells how pleased the senior Dunhams were with the success of Ann in high school, but Stanley forbade her to go to the University of Chicago, "deciding that she was still too young to be living on her own."

Soon thereafter, however, the family decamped for Hawaii.

"Something must have still been gnawing at my grandfather's heart," writes Obama. He attributes the move to his wanderlust and the "limitless" prospects offered by a new furniture store in Honolulu. Adds Obama, "He would rush home that same day and talk my grandmother into selling their house and packing up yet again."

What Obama does not mention is that even at this time his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, likely earned more than her furniture salesman husband. To move, she had to give up her job as a bank officer in Seattle. Arriving in Honolulu, she worked as a by-the-hour bank teller. This job would, however, have given her the opportunity to tend to the young Barack.

It seems altogether possible that the progressive and adventurous 17 year-old Dunham was impregnated by a black man while the family was still living in the Seattle area. If so, this pregnancy could have prompted the family to uproot to Hawaii where no one knew them and where mixed-race babies were more accepted. According to the Andersen account, whose source was Maxine Box, "There were loud arguments between father and daughter -- fights that sometimes turned violent." Ann did not want to go.

Both the "Dunham as father" and the "anonymous black father" scenarios would make the Obama camp wary of sharing Obama's actual birth certificate, either because Dunham was not Obama's mother or, if she were, because Obama was born much earlier than August 4, 1961.

If Obama were born, say, in February or March 1961, it would clarify why, as documented, Dunham attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the fall semester of 1960 but not in the spring semester of 1961. This timetable would have also allowed Dunham enough time to recover and prepare for a return to college in Seattle in August with or without the baby. Dunham would not return to the University of Hawaii until 1963. She filed for divorce in 1964, and little was heard from Barack Sr. ever again.

Scientists use the phrase "inference to the best explanation" to illuminate an unproven phenomenon. Given the available evidence, including the fact that some evidence has been strategically withheld, one can infer that Obama likely was born in Hawaii but that Ann Dunham did not give birth to Barack Obama Sr.'s child on August 4, 1961.

So much depends on Obama's fabled "story," however, that the mainstream media have chosen not investigate. When Christopher Andersen tried, he found himself immersed in a swamp of conflicting and concocted stories that tested the savvy of even a veteran biographer.

And so Obama's birth remains a mystery a year after his inauguration. The mainstream media meanwhile have paid more attention to the origins of Trig Palin than to those of the president, and have spent their excess energy mocking those who do the reporting they once did.

If my humble efforts to clarify matters make me a "birther," so be it.

Barack H. Obama was a British citizen in 1961. He registered his son as a British citizen a few months after birth and later, after Kenyan independence in 1963, as a citizen of Kenya.

You obviously do not understand either the definition or the origin of the term, Natural Born Citizen, as it is related in the U.S. Constitution.

I will supply you with both.

The definition of the term, “natural born citizen”, was entered into the Congressional record of the House on March 9, 1866, in comments made by Rep. John Bingham on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was the precursor to the Fourteenth Amendment. He repeated Vattel’s definition when he said:

“[I] find no fault with the introductory clause, which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen. . . . ” — John A. Bingham, (R-Ohio) US Congressman, March 9, 1866 Cong. Globe, 39th, 1st Sess., 1291 (1866), Sec. 1992 of U.S. Revised Statutes (1866).

In other words, anyone born in the U.S.A. of citizen parents is a natural born citizen.

Here is the true precedent from a most liberal professor.

In a recent Illinois Public Law & Legal Theory written by Professor Lawrence B. Solum of the U of IL, College of Law, Chicago, Solum further explains why the English common law definition of ‘natural born subject was not the definition adopted by the Framers for the Sovereign citizens of the United States of America.

[Blackstone Commentaries (1765): When I say, that an alien is one who is born out of the king’s dominions, or allegiance, this also must be understood with some restrictions. The common law indeed stood absolutely so; with only a very few exceptions: so that a particular act of parliament became necessary after the restoration, for the naturalization of children of his majesty’s English subjects, born in foreign countries during the late troubles. And this maxim of the law proceeded upon a general principle, that every man owes natural allegiance where he is born, and cannot owe two such allegiances, or serve two masters, at once. Yet the children of the king’s ambassadors born abroad were always held to be natural subjects: for as the father, though in a foreign country, owes not even a local allegiance to the prince to whom he is sent; so, with regard to the son also, he was held (by a kind of postliminium) to be born under the king of England’s allegiance, represented by his father, the ambassador. To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. III. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband’s consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants. But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception;...]

[F.E. Edwards, Natural Born British Subjects at Common Law, 14 Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation 314 (1914): The pro- position that British Protectorates, and consequently any less interest of the Crown, should be excluded from our definition of the King’s protection, is supported by Sir William Anson, who declares that birth within such a region is not sufficient to found a claim for British natural-born status. The real test of whether a given territory is part of the British Dominions is that it must have passed openly, completely, and unequivocally into the possession of the Crown.]

[Solum: If the American conception of “natural born citizen” were equivalent to the English notion of a “natural born subject,” then it could be argued that only persons born on American soil to American parents would have qualified. This might lead to the conclusion that McCain would not be a constitutional natural-born citizen, because the Panama Canal Zone was not the sovereign territory of the United States, but was instead merely subject to its administrative control.

The language of the Constitution recognizes a distinction between the terms “citizen” and “subject”. For example, in Article III Section 2, which confers “judicial power” on the federal courts, “citizens” of the several states are differentiated from “citizens” or “subjects” of foreign states—corresponding to the distinction between diversity and alienage jurisdiction. In the framing era, these two terms reflected two distinct theories of the relationship between individual members of a political community and the state.

In feudal or monarchical constitutional theory, individuals were the subjects of a monarch or sovereign, but the republican constitutional theory of the revolutionary and post revolutionary period conceived of the individual as a citizen and assigned sovereignty to the people.

The distinction between citizens and subjects is reflected in Chief Justice John Jay’s opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia, the first great constitutional case decided after the ratification of the Constitution of 1789:

[T]he sovereignty of the nation is in the people of the nation, and the residuary sovereignty of each State in the people of each State…

[A]t the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects…]

As you can see, in England there are two very distinct meanings of ’natural born’ subject. In one hand there is the broader view & in the other there is the view of the laws of nations. What the liberal progressive constitutionalists use is the broader view and thus disregard the fact that at some point, even England used the law of nations. The Framers also knew of Englands use of the law of nations and were very aware of its importance when establishing a new nation. It has also been proven that the Law of Nations was in the hands of the Framers at the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

And as pointed out above, please do not come back with the same old lame references to Blackstone & English common law, we know for a fact from the very 1st SCOTUS Justice Washington appointed, a Justice who was only 2nd to James Madison in the drafting of the Constitution, that the definition for US citizens was not derived from English common law, but on the law of Nations which is the law of nature:

“The law of nature, when applied to states and political societies, receives a new name, that of the law of nations. This law, important in all states, is of peculiar importance in free ones. The States of America are certainly entitled to this dignified appellation…But if the knowledge of the law of nations is greatly useful to those who appoint, it surely must be highly necessary to those who are appointed…As Puffendorff thought that the law of nature and the law of nations were precisely the same, he has not, in his book on these subjects treated of the law of nations separately; but has every where joined it with the law of nature, properly called so…the law of nature is applied to individuals; the law of nations is applied to states.”

Wilson, in his 1st commentaries, blasts Blackstone’s theory by citing that the definition of ’subject’ per English common law according to Blackstone was not the definition of ‘citizen’ as adopted by the framers of the US Constitution. A ’subject’ is ruled by an all powerful central government/monarchy and the under the new Constitution of the United States, the central government’s power is derived from the people, the citizens.

Wilson also wrote the very 1st SCOTUS decision in Chisolm which is cited to this day as to the powers of the central government. He also was no right-wing conservative where the limits of the central government were concerned. Wilson felt that the Constitution did not go far enough in giving broader powers to those in Washington, but he KNEW the premise of the Constitution and stood behind it in every decision he made, regardless of his political philosophy.

Note: Barack H. Obama II could only have ceased to be a subject of the British Sovereign, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, by naturalizing to another nation as a citizen of that nation. There is no evidence that he has ever done so.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.