In a Washington Post commentary, Obama biographer David Maraniss reflects what it’s like to have had his book “Barack Obama: The Story” mined and targeted by the Obama doubters and haters. He also recounts what it would have taken to fake the future president’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu: “First, the local newspapers would have had to have been in on the scheme, because they ran notices of his birth among all the other local births that week. Second, the Immigration and Naturalization Service would have had to have been covering something up, because INS officials were closely tracking Barack Obama Sr. when he was at the University of Hawaii on a student visa from Kenya. They thought that he was a bigamist – which he was, having married a woman in Kenya before coming to the States – and a womanizer, which he also was. INS documents in the weeks and months before and after the son’s birth clearly establish the father’s whereabouts and the birth of his son. Finally, the name of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann, was unusual enough that doctors and nurses in Honolulu remembered it and her giving birth. One prominent doctor was asked by a young journalist if anything interesting had happened in the medical world that week, and he responded, ‘Well, Stanley had a baby!’” What drives the “birthers” and other Obama haters? “Some of it can be attributed to the give-and-take of today’s harsh ideological divide. Some of it can be explained by the way misinformation spreads virally to millions of like-minded people, reinforcing preconceptions. And some of it, I believe, arises out of fears of demographic changes in this country, and out of racism,” Maraniss concludes.
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