US Elections 2008 - II

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Obama’s Story About Dad’s Kennedy Link is ‘Confused,’ Fact Checker Writes
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Barack Obama credits a Kennedy administration program for bringing his father to the United States, an event which eventually led to Obama’s conception.

Not quite, says The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

Calling Obama’s chronology “extremely confused,” the Post’s Michael Dobbs attempts to set the record straight.

Dobbs writes that Kenyan leader Tom Mboya — not Kennedy — organized the 1959 and 1960 airlifts that supposedly brought Obama’s father to the United States. Dobbs also writes that the airlifts were in response to Kenyan political situation, not — as Obama has suggested — a Kennedy program to improve the U.S. image abroad (Kennedy didn’t take office anyhow until 1961).

<b>Obama made the claim last year in a speech commemorating the historic civil rights march in Selma, Ala. He also said that when Obama Sr. found himself at the march in Selma, he met the Democratic presidential contender’s mother, and the rest — as Obama tells it — is history.</b>

“So the Kennedys decided we’re going to do an air lift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is,” Obama said March 4, 2007.

“This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child.

“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”
And as far as Obama’s claim that he apparently was a result of his parents’ union at the 1965 march: That, too, isn’t possible — without a time machine, Dobbs says. Obama was born in 1961.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->