Surprise! Barack Obama was a 'birther'

Earlier today, Breitbart.com revealed that Barack Obama's literary agency pitched an autobiography to publishers claiming an especially exotic heritage for the young author. Namely, that Obama was born in Kenya.

What's been missed in much of the resulting kerfuffle is this: Acton & Dystel, Obama's agency, didn't make up the bio on its own. They almost certainly received the critical details from Mr. Obama himself.

Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."

The booklet, which was distributed to "business colleagues" in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel...

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.

...The errant Obama biography in the Acton & Dystel booklet does not contradict the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate. Moreover, several contemporaneous accounts of Obama’s background describe Obama as having been born in Hawaii.

The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama--or the people representing and supporting him--manipulate his public persona.

David Maraniss's forthcoming biography of Obama has reportedly confirmed, for example, that a girlfriend Obama described in Dreams from My Father was, in fact, an amalgam of several separate individuals.

To be clear, Andrew Breitbart was not a "birther", nor am I.

What is clear, however, is Obama's willingness to play fast-and-loose with the facts in order to sell his books and advance his career. My hunch: Obama crafted the book deal bio in order to make his background appear more worldly: a Kenyan birthplace is certainly more exotic than a Hawaiian one.

What's hilarious about this entire debacle is that it proves Barack Obama was a 'birther'.