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This criticism is based on an overly-literal interpretation of Barack Obama's 2007 speech in Selma, Alabama, which we covered in a separate article. These attributes are not mutually exclusive: Barack Obama's (biological) father was all of these things at different times in his life, as Obama described in his book, Dreams from My Father: We are unaware of Barack Obama's ever having claimed his father was a proud freedom fighter. Obama has written (and spoken) at length about his father's returning to Africa from America to work for the Kenyan government, with that country's political turmoil eventually leaving him a bitter drunk and a defeated, lonely bureaucrat. As we discussed in a separate article, Kenyan politician Raila Odinga has recently claimed to be Barack Obama's cousin, but there is no substantive evidence documenting his claim, and the two men share no meaningful familial connection. The author has apparently confused Obama's grandmothers. In the instance cited above, Obama was speaking of his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, not his paternal grandmother. (In 2007 Obama described his maternal grandparents as nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists.) Many Swahili words and names are of Arabic origin (just as many English words originated with other languages). Barack is a Swahili name that entered the language via historical trade and cultural ties with Arabia. The topic is already covered in our separate article about the (false) claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Barack Obama attended more than one school in Indonesia, one of which was a public school that included Islamic religious instruction among its curriculum, and one of which was a private Catholic school. We are unaware of Barack Obama's ever having claimed he was fluent in any Indonesian language (beyond the level of competence that could reasonably be expected of the non-native child speaker he was at the time he lived in that country). He did acquire (and apparently still has) a passable command of Bahasa, as Time magazine noted in a 2007 article: We have not found any citation for Obama's having claimed that his childhood in Indonesia qualified him as having more foreign experience (what the comparative more refers to also isn't clear). Barack Obama did live in Indonesia for four years as a child, and he could in fact speak the local language passably well. Whether his time in that country provided him more foreign experience is argumentative, but people other than Obama himself have suggested that it might: Barack Obama has lived in, traveled to, or otherwise spent time in countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, the Palestinian Territories, Afghanistan Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as serving as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Whether his experiences make him stronger on foreign affairs is argumentative, but again, people other than Obama have suggested that it might: Obama wrote at length in his two books about his experiences growing up as the child of mixed-race parents and the issues that accompanied that status, and he noted in his first book, Dreams From My Father that before entering politics he had used marijuana and cocaine. His drug use, he wrote, was ... something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory and said in a 2006 interview that his drug use was ... reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy. Teenage boys are frequently confused. We could not find an instance in either of Barack Obama's books (or elsewhere) where he claimed that his decision to run for public office was influenced by an article in Ebony magazine. In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama writes of a childhood experience occurring on a day when his mother dropped him off at a library on her way to work, and he began thumbing through issues of LIFE magazine: As far as we know, no one has yet found any matching article in the pages of LIFE magazine. However, that does necessarily not mean Barack Obama saw no such article; it may simply mean that, writing decades after the fact, he misremembered the title of the magazine he was viewing. In 2004, just after winning election to the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama said during apress conference, in response to a question about his possibly running for national office, that: A legislative present vote (which essentially counts as a No vote but does not go on record as such) is, as the New York Times observed, not unusual in Illinois, a tactic often used in concert with other party members and leaders: We're unsure what supposed misvote this line references. Barack Obama was indeed a professor at the University of Chicago's Law School, a fact verified by that institution itself: Between 1993 and 2002, Barack Obama worked as a civil rights lawyer with the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland. It's unclear what ethics bill this statement references. Obama did help pass a major ethics reform bill as an Illinois State Senator, and 110th U.S. Congress passed the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act, which closely mirrored and drew key provisions from a bill (S. 230) that Senators Obama and Feingold introduced in January 2007. We could find no reference to document Obama's supposedly having said that neither of those bills would exist if not for him. Again, it's unclear which ethics bill this statement references, nor could we find any reference to document Obama's supposedly having said such a bill was hard to pass.' As the New York Times reported in February 2008: We couldn't find a reference for Barack Obama's supposedly claiming that he had released his state records, only that he said he didn't have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records and that they might not exist. Politico.com noted in October 2008 that: In Barack Obama's book Dreams from My Father, beginning at the start of Chapter 9, he writes in detail about the efforts of community organizers to push a grassroots campaign advocating the removal of asbestos from the Altgeld Gardens housing project in Chicago. Although in his book Obama emphasizes his own role in the effort, many other people who took part in are indeed mentioned as well. It is unclear to us what bill or statement is supposedly being referenced here. We couldn't find a reference for Barack Obama's having described himself as a bold leader in Illinois, but certainly some of his supporters have claimed that of him (just as some of his critics have claimed the opposite). Barack Obama did pass 26 bills in his final year as an Illinois state senator. We could not find any reference to his claiming that all of them were my own bills, but he certainly received a boost in passing them from Illinois Senate President (and fellow Democrat) Emil Jones, who helped Obama learn the ways of the state legislature and gave Obama the chance to work on the ethics legislation and death penalty reforms that Obama now boasts about in his presidential campaign: As FactCheck.org noted in March 2008 about the 'NAFTA-Gate'controversy: In September 2007, the U.S. Senate voted on a resolution to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization: Senator Obama was on the campaign trail at the time and did not return to Washington for the vote. On March 1, a Columbian Army strike on a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebel camp in Columbia killed 24 people, including Raul Reyes, the FARC's foreign minister. Files in a laptop computer seized from the wreckage of the rebel camp included references to U.S. diplomatic overtures which the Associated Press described as scintillating, if vague: Exactly who the referenced gringos were and whether they had any substantive connection to Barack Obama is unknown. In August 2007, major Democratic candidates signed a pledge to not campaign in Florida because that state had moved its primary election up to 29 January 2008, one week earlier than the Democratic national rules allowed. In January 2008, the Obama campaign launched national television advertisements on CNN and MSNBC that were also shown in Florida. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton maintainted that they had asked CNN and MSNBC to pull Florida from the ad buy, but those networks said they could not. Senator Obama didn't seriously claim to have won Michigan; during an 8 March 2008 Today Show interview he misspoke and inadvertently mentioned Michigan among a list of states which he had won. In accordance with the agreement mentioned in the previous entry, Barack Obama's name didn't even appear on the Michigan ballot. Senator Obama didn't claim to have won Nevada (a state that holds caucuses rather than direct-election primaries); he noted, correctly, that although Senator Hillary Clinton tallied more overall votes at the Nevada caucuses, he actually picked up more national delegates from that state: Senator Obama has no influence or power over the holding of caucuses rather than primary elections; that choice is made by each state individually, and candidates have to abide by whatever is decided. We could not find any reference to document Barack Obama's having claimed he passied 900 bills in the [Illinois] state senate. We are unsure what extortion claim this statement supposedly references. In April 2007, the Chicago Tribune wrote of Barack Obama's first campaign for public office: Senator Obama didn't say that has never accepted money from political action committees. (He used PAC money in his previous U.S. Senate and Illinois state Senate races.) He pledged that he would not accept PAC money for his 2008 presidential bid, a pledge that he has upheld. As Politico.com noted in May 2008: The Wall Street Journal observed in November 2008 that: Senator Obama also said that his administration would not employ federally registered lobbyists, although (as the New York Times noted) he has allowed himself some wiggle room in that regard: A widely-circulated spoof of Apple Computer's famous 1984 television advertisement for their (then-new) Macintosh computer was not created by an Obama campaign worker. It was, as explained in a statement issued by the managing director of Blue State Digital (a firm contracted to provide technology services to the Obama Campaign), created without authorization by an employee of that company: Senator Obama expressed opposition to the war in Iraq well before he gained a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004. (The vote that authorized U.S. military action in Iraq was held in 2002.) He has since voted in the Senate to authorize funding for that war, for reasons he defended in a February 2008 Democratic debate: These items are covered here in separate articles about the national anthem, Che Guevara, and Social Security.
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