As I do media to promote my new book, "Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency," I am inevitably asked the most basic of questions: Just where was Barack Obama born?
I have been asked that question before. In fact, in the spring of 2011, Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen called me out of the blue to ask that very question. I told Cohen I followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance and knew no more than anyone else.
For "Unmasking," I understood, that answer would not do. As a guide, I turned to the 14th century philosopher William of Occam. His theory is often stated thusly, "The simplest explanation is usually the best."
The simplest explanation is that President Barack Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu just as the newspaper birth announcements said he was.
But Occam's razor is misunderstood. Said William, "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate.'' This translates roughly, "Multiple variables are not to be posited without necessity." So let us consider all the necessary variables.
The first is that Barack Obama resisted sharing his birth certificate at considerable cost and very nearly to the point of political self-destruction. This much is undeniable. In fact, his resistance created candidate Trump.
Although Trump never said Obama was born in Kenya, Obama did. As late as 2007, the promotional materials of his literary agency were claiming Obama was "born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister."
This, curiously, is not a necessary variable. Although Obama surely supplied the biography to his agency, he has been known to fabricate large chunks of that biography.
In 1991, when he first shared the Kenyan birth story, Obama was likely trying to position himself as more exotic than a garden-variety African American, but no reliable evidence supports a Kenyan birth.
What is important is that the Dunhams, Obama's maternal grandparents, abruptly pulled up stakes in summer 1960 and moved from Seattle to Hawaii against daughter Ann's will. Obama's leading biographers tell different stories as to why the family moved, none detailed, none particularly convincing.
Important too is that 17-year-old Ann was something of a wild child in high school, and she had a crush on the eponymous Afro-Brazilian of the movie "Black Orpheus," a passion she would later reveal to her embarrassed son.
At the time, too, parents routinely sent their pregnant daughters off to some distant place to conceal an inconvenient pregnancy even if the father was of the same race. Hawaii was the one state in America back then where a biracial baby could pass almost unnoticed.
In 1960, Kenyan Barack Obama was starting a year-long struggle with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to extend his stay in Hawaii. In spring 1961, he told the INS that he had an American wife who was "hapa," pregnant.
The fact that Ann dropped out of the University of Hawaii before her second semester, when she would have been only a month or two pregnant with the child of Obama, adds weight to the speculation that she was pregnant with a mixed race child when she arrived in Honolulu.
In this scenario, the arranged marriage with an African, whether legal or not – Obama was already married – would make sense for everyone. Obama got to extend his stay, and the Dunhams got a seemingly distinguished African for a son-in-law. In 1961 America, oddly, Africans enjoyed a higher status than African Americans.
In fact, Obama and Dunham's father became pals. Had the much older Obama knocked up Stanley Dunham's 17-year-old daughter, in 1960 or any year, fisticuffs would have been a more likely outcome than friendship.
In this scenario, the Dunham family might have claimed a home birth and called it in to the authorities in August. They would have done this not to pave the boy's way to the presidency but to protect him from the shame of an out-of-wedlock birth.
If, say, Obama had actually been born in February, not August, the very date would have given the Obama camp cause to resist sharing the birth certificate. It would have shattered what biographer David Remnick called Obama's "signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal."
This scenario also makes sense of Ann's arriving in Seattle in late August 1961 with only the baby as companion. Had baby Barack been born on Aug. 4, as claimed, he would have been no more than 3 weeks old.
In his heavily researched 2017 biography, "Rising Star," civil rights historian David Garrow finally stripped Obama's "multicultural ideal" of all its romance.
According to Garrow, "[T]he young couple never chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann's pregnancy." Ann Dunham left Hawaii as soon as the baby was old enough to travel, and Obama Sr. may never have even seen the child.
Garrow quotes approvingly one unnamed scholar to the effect that Obama was no more than "a sperm donor in his son's life."
Occam says he was not even that.
To learn more about Jack, see www.Cashill.com.
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