The Continued Vetting of Barack Obama

In my post yesterday, I did not realize what a controversy that the upcoming biography of Barack Obama had become.  It all started when Politico reported that the stories in Obama's Dreams From My Father regarding his girlfriend in New York were in fact composites (his girlfriend at the time was actually a mixture of several different girlfriends).  Politico, though, completely botched the story when they reported it as if this was a new revelation (see the paragraph length editor's note at the beginning of the story). 

It was not. 

Obama himself stated that some of the characters in Dreams were composites in the introduction of the book, the first edition of which was published in 1995.  But this brings up a very interesting question:  who in press has actually read Dreams?  You would think that during the vetting process pre-2008 that most, if not all, in the press would have read that book to look for clues that would tell us more about then-candidate Obama.  Tim Stanley at The Telegraph pieces this all together and asks the questions that most in the press never bothered to ask in 2008:

Why didn’t we know all these details four years ago – even though some of them were published in a best-selling autobiography that was sold to us as if it was a fifth gospel? And yet we knew everything there was to know about Sarah Palin, despite the fact that she was in the race for a much shorter space of time than Obama – and only running for veep.

That’s the significance of the canine and composite revelations – both of them, aside from their delightful “dish” factors, not really revelations at all. That we are only discussing them this late into Obama’s career suggests that the vetting that should have happened four years ago was unforgivably neglected. But, hey, it’s never too late to start.