Dreaming It Up

Team Obama has a message for all you old-school, bourgeois types who haven't yet evolved beyond getting married and registering for gifts: Barack Obama needs your wedding gifts more than you do!

Wherever money changes hands, there you will find Obama, sniffing it out and wanting a cut. See Twitchy for more helpful fundraising suggestions. (Husband Pundit was right on target in '09: Obama really does want all your stuff. If you fell for him last time, please try not to be so stupid again this November. Thanks!)

Also from the Obama Campaign, this peculiar summertime plea from the first lady:

For the first 10 years of our marriage, Barack and I lived in an apartment in my hometown of Chicago.

The winters there can be pretty harsh, but no matter how snowy or icy it got, Barack would head out into the cold — shovel in hand — to dig my car out before I went to work.

In all our years of marriage, he’s always looked out for me. Now, I see that same commitment every day to you and to this country.

The only way we’ll win this election is if we can rely on one another like that, all the way to November 6th. Barack is working hard, but he can’t do this alone — he needs your help.

Make a donation today to build this campaign — when you do, you’ll be automatically entered to join Barack and me for a casual dinner:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Barack-and-Me

Your flight, your meal, your accommodations — that’s all taken care of. Just bring yourself and a guest, and get ready to enjoy a good meal together.

Thanks,

Michelle

Hmmm. Let's set aside that silliness about Obama "looking out for us." Trivial and real-people-normal though it is, I find myself questioning the literal story. If Michelle hadn't asserted it, I might have believed Barack regularly shoveled snow, but no unit of Obama biographical data can be taken as true, or even truish, without assiduous fact checking. My guess: Barack (or a composite thereof, perhaps the brother-in-law of an acquaintance-composite from his Columbia days) shoveled snow (or perhaps scraped the windshield or warmed up the car one morning, or took out the trash, or at least replaced the empty toilet paper roll) at his wife-composite's gentle request, so she could get out to her realish-job and fend off another of those debilitating child-induced headaches. Whatever the chore, it was likely the hardest work he's ever done and he will never, ever, do it again. The campaign probably racked its brains trying to think of some kind of domestic task he might have performed once in the summer but came up with nothing even remotely plausible. (Photo ops don't count.)

"Working in the Garden"

Why are we so skeptical? Simply because he's not who he says he is. That wouldn't have sold books or advanced his political career. Mark Steyn:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

Oh. What a falling off that is from the Dreamed Up About My Father version. But does it really matter? Yes, actually. Mark:

In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over Dreams from My Father is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.”  We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straightjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

Read the rest. Steyn is brilliant, as usual.

Related: In the Land of Make Believe, Anything Goes and The self-made-up man

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