As WND reported, radio host Rush Limbaugh raised an intriguing question on the air: "Where are all of Obama's former girlfriends?"
In referring to past email inquiries he received on this subject, Limbaugh continued, "They are interesting because those people haven't surfaced. There aren't any ex-girlfriends that have admitted it."
In fact, I wrote about this question in my book, "Deconstructing Obama," and on these pages last year. As the likely source of these rumors, I thought I might clarify them, at least to the degree they can be clarified.
As it happens, Obama inadvertently raised the girlfriend issue himself in his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father." Published when he was 33, "Dreams" documents Obama's all-consuming search for identity.
Whether he dated white women or black women – and what he might have learned from either – matters, but Obama gives the reader very close to nothing.
"Cosby never got the girl on 'I Spy,'" he laments in "Dreams," but in his own retelling, he does not do much better.
Although Obama spent 13 years on the mainland as a single man, on only one occasion in "Dreams" does Obama make any reference to his love life.
In a brief recounting, he tells his half-sister, Auma, that in addition to a white woman he had loved and lost, "There are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good."
The problem is that Obama shares with the reader not a word about any of the black ladies, and not one of them has come forward on her own.
The white woman in question presents a different set of problems. In terms of height, hair color, eye color, parentage and highly specific place of origin – namely a large country estate with a lake in the middle – she is a dead ringer for Bill Ayers' lost love, the late Weatherwoman Diana Oughton.
In his definitive Obama-friendly biography, "The Bridge," David Remnick likewise falls silent on the subject of girlfriends, white or black.
Remnick interviews hundreds of people in Obama's life, but unless I missed something, he offers not a single interview of an Obama girlfriend.
Obama biographer Christopher Andersen made a serious effort to identify the mystery white woman, but he failed.
"No one," he writes, "including [Obama's] roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence."
To be sure, Obama did court and marry his wife, Michelle. This tale of courtship, however, is strikingly devoid of any reference to love, sex or romance.
At his most passionate, Obama says of Michelle, "In her eminent practicality and Midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little of Toot [his grandmother]." That description must surely have warmed Michelle's heart.
In his second book, "Audacity of Hope," Obama does not even get the date of their first meeting right. "I met Michelle in the summer of 1988," he writes, "while we were both working at Sidley & Austin."
Obama acknowledges he had just finished his first year at law school, but he did not begin Harvard Law until the fall of 1988.
As has become more and more evident, there are some serious manipulations in the Obama narrative. If the year he first met Michelle is not one of them, the courtship of the mystery white woman is.
This is what happens when other people write your books.
