Five Years Later, The First Vetting

When Obama first announced that he was running for president, the mainstream news media just took his word for it regarding who he was. 

He's not that guy. The public image of Barack Hussein Obama is as much a fabrication as Julia.

Months before Barack Obama knew Mitt Romney would be his political opponent in 2012, the president knew the identity of his foremost literary challenger: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Maraniss, who had been reaching out to Obama’s old friends, classmates and lovers for the past several years.

The product of his big dig, “Barack Obama: The Story,” seems to be a nuanced, even sympathetic portrayal culled from people who still admire Obama. Yet, make no mistake, this is a dangerous book for Obama, and White House staffers have been fretting about it in a low-grade way for a long, long time — in part because it could redefine the self-portrait Obama skillfully created for himself in 1995 with “Dreams from My Father.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/75865.html#ixzz1twBvWbb9