In The Future, We Will All Be Cherokee For 15 Minutes

Now Barack Hussein Obama claims that, like Elizabeth Warren, he too is Cherokee.

President Barack Obama and Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren have more in common than just their liberal political ideology, Harvard Law pedigree, and Democratic Party affiliation. Both claim Cherokee ancestry, and neither can prove it.

Ms. Warren's claims are current and well known, but President Obama's claims were made back in 1995, when his memoir, Dreams from My Father, was published. On pages 12 and 13 of the 2004 paperback edition, the President unequivocally asserts his Cherokee ancestry:

If asked, Toot [Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyne Payne Dunham] would turn her head in profile to show off her beaked nose, which, along with a pair of jet-black eyes, was offered as proof of Cherokee blood.

But an old, sepia toned photograph on the bookshelf spoke most eloquently of their [grandparents Stanley and Madelyne Dunham’s] roots.  It showed Toot’s grandparents, of Scottish and English stock, standing in front of a ramshackle homestead, unsmiling and dressed in coarse wool, their eyes squinting at the sun baked flinty life that stretched before them…in their eyes one could see truths that I would have to learn later as facts…that while one of my great-great grandfathers, Christopher Columbus Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife’s mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis…that although another distant ancestor had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee, such lineage was a source of shame to Toot’s mother [Leona McCurry Payne] who blanched whenever someone mentioned the subject and hoped to carry the secret to her grave.

Unlike Ms. Warren, no one has ever alleged that President Obama may have secured employment due to his claim of Native American ancestry. Like Ms. Warren, however, the President puts forth his claim with emphatic certitude, although until now no one has sought to ask him to provide evidence to prove it.