I think the issues regarding Barack Obama’s memory and his accounts in his books are fairly small potatoes… so far. If it comes to light that Obama has been telling stories that just flat out didn’t happen – say, listening to President Richard Nixon on Christmas Eve 1968 while in Cambodia – then this will be a bigger problem for his campaign. As it is, it is a bit odd that a key memorable image and account that influenced Obama as a young man either didn’t happen or can’t be verified.

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he recounts a watershed moment of his own — a “revelation,” a “violent” awakening, an incident that “permanently altered” his “vision.” Twice he tells how as a 9-year-old he went to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia (a country where his mother had taken him to live) and came across a Life magazine article about a black man who had tried to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The result was a disaster.
“I felt my face and neck get hot,” Obama wrote. “My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page.”
The child had, for the first time, confronted racism and its hideous consequences.
Only there is no such issue of Life magazine. So says the Chicago Tribune, which has gone through the Obama memoir with commendable thoroughness. The newspaper conducted “more than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors” from Obama’s youth and found both trivial and substantial differences between the stories Obama tells and those recalled by others. What emerges from the Tribune’s reporting is a man who seems much less fixated than he insists on finding his racial identity.
When the Tribune told Obama that Life magazine historians could find no such story, Obama suggested it might have been Ebony — “or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?” (The Tribune says Ebony’s archivists also could not come up with such an article.) Indeed, the memory of the event/non-event is so firmly planted in Obama’s mind that it seems to have become an emotional truth for him, far more powerful than an intellectual truth.

But Mike Allen has a slightly meatier example of Obama’s rhetoric not matching the facts:

Speaking early this month at a church in Selma, Ala., Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said: “I’m in Washington. I see what’s going on. I see those powers and principalities have snuck back in there, that they’re writing the energy bills and the drug laws.”
It was a fine populist riff calculated to appeal to Democratic audiences as Obama seeks his party’s presidential nomination. But not only did Obama vote for the Senate’s big energy bill in 2005, he also put out a press release bragging about its provisions, and his Senate Web site carries a news article about the vote headlined, “Senate energy bill contains goodies for Illinois.”
The press release said he voted for the bill “reluctantly” because he wanted something “bolder,” and his staff says there was nothing inconsistent about the comment in Selma.

Hm. Not quite, “I voted for it before I voted against it.” More like, “I voted for it, before I denounced it.”