First, I think I’ve come up with something that doesn’t add up, even granting that Obama writes in the introduction, “for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.”

Obama describes interviewing for a position at “a prominent civil rights organization” in New York City. The time is sometime not too long after Obama’s graduation in 1983. Two pages earlier, he mentions to a building guard he is twenty-two and working at a “consulting house to multinational corporations,” first as a research assistant, then as a financial writer. He makes a reference to “months passed”, so maybe this is 1984 or 1985.

He was a tall, handsome black man, dressed in a crisp white shirt, a paisley tie, and red suspenders. His office was furnished with Italian chairs and African sculpture, a bar service built into the exposed brick. Through a tall window, sunlight streamed down on a bust of Dr. King.
“I like it,” the director said looking over my resume. “Particularly the corporate experience. That’s the real business of a civil rights organization these days. Protest and pickets won’t cut it anymore. To get the job done, we’ve got to forge links between business, government, and the inner city.” He clasped his broad hands together, then showed me a glossy annual report opened to a page that listed the organization’s board of directors. There was one black minister and then white corporate executives. “You see?” the organizer said. “Public-private partnerships. The key to the future. And that’s where young people like yourself come in. Educated. Self-assured. Comfortable in boardrooms. Why, just last week I was discussing the problem with the secretary of HUD at a White House dinner. Terrific guy, Jack. He’d be interested in meeting a young man like you. Of course I’m a registered Democrat, but we have to learn to work with whoever’s in power…”

The scene of a Mephistophelean offer from the ultimate sell-out is a little too perfect in a lot of ways, but what jumped out at me was the reference to “just last week I was discussing the problem with the secretary of HUD at a White House dinner. Terrific guy, Jack.” I presume that’s a reference to Jack Kemp.

But Jack Kemp didn’t become Secretary of HUD until 1989, when George H.W. Bush took office.

A few pages earlier, I noted one of the most pessimistic notes from Obama, one hard to imagine coming from any other presidential candidate: “What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment.”

I was going to question a section involving his work at the consulting house, but now I find that a former co-worker has concluded entire passages of Obama’s experience there are inaccurate: “I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s.I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book.”

UPDATE: Campaign Spot reader Cole notes that during the Reagan administration, the HUD secretary was an African-American, Samuel Pierce.