A recent story in Tablet Magazine by David Samuels, which includes an interview with one of Obama’s biographers, David J. Garrow, gives us some clues about America’s first half-black, half-white president and why he has meticulously hidden details of his life from the American people.
Basically, Barack Obama fantasized about gay sex and was a social-climbing, wanna-be billionaire who loathed his real-life story. Obama carefully refashioned a new character named Barack Obama into a carefully curated creature whose reputation the real Obama and his acolytes continue to tend with the scrupulousness of a bonsai master.
Many of these things have been whispered about the man since he came onto the American political scene. Those who said it out loud were largely dismissed. And, as Garrow acknowledges, an incurious media didn’t want to be that guy who asked too many questions because they’d be called racist.
Only one person ever bothered to look up the love of Obama’s life, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. They were together for years and lived together. "I mean," Garrow told Samuels, "one would think that there’d be a journalist in America who would go look at the student directory in the University of Chicago Library in 2008." Garrow jokes, "Yeah, we’re looking for the Black guy’s white girlfriend." Samuels adds, "I mean, why go through all that trouble to be labeled a racist and lose your job?"
Garrow tracked down Jager, whom Obama asked to marry twice. She claims to have dumped him over the issue of the cavalier statements from an anti-Semitic friend. Jager’s dad’s parents were members of the Dutch Resistance and hid a Jewish child for three years during the Holocaust.
If Obama speaks of Jager at all, which he barely did in his first big book, "Dreams From My Father," a book labeled "historical fiction" by Garrow—"Oh God, did that infuriate him"—it is Obama who dumped her. When Garrow spent eight hours interviewing Obama, the only off-limits topic was his father.