The Real Price of Obama’s Prevarications

Prevarication, noun: a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth.

On July 5, Fox News ran a piece documenting the "fresh scrutiny" Barack Obama has faced since the June publication of David Maraniss's new book, Barack Obama: The Story.

"By some counts," Fox's James Rosen reported, "The Story presents more than three-dozen instances of material discrepancy where [Dreams from My Father] fails to align with the facts as Maraniss reports them." Although Rosen tried to determine whether Obama was justified in prevaricating as he did in his 1995 memoir, he did not assess the real cost of that prevarication. Neither did those he interviewed.

Among them was black scholar Gerald Early, who caught some heat for his remarks. Said Early of Obama's "fabrications," a word he doesn't hesitate to use, "I don't think it much matters whether Barack Obama has told the absolute truth in Dreams From My Father. What's important is how he wanted to construct his life."

In the full disclosure department, I have met Early. He struck me as a reasonable guy even before he wrote a positive review of my book, Sucker Punch, for the New York Times. In his defense, Early discusses Obama here as a memoirist in the black tradition, not as a would-be president. That latter task has been undertaken most prominently by two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers, David Maraniss and David Remnick. Their standard should have been higher.