@Sanguine @sneakypete @Elderberry @Bigun@Smokin Joe Nope, under the laws at the time she wasn't old enough to confer citizenship and it would have defaulted to his father's.
Right again. The federal statute said that the mom's American citizenship would not convey to the child unless she had resided in the USA for at least five years after her fourteenth birthday. Stanley Dunham was only eighteen when Obama was born. This fact legally knocked him out of American citizenship. (His dad was not an American citizen, of course.)
I have often thought that this might have been a sore spot for Obama. He might have tried to flip the disappointment of non-eligibility for his mother's citizenship (an inarguably precious commodity) into a hyped-up source of perverse African pride during his early years. According to a schoolmate who was willing to give an interview, Obama
bragged about being
from Kenya, occasionally even claiming that he was the
son of an African prince.It also occurs to me that such hype is pretty hollow when one considers that most folks in wealth-compromised Africa would seem to prefer living in bountiful America.
Claiming to be born of African nobility might impress American kids who might otherwise assume that Obama was born in the stereotypical mud hut, but the deception would just get hollower and hollower in Obama's soul. And the worst thing about hollow hype is that it eventually calls for substantial reinforcement in the soul, I think. If that is the case, I would assume that Obama's angst of non-American citizenship and hollow hype would gradually revamp his emphasis of merely
hyping Africa into
depreciating America pretty vigorously at the same time. I believe Obama was at some level "sincere" in a foul
self-deception wherein he was trying to make Africa out to be more
noble than America--and it surely it suited him to work from both ridiculous ends. (When Obama became POTUS, this farcical effort showed over and over in his simultaneous protestations of love for Kenya and maligning of America.)
Extrapolating just a bit, if Obama ever had a dream of becoming a naturalized American, he understandably lost enthusiasm for that scenario. And once Super-Communist Frank Marshall Davis handed teenaged Obama a mission of attacking America by pursuing politics, I would guess that genuine American citizenship held no appeal whatsoever. (Naturalization need not come up, because it could be finessed in the political world--a world of fraud, of course.)
The White House itself did not come onto the table of conspiratorial opportunity until much later, of course, and the opportunity was too momentous to pass up. Obama had to begin
re-writing his legend after he rose in Illinois politics and even learned (with the encouragement of Ayers and other folks traceable to Davis's old but still thriving Chicago network) that he had a meaningful shot at a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Re-writing his life story with the help of numerous expert liars, Obama was able to confuse and even intimidate pundits like Limbaugh and Levin. They
assumed that Obama had been lying
earlier in life for reasons of getting scholarships through a birthplace
fraud (i.e., not really born in Kenya) and later
posing as a politically exotic commodity, i.e., a truly
AFRICAN African-
American.
The irony is that Rush and Mark and many, many others never had the guts to work through and figure out the legerdemain of Obama's sundry lies. As I said earlier, Obama is not an African-American of any sort. He is merely an
African. (And yeah, I do suspect that the century-old Luo seer's prophecy did fit somewhere into Obama's grandiose dreaming.)
