Assuming the identity is valid (and there seems to be little thus far to indicate that it isn’t) then Vanity Fair in Italy has apparently located Barack Obama’s long lost (or not so lost) half brother, George.
The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it had found George Hussein Onyango Obama living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.
Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate’s half-brothers, spoke for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic contender.
“No-one knows who I am,” he told the magazine, before claiming: “I live here on less than a dollar a month.”
We can leave for another day the question of whether or not this should be an issue in the presidential election, but I think we can rest assured that it will. It seems that George has been living for some while in a shanty town outside of Nairobi in a six by nine foot shack. He’s not in contact with any of his family and lives by his wits in a town where street violence is the norm. He also claims that he doesn’t mention his famous brother in conversations because he is “ashamed.” (It’s unclear if he meant he was ashamed of his brother or embarassed by his own impoverished conditions.)
Why does this matter to the presumptive Democratic nominee? Because if you found out that an elected official, running for high office and the multi-million dollar recipient of book deals, etc. was keeping his mother in a cut-rate old folks home eating Alpo, you might not think very highly of him. Having a brother living in such conditions is certainly not much better.
But was George really a “long lost” brother of Barack Obama’s? Perhaps not.
He has only met his famous older brother twice – once when he was just five and the last time in 2006 when Senator Obama was on a tour of East Africa and visited Nairobi.
The Illinois senator mentions his brother in his autobiography, describing him in just one passing paragraph as a “beautiful boy with a rounded head”.
Of their second meeting, George Obama said: “It was very brief, we spoke for just a few minutes. It was like meeting a complete stranger.”
So Obama knew of his brother’s existence as recently as two years ago and the guy remains living in misery in some crime infested, dirt road shantytown? There may indeed be more to the story than meets the eye. Perhaps George prefers no contact with his famous sibling and prefers not to accept any charity? That has an odd ring to it, though. Expect some questions to be put to Obama over this one.
UPDATE: Some good comments and e-mails coming inon this one. Among the more interesting was this question:
If Obama is elected, would the secret service be required to protect George Obama? Would the requirement be affected by the half brother status as opposed to a full blood brother? Or would that fact that George isn’t a U.S. citizen or resident affect the requirement?
An interesting question indeed.
(Photo by Guy Calaf, Vanity Fair, Italy)