Some Obama info links

A few Obama-related links for your perusal.

On whether Obama inflated his resume:

New York Times article from last October: Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say :

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

Another article: Co-Workers: Obama Inflated His Resume citing at length Dan Armstrong, one of his co-workers quoted in the New York Times piece:

Indeed, there would seem to be an especially conspicuous absence of witnesses to the years after graduated from Columbia and before he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer.

Well, it turns out that one of his co-workers, Dan Armstrong, has in fact written about Mr. Obama during those days. And while he is an admitted fan of Obama’s, he claims that he has inflated his resume considerably.

Here's the co-worker's original blog post, dated July 2005: Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume:

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, 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.

On the lack of people from his past willing to endorse Obama at the DNC Convention:

Columnist and political commentator Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post, notes the lack of people coming forward to vouch for Obama:

Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself.

Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that, except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States. A leap of such audacity is odd. The air of unease at the Democratic convention this week was not just a result of the Clinton psychodrama. The deeper anxiety was that the party was nominating a man of many gifts but precious few accomplishments -- bearing even fewer witnesses.

On Obama's Harvard Law days:

Article in World Net Daily: Why Obama is mum about Harvard:

For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop, Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.

According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science but without honors.

In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.

This last article is mostly a hit piece on Obama, but it does give some background to his Harvard Law days and some of his alleged connections, and cites, among others, New York Times reports from the period.