Dumbest Post – Misreading Obama
Via Flickr user richiec
Vanity Fair‘s release of an excerpt from a new book about the President included sections of a journal kept by one of Obama’s college girlfriends. Dylan Byers at Politico noticed one interesting detail, a comment from the President during an interview with the book’s author in which he referred to the girlfriend in his own Dreams from My Father as a “composite.” Byers ran with the detail, writing, “Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the ‘New York girlfriend’ was actually a composite character.”
But as Benjy Sarlin at TPM notes, Obama had already revealed that the character was a composite – in the intro to the book itself.
Politico blew it by not reading an actual copy of the book, in which a then 33-year old Obama — in the introduction — explicitly makes clear that he used composite characters throughout the book. Nor was this added to later editions after the fact: the intro was in the first edition.
Politico’s correction is tepid, at best. Read it and Byers’ original post at Politico.
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