A book pamphlet that says Obama was born in Kenya was a mistake, the publisher said, but critics are unconvinced.
The pamphlet advertises a book by Obama. It was published and circulated by his then-literary agent, Acton & Dystel, to publishers in hopes of selling what was to be his first book, "Journeys in Black and White."
The President abandoned the book, later publishing "Dreams of My Father" instead.
The pamphlet states:
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.
The pamphlet was uncovered by www.breitbart.com and kicked off controversy about how this discrepancy occurred.
Obama was born in Hawaii and, despite the claims of conservative "birthers" who believe he was born abroad, few critics argued the pamphlet proved the President's foreign origin.
"It is evidence--not of the President's foreign origin, but that Barack Obama's public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times," an editor's note stated on breitbart.com.
Rush Limbaugh speculated on his radio talk show on May 17 that Obama lied to his agent to make himself sound more interesting. "It's just an effort to make himself sound more exotic, and what it really indicates is that the guy will lie. He will exaggerate," Limbaugh said.
The author of the pamphlet denounced the speculations, saying the slip-up was hers. "This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii," she told Political Wire.
