“David never existed, he never lived so he never died,”
It’s a Wonderful Life that never was.
LOOKING FOR DAVID:
...but what jumped out at me was the reference to “just last week I was discussing the problem with the secretary of HUD at a White House dinner. Terrific guy, Jack.” I presume that’s a reference to Jack Kemp.
But Jack Kemp didn’t become secretary of HUD until 1989, when George H. W. Bush took office. Obama spent most of Bush’s term at Harvard Law School. (And at this point in DFMF, Obama hasn’t even moved to Chicago yet, where he spent three years before going to Harvard.) I noted last summer that the reference didn’t quite add up, even granting that Obama writes in the introduction, “for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.”
A bit of digging reveals that it is pretty tough to find when Obama’s half-brother David Ndesandjo died; some sites put it at 1987. So in the span of several pages, we have an anedote from 1983 (when Obama tells the guard he is 22), his half-brother’s death (at age 25-26?), and a reference to Kemp (which couldn’t have happened before Obama was 28).
SO LET'S PLAY WHO CAN FIND DAVID, SHALL WE?