According to Breitbart's Ben Shapiro, Obama's literary agent firm, Dystel & Goderich, didn't get around to correcting the Kenyan birth detail until sometime between April 3, 2007 and April 21, 2007. That was based on a search of the Wayback Machine. Zero launched his presidential campaign in February 2007.
I can't imagine that the source of the Kenyan birth factoid could have been anyone other than Obama himself. He obviously thought it was a useful component of the legend he was trying to build. He probably simply forgot it was still out there waiting to be found by Google. I wonder who reminded him that it wasn't useful in a presidential campaign?
I don't buy the stuff about applying as a foreign student with an Indonesian or Kenyan passport. I don't think he needed to do that. Columbia and Harvard probably thought he was the ideal affirmative action applicant. Black. Unusual international background. And, as Slow Joe Biden said, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."
In 1990 when Obama was elected President of the Harvard Law Review there were a bunch of articles about him in major newspapers. They all listed Hawaii as his place of birth.
Here’s the New York Times article:
First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review
By FOX BUTTERFIELD, Special to The New York Times
Published: February 06, 1990
The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.
‘’The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,’’ Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ‘’It’s encouraging.
‘’But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,’’ he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment.
[excerpt]
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/06/us/first-black-elected-to-head-harvard-s-law-review.html