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| Genieveve Cook is a former girlfriend |
That somebody tracked down President Obama's old girlfriends. Journalists long ago tracked down First Lady Michelle Obama's high school boyfriend and prom date. Back in 2008, they tracked down some woman whom then-presidential-candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had dated 40 or 50 years ago (not to mention some lobbyist who he allegedly dated while married). When they can't track down the former lovers of an attractive and charismatic black man, they're either white chicks who he's hiding for image reasons or he's gay. Since Obama ain't the latter, it could only be the former. I see that we were right. From the Chicago Sun-Times: "No one has heard from Barack Obama’s former girlfriends until now, when two of them — Genevieve Cook and Alex McNear, complete with love letters and a diary detailing their relationships — surface in a new Obama biography by David Maraniss. Obama’s 'sexual warmth is definitely there,' Cook wrote on Feb. 25, 1984, 'but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all.'"
The article continues: "The article continues: "Obama was 22 and living in New York when he started 'his most serious romance yet' with Cook in 1983, Maraniss writes in
Barack Obama: The Story (Simon & Schuster, $32.50), excerpted in the June issue of Vanity Fair. (The book will be released on June 19.) He was 'guarded, controlled,' a man who built a 'veil' around himself, Cook wrote in her journal as she puzzled over how they could be so close — yet so far apart at the same time. 'When she told him that she loved him,' Cook recalled for Maraniss, 'his response was not ‘I love you too,’ but ‘thank-you” — as though he appreciated that someone loved him.'"
More: "McNear was a friend from when Obama attended Occidential College in California, 'who had enchanted Obama when she was co-editing' a campus literary magazine. The more profound relationship was with Cook, three years older than Obama, the daughter of an Australian diplomat who — as did he — lived for a time in Indonesia. 'Day by day, week by week, her perceptions of him became more complicated,' Maraniss writes about Cook’s journal entries..."
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| 6 years later, he met Michelle Robinson |
A Vanity Fair article by Mr. Maraniss goes into more detail. Ms. Cook's early 1980s journal entries foreshadow a shift in then-young Barack Obama's life: "Genevieve and Barack talked about race quite often, as part of his inner need to find a sense of belonging. She sympathized and encouraged his search for identity. If she felt like an outsider, he was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? He confessed to her that at times 'he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.' At some point that summer she realized that, 'in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black.'
More: "Early in Barack’s relationship with Genevieve, he had told her about 'his adolescent image of the perfect ideal woman' and how he had searched for her 'at the expense of hooking up with available girls.' Who was this ideal woman? Genevieve conjured her in her mind, and it was someone other than herself. She wrote, 'I can’t help thinking that what he would really want, be powerfully drawn to, was a woman, very strong, very upright, a fighter, a laugher, well — experienced — a black woman I keep seeing her as.”
