On Saturday, Obama made his first visit to an Indiana house built by a great-great- great-grandfather for a potluck dinner with neighbors. Obama's local patrimony was recently uncovered by campaign researchers, an aide said, and the candidate was uncharacteristically short on words about it. "Look at this: the Dunham, uh . . ." he said, bounding off his bus toward the white clapboard house. After a long silence, he described it as a homestead. (my emphasis.)

Why would Obama do this -- tell family stories he's only recently learned from others? According to the same Boston Globe article, the campaign decided Obama was better off touting his mother's family than his father's Kenyan roots.

Entering tomorrow's primaries for the first time defensive about his identity - against charges that he is an elitist, distant from everyday concerns - Obama's campaign is placing new attention on some overlooked biographical points.

"The bio is our central focus," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist. "The bio is valuable because he is not a faux advocate for working folks."

Previously, the Obama strategy was to focus on his multiculturalism and the Kenyan side of his family:

While Obama's self-introduction in his famous 2004 Democratic convention speech also began with his parents, he told it then as a serendipitous romance whose unlikely participants - a Kenyan black man and Kansan white woman - spawned a "skinny kid with a funny name" uniquely able to bring people together.

Having written a memoir, "Dreams from My Father," about the search for his father's Kenyan relatives, Obama's focus in recent days turned to the roots of his mother, Ann Dunham. Out is the paternal grandfather who cooked for the British as a domestic servant. In is the one who enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor and served under General George S. Patton in Europe. (He married the woman Obama described last month as a "typical white person.") (my emphasis.)

The reaction they got in Indiana to his mother's family was positive.

Obama's attention to the less exotic component of his biracial makeup appealed to Irene Evans, who watched him from a picnic blanket in Noblesville. "I think white people can identify with the white background of his family," said Evans, 60, a social worker from Indianapolis who is white.

Obama has used his new biographical initiative to reassert his patriotism. "My belief in America," said Obama, is grounded in the support his mother's family received from federal programs, such as the GI Bill, Federal Housing Authority loans, and food stamps. He did not mention the Kennedy-era government scholarship that Obama has said was responsible for his "very existence," by bringing his father to the United States as a foreign student.

"When I met my wife, it turned out she had the same story," Obama said Friday. Economic hardship is "part of what we've been," he said, citing their challenges as a couple paying for day care, gas, and student loans.

"We didn't recognize, I think, the caricature that's been painted of us over the last couple of weeks," Obama said Friday, citing the image of "elitist, intellectual pointy-head types" at an Indianapolis press conference. "The fact is our lives, if you look back over the last two decades, more closely approximate the lives of the average voters than any other candidate."

In other words, he's not repeating the memory-challenged words of an elderly grandfather or great-uncle. He's repeating what he's been told about them, because his campaign decided they should be the focus of his biographical narrative.

Still not convinced? Here's one more example. In his 2002 anti-war speech, Obama said his grandfather enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, which was December, 1941. [Charleston Gazette (West Virginia) April 8, 2008, Tuesday, available on Lexis.com]

"My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

Here is the WWII Kansas Veterans Index. His grandfather, Stanley A. Dunham, enlisted in the Army on June 18 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor. [Hat tip Baldilocks.)

There's no requirement in my mind that a presidential candidate have close family ties. But if a candidate is going to tout his family values and family history as a reason voters should view him as "just like us," his stories should at least be genuine, not something he learns from campaign staffers.

Update : The Charleston Gazette reprinted Obama's 2002 anti-war speech, he did not repeat the comments about his uncle while cammpaigning in W.Va. He did talk, however, talk about his grandfather enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor [IN CHARLESTON, OBAMA VOWS TO KEEP FAITH WITH OUR VETERANS States News Service May 12, 2008]:

My grandfather - Stanley Dunham - enlisted after Pearl Harbor and went on to march in Patton's Army. My grandmother worked on a bomber assembly line while he was gone, and my mother was born at Fort Leavenworth. When he returned, it was to a country that gave him the chance to college on the GI Bill; to buy his first home with a loan from the FHA; to move his family west, all the way to Hawaii, where he and my grandmother helped raise me. Today, my grandfather is buried in the Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, where 776 victims of Pearl Harbor are laid to rest.

I knew him when he was older. But whenever I meet young men and women along the campaign trail who are serving in the military today, I think about what my grandfather was like when he enlisted - a fresh-faced man of twenty-three, with a heart laugh and an easy smile.

I can still remember the day that we laid my grandfather to rest. In a cemetery lined with the graves of Americans who have sacrificed for our country, we heard the solemn notes of Taps and the crack of guns fired in salute; we watched as a folded flag was handed to my grandmother and my grandfather was laid to rest. ....

He has mentioned his grandfather enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor many times. The earliest other reference to his uncle I could find was in an article titled "Military Update: PTSD case review hit; more meds moving off formulary", The Capital (Annapolis, MD) September 30, 2005 :

Both his grandfather and great uncle served in World War II, said Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), but only his great uncle entered a Nazi death camp as the war came to a close. "According to the story my grandmother told," said the senator in a phone interview, "when he got home he went up to his parents' house, into the attic, and didn't talk for about six months."

I also received by e-mail a purported KS military registration for his grandfather for January 1942 rather than June with an explanation that it takes a month to be accepted after you enlist. So his grandfather may have enlisted in January rather than June.

More to the point, as to my theory that Obama didn't know his mother's relatives (other than his grandparents) very well before his campaign advisers urged him to switch from talking about his father's side of the family to his mother's, that seems to be the case from the transcript and article below:

In Kansas, Obama Tells His Family Story National Public Radio (NPR) January 30, 2008:

ONYEA: On his plane heading to Kansas, Obama told reporters some of his cousins would be attending the rally, joking that we probably wouldn't think they were his cousins if we spotted them in a crowd. Sure enough, at the event, he made an introduction.

Sen. OBAMA: And I've got another relative here at the - McCurry, where'd she go? There she is.

GONYEA: A 72-year-old white woman stood up in the audience not far from the stage - Margaret McCurry Wolf.

Ms. MARGARET McCURRY WOLF (Senator Barack Obama's Grandmother): His grandmother is my first cousin and we lived in Wichita and his grandma grew up in Augusta so we spent a lot of time on holidays and picnics with his grandma.

GONYEA: Wolf says she first heard of Barack Obama about four years ago and got a huge surprise one day while watching him on TV. Obama was being interviewed about his new book and began talking about his maternal grandmother.

Ms. WOLF: I looked at my husband, I just started shivering. I said that's Stanley Ann's son. I said he is my cousin.

Finally, from a January, 2008 article on his first-ever visit to El Dorado, KS [THE NATION; Obama explores Kansas family roots; In a deeply Republican state, the Democrat speaks about unity and his grandparents' humble beginnings. Los Angeles Times January 30, 2008,]

Standing in a packed gym in wind-swept Midwest oil country, Barack Obama was trying to explain how he and the 72-year-old white woman in the audience, with her hair band and spangly blue cardigan, happen to be related.

Obama had traveled here to his grandfather's birthplace to make a point about humble beginnings and possibility, about unity and shared purpose, and he was using his family's roots in deeply Republican Kansas as an illustration. At least, he was trying to.

Something about the McCurry family and a woman named Ruth, Obama began, tentative. She "was my grandfather's aunt, right? My grandmother's first cousin? . . . We're going through my family tree, trying to figure it all out."

The Illinois senator never got it quite right, but Margaret McCurry Wolf of Hutchinson, Kan. -- looking extremely proud and a little bit flustered -- was willing to explain their bond to anyone who asked.

"His grandmother is my first cousin," said Wolf, who had switched her voter registration from Republican to Democrat a month ago so she could caucus for Obama on Feb. 5. "I want him to make it so bad. I pray daily for him."

The candidate is not in South Carolina anymore, where African Americans helped him to victory in the primary on Saturday. When he talks inclusiveness in El Do-RAY-do (population 12,000, 94% white), he means something just a little bit different.

My only point is, as I've said above, Obama seems not to be making mistakes about his relatives because he's repeating what he's been told about them since his campaign decided they should be the focus of his biographical narrative.

Again, there's no requirement in my mind that a presidential candidate have close family ties. But if a candidate is going to tout his family values and family history as a reason voters should view him as "just like us," he should at least have a personal relationshiop with them, not just repeat what he's learned from campaign staffers and say that constitutes "roots."

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