His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas [bold mine-DL], Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. ~David Brooks

The first place on this list is a small but curious error, and one that might be subtly encouraged by Obama’s first national ad of the general election in which he talks up his grandparents’ Kansas roots.  While virtually every profile of the candidate remarks on his mother‘s home in Kansas, and the phony controversy over Obama’s birth certificate takes for granted that everyone agrees his birthplace is supposed to be (and was) in Hawaii, there is an idea that seems to be circulating that he spent some time as a child in Kansas.  This simply isn’t true, anyone who has spent any time following Obama’s career knows it isn’t true.  How does it get included on the list?  It’s not as if his non-Kansan childhood is a mystery, since it was remarked upon when he was campaigning in Kansas earlier this year when he made his first visit to his grandfather’s hometown.       

This would be almost entirely irrelevant, except that this serves as a useful example of how small, easily avoidable errors creep into prominent discussions of his biography and create the basis for other false claims on the grounds that we “don’t really know” who Obama is.  If the most basic, readily confirmed facts seem to be in dispute, when there is actually no dispute about them, the room for rumors and bizarre claims grows.  The supposedly “elusive” Obama is not really “elusive” at all, but for some reason people keep insisting on making him into this incomprehensible, protean figure who cannot be fully known.  The information is all there in the public domain, and his biography is as well-known to us as any candidate’s in recent memory (does anyone remember hearing even once about where Bob Dole went to elementary school?) thanks to his own autobiographical work, but somehow we are supposed to believe that his identity “eludes” us.  It would probably seem much more clear if everyone discussing his biography would be a bit more attentive to basic claims about where he lived and grew up.