Obama spent his first year in CHAZ

In his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama claimed his father left Hawaii in 1963, when he "was only 2 years old." Unchallenged by the major media, Obama continued to peddle this fiction throughout his presidency.

It sustained what Obama biographer David Remnick called Obama's "signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal." Like much of what Obama said, it was false.

In the summer of 2008, two journalists set out to tell the story of Obama's early years in Hawaii. One was Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss, whose research would culminate in a 10,000-word article in the Washington Post.

The other was citizen journalist Michael Patrick Leahy. Leahy's research would culminate in an 8,000-word chapter in his self-published book, "What Does Barack Obama Believe?"

Working with considerably fewer resources and without the backing of a celebrated newsroom, Leahy talked to many of the same people Maraniss did. Given his limitations, he did his research strictly by phone and internet.

As a reporter, however, Leahy did have one major advantage. He was prepared to challenge the Obama myth and said so right up front.

"While we can't fault Barack Obama for believing the fictional account his mother told him about his father's role in his early life," wrote Leahy, "we can fault him for failing to undertake even the most rudimentary investigation of the truth behind this fictional account as an adult, and subsequently perpetuating that fiction publicly for over 13 years."

Following the facts where they led him, Leahy concluded that Obama Sr. did not leave Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in Hawaii.

Rather, it was Dunham who "left Barack Obama Sr. in Honolulu and moved into her own apartment in Seattle, Washington." Leahy backed up his claim with school records from the University of Washington, as well as records from the apartments Dunham rented.

He correctly surmised, "Stanley Ann Dunham returned to Hawaii from Seattle, Washington, some time between September 1962 and January 1964, only after Barack Obama Sr. left Honolulu for Harvard." This was information no one in the mainstream media wanted to find. Journalists like Maraniss had a candidacy to protect.

In his Post article, Maraniss made no mention of Seattle. He claimed that Barack Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962, specifying that "before the month was out, [Obama. Sr.] took off, leaving behind his still-teenage wife and namesake child."

In June 1962, Obama was 10 months old, not 2 years old as Obama claimed, but Maraniss made no point of the baby's age or the discrepancy in Obama's retelling.

He also left intact the image of the young couple's "improbable love" and their "abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation" tropes Obama first trotted out at his breakthrough 2004 convention speech.

As it happens, the one place where the tale of Ann Dunham's Seattle hegira percolated was on the "Capitol Hill Seattle Blog." Wrote "jseattle" on Jan. 7, 2009, "There is no doubt baby Barack lived on the hill. It was a tumultuous time in his young mother's life."

Other locals happily chimed in with details, not realizing they were undoing the work the media had done to preserve the Obama mythology.

To be accurate, Dunham's apartment, 516 13th Ave. E, was located in what might be called "Greater CHAZ," just a few blocks beyond the current borders of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

With the spring 2010 publication of "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama," Remnick became the first of the mainstream journalists to mention the Seattle exile.

Although he wrote about Dunham's Seattle adventure casually, as if it were old news, he made a shocking botch of the sequence of events, his timeline a random assortment of conflicting dates and places.

In her 2011 biography of Obama's mother, "A Singular Woman," the New York Times' Janny Scott also allowed that Dunham did go to Seattle but, like Remnick, she played games with the timeline.

In her 2011 biography, "The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father," the Boston Globe's Sally Jacobs manufactured still another inaccurate timeline. Like the others, she seemed intent on preserving the idea that Obama's parents had a real relationship.

It was not until 2012 that Maraniss owned up to the ongoing fraud of Obama's storied nativity.

In his book, "Barack Obama: The Story," he reported that Dunham left Hawaii for Seattle with baby in tow in late August 1961 – when Obama was officially no more than 3 weeks old – and she did not come back to Hawaii until after Barack Sr. had left for Harvard.

In his heavily researched 2017 biography, "Rising Star," civil rights historian David Garrow finally stripped Obama's "multicultural ideal" of all its romance.

According to Garrow, "[T]he young couple never chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann's pregnancy." Dunham left Hawaii as soon as the baby was old enough to travel, and Obama Sr. may never have even seen the child.

Garrow quotes approvingly one unnamed scholar to the effect that Obama Sr. was no more than "a sperm donor in his son's life."

Throughout the Obama years, the very same journalists who mocked "birthers" made a hash out of Obama's nativity story, the story on which he built his candidacy. Would that this was the worst of their oversights.

@jackcashill's forthcoming book, "Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency," is available for pre-order at Amazon.