Obama's literary agent says he was 'born in Kenya'

SO how did they miss this one?

According to a biography prepared by Barack Obama's literary agents back in 1991, the future President was born, not in Hawaii, but in Kenya.

An embarrassing claim, not only for Obama, who has had to fight off conspiracy theorists' claims he has no right to be president because he wasn't born on American soil, but for conservatives who have tried to exploit this line.

News website Breitbart.com has published a 1991 promotional booklet by Acton & Dystel that describes Mr Obama as "the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, (who) was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii".

Acton & Dystel perpetuated the claim in a later bio it published while Mr Obama was the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and after his keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention set him on the path to the White House.

"He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, has been a long time New York Times bestseller."

The bios are likely to give new life to the birther conspiracy theories that Mr Obama thought he had killed off last year when he released his birth certificate and comprehensively proved he is American born. That move came after months of clamouring by conservative politicians, with Donald Trump and the Tea Party leading the attacks.

The presidential campaign is already dominated by a divisive issue - gay marriage - but birther claims humming in the background will prove hard for Mr Obama to avoid.

Mr Obama's former literary agent issued a statement taking the blame for the wording in the bio and said she never consulted him on it. But a different agent, Jay Acton, told Breitbart.com "that while 'almost nobody' wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom 'the agents deal with on a daily basis', were 'probably’ approached to approve the text as presented".

Breitbart.com denied it was on the side of the birthers and said it published the bio because "complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama's ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him".

Commentators said that the controversy was the result of a "lazy literary agent" and it is hard to disagree.

A 1990 article in the New York Times on Mr Obama's election as the first black president to The Harvard Law Review states: "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."