"This  was nothing more than a fact checking error by me - an agency assistant at the  time," Miriam Goderich, now a named partner in the literary agency, Dystel &  Goderich, wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC News.  "There was never any information given to us  by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any  way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your  readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing  more."

This  confession rings false to the point of preposterous for any number of  reasons.  Let us start with the obvious.  At the time, 1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among its least significant.   How likely is it that Goderich would have remembered enough about a 1991 "error"  to know it was hers, especially since it went uncorrected through several  revisions until changed in 2007?  To make this claim credible, there would have  to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama submission in which he lists  an Hawaiian birth.  I am confident that there is no such  submission.

Former  publisher Tom Lipscomb does not buy Goderich's explanation for a New York  minute.  "As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I  think this is an amazing MIRACLE," writes Lipscomb emphatically on Power  Line.  "It is the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an  editorial assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, wrong  dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird country of origin like  Kenya for an author?"

The  Breitbart people followed up with a piece by Steve Boman, a Jane Dystel client in the  mid-1990s, who noted,  "All material she used in our proposals came  directly from me and my writing partner."  This is standard.  In the  eight books I have written under my own name, I have reviewed all biographical  information sent out about me either by agent or publisher.  Like most  authors, I have let a little fluff pass, but not much.

The  most interesting "tell" in the 1991 Acton & Dystel brochure relates to what  was said about Obama's career in the business world.  Obama, the reader  learns, "worked as a financial journalist and editor for  Business International Corporation."

In Dreams from My Father, Obama inflated his stint at Business  International even more and transformed it into a faux moment of racial  awareness, one of at least a half-dozen concocted racial melodramas in the  book.  As Obama tells the story, a "consulting house to multinational  corporations" hired him and promptly promoted him to the position of "financial  writer."

Here,  he felt like "a spy behind enemy lines," and a guilty one at that.  "As far  as I could tell," he adds, "I was the only black man in the company."  He  does not boast of his racial uniqueness.  Rather, in full grievance mode,  he considers it "a source of shame."  Indeed, the whole experience troubled  him:

I  had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of  an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my  reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my  hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry,  barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had  told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of  resolve.

As  early as July 2005, however, former co-worker and Obama fan Dan Armstrong  revealed Obama's whole account to be a "serious exaggeration."  Obama  worked at not a multinational corporation, but a "small company that published  newsletters." He was not the only black person who worked  there.  He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie,  interview international businessmen, or write articles.  He mostly just  copy-edited business items and slipped them into a three-ring binder for the  company's customers.

Are  we supposed to believe that Goderich not only changed Obama's birthplace from  Hawaii to Kenya, but also transformed him from a grunt filling three-ring  binders into a "financial journalist and editor"?

When  this discrepancy surfaced years later, pundits in either camp were confused as  to why Obama would lie about such seemingly irrelevant details.  There are  two good, non-exclusive possibilities.  For one, the exaggeration enables  the reader to see Obama as he would like to see himself -- "a spy behind enemy  lines."  For another, Obama's co-author, Bill Ayers, once again took the  framework of Obama's life and roughed in the details.

In Fugitive Days, Ayers' 2001 memoir, he uses the phrase "behind enemy  lines" almost literally to describe his and his comrades' quiet infiltration of  the opponent's position.  Wife Bernardine Dohrn has said the same in  public.  When the Weather Underground declared its state of war with the  United States in May 1970, Dohrn warned that people fighting "Amerikan  imperialism" all over the world "look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic  position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the  empire."

The  bottom line is this: Obama has been creating and shifting identities his entire  adult life.  If the agency brochure was a snapshot of the 1991 Obama, Dreams captured him in his 1995 pose: hip, black, progressive, wounded by racial slights but able to overcome  them, just the man to lead Chicago into the 21^st century, then the  extent of his and Ayers's ambition for him.

"I  met [Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s[,]"  Bill Ayers would tell Salon, likely pushing the actual date back several years.  "And  everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first  two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of  Chicago."

Friend  Cassandra Butts traced that ambition back at least to Harvard.  "He wanted  to be mayor of Chicago and that was all he ever talked about as far as holding  office," she would tell early Obama biographer David Mendell.

No  one would have challenged Obama's biography had he not gone beyond Chicago, but  he did.  And so where he was born matters, and whether he even wrote his  own biography matters, too.  As much as I know about Obama, I don't know or  pretend to know the answer -- at least to the first of those two  questions.