You say that as if I have any history of handwaving away news sources.
I plan on dropping this until we get some proof one way or the other, at which point either I’ll apologize to you or I’ll expect you to apologize to me - as appropriate.
For what it’s worth, I read Norwegian with no problems whatsoever and the translation is word for word perfect, the only slight hiccup being Obama’s job title, as footnoted.
VG (Verdens Gang - “Events of the world”, I guess…) is not a heavy-weight newspaper like the Wall Street Journal, but it is very much real news magazine, not a tabloid. I’d be surprised if they haven’t done due diligence on the research.
Norwegian signing in.
VG is one of the biggest newspapers in Norway, and, although it can be a bit sensationalist (I’m not a fan), it is usually quite credible. There is at least no reason to question whether the letter from Obama has a different content than written. So I guess it all depends on whether the woman in question is trustworthy or someone who would fake a letter like that and make up the story in order to get in a Norwegian newspaper.
It’s a nice story and I’m inclined to believe it.
Must’ve gotten my Scandinavian newspapers mixed up. Verdens Gang is in fact sold in tabloid format, but it’s still considered a decent newspaper as regards quality of the journalism.
Read more carefully. It was the American parents of the girl who wrote to Obama and said that they’d vote for him.
I don’t see this story as all that unbelievable. Hell, one time I gave a desperate, out-of-state stranger $20 for some gas he’d already pumped but couldn’t pay for, and I suppose I’ve never been a generous enough person to give my time as a community organizer, or any kind of volunteer work, really. Stands to reason that a person more generous than myself might give up a larger chunk of change to help a stranger than I would. And seeing as how it makes such a great story, it also stands to reason that it would pop up when Obama ran for president.
I’m not saying that it’s definitely true, but nothing about it has a terribly implausible ring to my ears.
Absentee ballots? Okay…
I once had a hell of a voting day experience because, less than 30 days before the election, I moved to a new address six blocks from the old one. But, whatever.
No, not absentee ballots. Two votes from two people in Kansas. The mother and father of the girl who went to Norway.
But then you didn’t read too closely the first time, so I guess I shouldn’t have expected you to read the post directy before yours.
I’ve lived in the UK for 12 years and am still allowed to vote in Nebraska elections via absentee ballot. If you keep your citizenship (and why wouldn’t you?) it’s pretty simple.
Surely this story will appear in some US media outlet soon and Obama will confirm or deny it. I’m surprised they are so slow on the uptake.
I could understand if major news outlets were hesitant to run something this soft with less than a month to go before the election. It’d get slammed as irrelevant, which it is, but if true it’s a nice story.
And so you find it entirely incredible that some people would be sufficiently organized and motivated to both obtain absentee ballots and use them?
Okay… But whatever.
Don’t know or much care if the story is true, but this point annoyed me. If I knew that I were going to be somewhere other than my voting district on November 4th, I would make damned sure to get and use an absentee ballot.
I’ll help translate the original in that case. However, since we know that McCain broke his arms as he ditched his plane into Truc Bach lake, he would have had to perform the Heimlich is some other way. This means that his life-saving gesture would have been hard to distinguish from kicking some poor kid in the gut. No wonder he wasn’t popular.
There’s nothing inconsistent with Obama’s personality in this story, and I’d love it if it were true, but I have a couple of questions. Why would he give an address in Kansas? His grandparents lived in Hawaii. His mother was spending time both in Hawaii, working on her Ph.D., and in Indonesia, where she did work concerned with microfinance. Why would he give the woman anything other than his address in Massachusetts? Who did he even know in Kansas?
What was Obama doing at Miami Airport? In November 2, 1988, he was a first-year student at Harvard Law School. This was several weeks before Thanksgiving. Why would he be on vacation at the time?
Please, please, please, I’m asking these as genuine questions. I have no agenda in this. As I said, I think this story is consistent with Obama’s personality. Please, please, please, don’t reply with “You piece of garbage, how dare you doubt this story?”
The question that came to my mind was how come the girl didn’t have any money? She was traveling abroad by herself, for Og’s sake! No traveler’s checks, credit cards or anything?
It could be true, I suppose, but it just sounds dumb.
Typical elitist jerk, peeling off a benjie from his roll of hundreds to get some hysterical woman out of his way in the airport ticket line.
On a more serious note, neutron star, you should watch who you’re accusing of not reading closely when you yourself miss passages like this:
(emphasis mine)
These are both good questions, particulary the Kansas one since he never lived there. I guess it’s possible that it’s a detail that was misremembered (it was 20 years ago), or it might be a fatal flaw in the story.
Dolores Reborn writes:
> The question that came to my mind was how come the girl didn’t have any
> money? She was traveling abroad by herself, for Og’s sake! No traveler’s
> checks, credit cards or anything?
In 1974, I traveled by Greyhound from Sarasota, Florida to Austin, Texas and back. I was a senior in college and was visiting the grad school I would be attending. I had purchased the bus ticket both ways, but I had very little money with me. I had to ride my bike to the bus station and lock it onto a pole in the parking lot. If it had been stolen during the several days I was gone, I would have had to walk home, which was several miles from the bus station. I didn’t have any credit cards then. I didn’t get one till I was thirty-two years old. (It wasn’t as common to have credit cards at the time.) It was many years after this before I ever saw a traveler’s check. I arrived back in Sarasota with essentially no money in my pocket. I was only able to get any food on the ride back because I was given five dollars in Austin from someone who had never met me before. I paid him with a check, but he knew nothing about me.
[hijack]If you applied for and got UK citizenship, you’d lose your American one. The US only recognises dual citizenship for immigrants, not emigrants.[/hijack]
I did some cheap traveling back in my youth also, however:
And it was 1988.