<p>I read this today in the NY Times… Maureen Dowd’s column. She claims that Obama wrote this.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02dowd.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02dowd.html</a></p>
<p>“But he notes that Obama’s abandonment by his African father at the age of 2 marked him. “Much of the excitement that surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly tethered to race,” Steele writes. “Yet the very arc of his life — from Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago — has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to ‘belong’ irrefutably to the black identity.” (Obama wrote that he dropped a white girlfriend partly because of her race.)”</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any implication that he chose his wife for political reasons, just that he preferred to have a black identity. I don’t think it’s all that unusual for people to restrict their choice of spouse to a particular group. For example, many people in my extended family considered only Roman Catholics.</p>