Barack Obama's Aunt, a Last-Minute Surprise

In presidential campaigns, some last-minute surprises are major and some last-minute surprises are minor. The queston regarding Senator Barack Obama's aunt living in the United States would rank in the minor last-minute surprise group.

Richard M. Nixon, during the final week of his 1972 campaign against George McGovern, declared that "peace is at hand" in the Vietnam War. Nixon said that he could not get into the sensitive details of negotiations, but that the national nightmare in Southeast Asia was finally coming to an end. Henry Kissinger was all over the newscasts, enacting his so-called shuttle diplomacy.

Now in this case, Richard Nixon pulled a major last-minute surprise. It turned out that "peace is at hand" was nowhere near the truth, because the last Americians were not airlifted out until 1975, when the North Vietnamese overran Saigon. The real national nightmare was the Watergate scandal over campaign tricks and coverups that forced Nixon to resign in 1974. Still, there was little that George McGovern could do about Nixon's last-minute surprise, other than to skeptically say, "Awww, c'mon." Nixon's last-minute surprise worked, even though he didn't need it.

The last-minute surprise regarding Barack Obama's aunt from Kenya, Zeituni Onyango, does not seem to hurt polling numbers that have steadily shown him on top of John McCain by an average of 50 percent to 44 percent.

Zeituni Onyango is living in a public housing complex in Boston. She is an illegal immigrant because in 2004, a federal immigration refused her request for asylum. The Associated Press, which broke the story, reports that her refusal to leave the country would represent an administrative, non-criminal violation of U.S. immigration law, meaning such cases are handled outside the criminal court system. Estimates vary, but many experts believe there are more than 10 million such immigrants in the United States.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton stated, "Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws be followed."

Democrats are saying they are suspicious of Republican leaks to the news media in a quest to create a last-minute surprise. This is in the same manner that Republicans believe that Democrats made leaks to reveal that McCain's "Joe the Plumber," Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher, isn't all that he was made out to be.

Zeituni Onyango is the sister of Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., departed the family's home when Obama was 2 years old and revisted once, when Obama was 10. He died several years later in a car crash in Kenya. The senior Obama fathered seven other children with three other wives.

Obama has written that he met Zeituni Onyango, along with other members of his large paternal family, when he visited Kenya as a young adult. He returned to Kenya in 2005 after his election to the U.S. Senate. This would indicate that Obama should have known that Zeituni Onyango had moved to Boston by then, but he would have had no way of knowing the legality of her immigration status.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/11/obama-camp-sena.html

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/11/ax-suggests-som.html

http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2008/11/

http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5gUH2aHCC2ZB2levUmVJMm7kauFtA