Obama wedding-ring mystery dates to Harvard

A publication produced by Harvard law students in 1990 confirms Barack Obama wore a ring on his wedding-ring finger before he married Michelle in 1992.

A reference to Obama wearing a wedding ring appears in an annual satirical edition of the “Harvard Law Revue,” published for the 130th anniversary banquet of Harvard Law School.

As president of the Harvard Law Review at the time, Obama was the target of a roast.

WND reported last week that photographs of Obama at Occidental College in Los Angeles and in New York City in the years when he was supposed to have attended Columbia University show him wearing a ring on the ring finger of his left hand.

The last page of the 1990 publication by Harvard students featured a mock “Doers’ Profile,” based on the print advertisement for Dewar’s brand Scotch whiskey that was popular at the time.

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The entire issue of the 1990 Harvard publication was found by blogger WTPotus and posted July 13 with links that lead to a Flickr.com page on which the entire issue can still be viewed, page by page.

As seen in Exhibit 1 above, the ad included a photograph of Obama along with a list of his “Latest Accomplishments.” One entry read: “Deflecting Persistent Questioning About Ring on Left Hand.”

The entry suggests the wedding ring was a mystery to students and Obama preferred to keep it that way by “deflecting persistent questioning.”

‘Complex’ personal history mocked

The satirical issue included on pages 8 to 10 a mock “Self-Tribute” authored by one “Baroque Yo’ Mama.” It was titled “Between Barack and a Hard Place: My First Hundred Days,” distinguished with the page heading “Obamania.”

As seen in Exhibit 2, the first page of the piece, undoubtedly not authored by Obama, makes fun of a “convoluted” family history that apparently was confusing to fellow students.

One line of the “self-tribute” said: “I invited my underlings to join me for a ‘pot luck’ dinner at my understated and mature apartment.” The line suggests Obama continued to smoke marijuana through his law school days, despite repeated assertions by his 2008 presidential campaign that he stopped using the drug either after attending Occidental College or after graduating from Columbia in 1982.

“Giving interviews and granting photo sessions has been a large burden, but when the movie rights are finally bought up I believe it will all be worth while,” the article continued, poking fun at Obama’s apparent propensity for publicity at the height of his fame as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

A footnote to the author’s name suggests Obama had told fellow students he was not going to clerk for a Supreme Court justice after graduating from Harvard Law School, a position that conceivably would have been available to him after serving as president of the Harvard Law Review.

The note indicated that even in 1990, Obama was openly discussing with his peers the possibility of running for president of the United States.

Not a high school class ring

A photograph of Obama with his Grandmother Sarah from his first trip to Kenya in 1987, during the summer before he entered Harvard Law School, clearly shows the ring on the wedding-ring finger of his left hand, as seen in Exhibits 3 and 4.

Like the photos WND previously reported, the photograph of Obama in Africa after he attended Columbia and before he attended Harvard shows the ring as a gold band. It appears shiny in the sunlight, much as one would expect of a gold wedding ring without elaborate adornments.

In sharp contrast, as seen in Exhibit 5, the class ring of Punahou High School in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he graduated, shows a distinctive Hala tree on the raised front face.

The engraved Punahou class ring appears thicker in the middle, less shiny in the sunlight and more elaborate in design than the ring Obama appears to have worn for at least a decade, beginning with his attendance at Occidental College.

New York Times report

On Jan. 28, 2007, some three weeks before Obama declared his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill., Jodi Kantor published an article in the New York Times that featured a discussion of the Harvard Law Review’s 1990 satirical edition.

The focus of Kantor’s article was to argue that Obama first became “a political sensation” at Harvard Law School.

“He arrived there as an unknown, Afro-wearing community organizer who had spent years searching for his identity,” Kantor wrote, “but by the time he left, he had his first national news media exposure, a book contract and a shot of confidence from running the most powerful legal journal in the country.”

The Kantor article included a photograph of Obama identified as having been taken in 1990 in fellow student Bradford Berenson’s apartment. The photo is incorrectly identified by the newspaper as having been taken during the 1990 election for president of Harvard Law School. It actually was taken during the 1990 mid-term congressional elections.

As seen in Exhibits 6 and 7, the photograph published by the New York Times in conjunction with the Kantor 2007 article shows Obama with a gold band on his left hand. The t-shirt he wore promoted Democratic candidate Harvey Gantt’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Gantt, the mayor of Charlotte, N.C., who ran twice for U.S. Senate as a Democratic Party candidate, lost to Republican Sen. Jessie Helms in the mid-term elections of 1990.

The Kantor article makes no mention of the ring comment in the “Doers’ Profile” mock advertisement of Obama displayed on the last page of the 1990 satirical edition.

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