Did Obama lie about his grandmother again?

By Mike Thayer

Remember back in 2008 when then Senator Obama said the following?....

It was March 18, 2008, Obama was making a speech on race relations after taking some heat from the media for his controversial relationship with American hating pastor Jeremiah Wright.  Obama threw his grandmother under the bus by saying:

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Obama also called his grandmother, "A typical white person," in a radio interview two days later.

Madelyn Dunham, Obama's grandmother wasn't like that according to people close to her.  A man who worked with Dunham for more than 40 years, Dennis Ching, said he "never heard her say anything like that. I never heard her say anything negative about anything." A Hawaiian State Senator who worked with Dunham at the Bank of Hawaii, Sam Slom, said "I never heard Madelyn say anything disparaging about people of African ancestry or Asian ancestry or anybody's ancestry."  And check this out from her brother, Charlie Payne, who told the Associated Press that his sister's reaction to being made a campaign issue was "no more than just sort of raised eyebrows."

Eyebrow raising not as in I can't believe he said that, but as in, where the heck did that come from?!

Remember what Obama was speaking to when he was making his remarks.  Race relations.  For political purposes he was trying to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright, score political points with some can't we all just get along rhetoric, and he used his grandmother to sell it.

In last night's presidential debate, Obama told a story about his grandmother again.  He talked about how his grandmother raised him, had only a high school education, went to work for a bank as a secretary and worked her way up the ladder, ending up being a Vice President of that bank.  Then Obama went on to say that in her later years, his grandmother lived on Social Security and Medicare.

Do you believe that?  Madelyn Dunham went to work for the Bank of Hawaii in 1960 and became the VP of that bank in 1970.  She retired from that job in 1986.   His grandmother lived on Social Security and Medicare?  Really?