American Elephants

President Barack Obama is heavily invested in his “colorful personal narrative,” a turn of phrase that I shamelessly stole from the gentlemen at Power Line because it is so accurately descriptive. The claim, however, that he is America’s first “Pacific President” is goes a little too far.

John J. Pitney Jr., the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College, took on the claim:

It is true that the president was born in Hawaii (sorry, birthers), lived from ages six to ten in Indonesia, and attended a Honolulu prep school. But he is not our first Pacific president. Richard Nixon was born in California in 1913, and spent much more of his life in the Pacific region than the current president has. Moreover, while Barack Obama made his career in Chicago and Springfield, Ronald Reagan made his in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

And the incumbent is hardly the first chief executive to have lived in another Pacific Rim country. William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines. Dwight Eisenhower had military postings in the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer in Australia and China; he even learned to speak Mandarin. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all served in the Pacific during the Second World War. What they did as adults was perhaps more consequential than what Obama did as a child.