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Insider Report from Newsmax.com

Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Obama’s Former Girlfriends Dish on Young Barack
2. Bill Clinton Lauds Another Former President
3. Forbes Lists ‘Best Franchises for the Buck’
4. Pew Poll: Federal Government ‘Mostly Corrupt’
5. We Heard: Rush Limbaugh, Vogue magazine, TV Viewing



1. Obama’s Former Girlfriends Dish on Young Barack

A new book about young Barack Obama reveals intimate details of his early love life through the eyes of two women he romanced in New York.

“Barack Obama: The Story,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist David Maraniss, chronicles Obama’s life in the early 1980s after he transferred from Occidental College in California to Columbia University in Manhattan.

In 1982, coed Alex McNear — who had met the future president at Occidental — came to spend the summer in New York and contacted Obama, Maraniss discloses in an adaptation from his book published in Vanity Fair magazine.

They met at an Italian restaurant and “we sat and talked and ate and drank wine,” McNear told Maraniss. “Or at least I drank wine. I think he drank something stronger.

“We walked slowly back to my apartment and said goodbye. After that we started spending much more time together.”

When the summer ended McNear returned to California, although they carried on a long-distance relationship through a series of letters. But the romance had fizzled by December 1983, when Obama met Genevieve Cook at a party in Manhattan’s East Village.

Brown-haired, hazel-eyed Cook, who at 25 was three years older than Obama, was the daughter of prominent Australian diplomat.

They had dinner a few days after the party, Cook recalled.

In a Jan. 22, 1984 entry in her journal, Cook wrote: “I really like him more and more — he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.”

A Feb. 25 entry stated: “The sexual warmth is definitely there but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all.”

Then on March 22: “Barack — still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.”

That spring Cook moved out of her mother’s Manhattan apartment and into a brownstone in Brooklyn, where Obama spent much of his time, according to Maraniss. “When she told him that she loved him, his response was not ‘I love you, too’ but ‘thank you,’” he writes.

In the fall of 1984, Cook began a teaching job at a public school in Brooklyn, and shortly after that Obama quit his job at Business International, a firm providing newsletters and reference materials for corporations. He moved in with Cook for a brief period before leaving for the Christmas holidays in Hawaii, and again lived in her apartment when he returned.

But the relationship had begun to sour. Cook: “My take on it had always been that I pushed him away, found him not to be ‘enough,’ had chafed at his withheld-ness, his lack of spontaneity, which, eventually, I imagined might be assuaged, or certain elements of it might be, by living together.”

At the end of March 1985, Cook moved to another apartment in Brooklyn, and Obama moved to Manhattan. The relationship was nearing an end.

Later that year, Obama left New York and headed west for a community organizing job in Chicago. He took along a white cable-knit sweater Cook had given him for Christmas, Maraniss writes.

“It would comfort him in the cold Chicago winter.”