Barack Obama’s aunt was found living in a “rundown” Boston home.

Bob Krumm writes about Obama's aunt.

Spread the wealth indeed

Barack Obama’s aunt was found living in a “rundown” Boston home.

While he was a U.S. Senator and his wife was a high paid hospital administrator making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, while he was busy raising more than half-a-billion dollars for his campaign, Barack Obama’s aunt was living in a Boston slum. No this isn’t a long lost half-brother he barely knew living halfway across the globe. This is a woman he spoke glowingly about in one of his books.

The most damning part of the story is this (emphasis added):

Speaking outside her home in Flaherty Way, South Boston, on Tuesday, Ms Onyango, 56, confirmed she was the “Auntie Zeituni” in Mr Obama’s memoir. She declined to answer most other questions about her relationship with the presidential contender until after the November 4 election. “I can’t talk about it, I just pray for him, that’s all,” she said, adding: “After the 4th, I can talk to anyone.”

His campaign obviously found her. It shouldn’t have been hard, in spite of being an apparent illegal immigrant, she and her husband have been cited in several newspapers over the years. But once they found her, rather than help her, the Obama campaign shut her up.

Spread the wealth indeed.

Oh, and since I’ve already mentioned illegal immigration, let’s talk about “Jobs that Americans won’t do”: It took a London paper to break this story.

Perhaps it's a Kenyan tradition to allow your relatives to wallow in poverty while you get rich.

UPDATE: Tigerhawk

This story is eerily reminiscent of the moment back in December 2007 when Obama seemed to brag that his grandmother lived in a "hut" back in Kenya. The press ate it up, but he dropped that talking point after conservative bloggers wondered why he had not helped the poor woman pay for a better house. Call me a bonehead, but we are beginning to see a pattern here. Indeed, I have finally figured out why somebody who has been as successful as Barack Obama believes that the government must help people who cannot or do not help themselves: He simply does not understand that helping the poor, unlucky, or incompetent is first the responsibility of family.

MORE: In response to various comments that defend Barack Obama on various grounds, I wrote a responsive comment that I liked enough to move into an update:

To those commenters taking the other side:

1. I completely agree that one is not responsible for the financial well-being of every relative.

2. I further agree that if one happens to have a lot of relatives from a poor country, be it Kenya or, for that matter, half of Europe circa 1945, it is unreasonable to demand that one locate them and ensure the well-beinng of all of them.

So I do not condemn Obama for deciding not to help his African relatives in the abstract.

But...

3. He has used these people -- his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, and so forth -- as props in his political narrative. He wants us to measure him in part by his relationship to these Kenyans, but -- and here is the harsh part -- only as that relationship is described by him. What if his characterization of that relationship is misleading? What if it turns out that while he is delighted to cite these people as evidence of his humble beginnings -- that is what I mean by using them as props -- he is not so delighted to consider them as part of his family? Is that not at least a potentially useful insight into the character of this man about whom we know so little?