The London Times details Barack Obama's complicated family history.

Obama’s African family is particularly complicated. By his own account, his father never really left Kezia, his first wife, in Kenya. She bore Obama Sr two children, Roy and Auma, who now works in social services in Berkshire.

They were separated, Obama’s mother claimed, but “it was a village wedding and there was no document that could suggest a divorce”.

His own father and mother’s wedding in Hawaii may not have been properly documented either. “How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama writes in his memoir.

After his father left Ann and two-year-old Barack to study at Harvard, he went to Africa with another American woman, Ruth, who became his third wife. She bore him two sons in Kenya, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident, but Obama Sr continued to see Kezia.

“Traditionally, she was still his wife,” a relative explained. Kezia went on to bear two more sons, Abo and Bernard. Although their paternity is disputed by some relatives, Obama Sr regarded them as his own. Later in life, he fathered another son, George, by a young Kenyan woman.

Not exactly a traditional family, although by all appearances Obama's own family reflects a more common stability.

What piqued my interest was the comparison with Republican hopeful Mitt Romney, whose own family history includes a number of polygamous ancestors. How will the respective family histories be treated by the media? Has Obama, the media darling, inoculated Romney against prurient interest into his background, or will we have a double standard?

We saw an amazingly robust effort by CNN in particular to refute the allegations that Obama attended a Madrassa as a child (that would have been difficult since Madrassa's have only become a factor in the Indonesian school system since the early 1990s--before this, Indonesia operated on a system designed by Dutch colonizers. Obama likely attended a pesantren).

Will we see a similarly conscientious effort on behalf of other candidates not so favored by CNN?

That would be nice, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Whisper campaigns have been a part of political combat since the inception of the nation. Historically they've been extremely effective. Alexander Hamilton's political career was completely destroyed in this way.

Modern whisper campaigns benefit from a rabid media, anxious to report almost anything before anyone else, but information technology also makes it extremely hard for such campaigns to take hold. It took me exactly five minutes to find a link to a site that discussed the Indonesia school system and made it clear that it was at least highly unlikely that Obama attended an actual Wahabi madrassa.

What is really required for a successful whisper campaign these days is media collusion. Only by having the story endlessly repeated so that it makes an impact on even the most superficial consumers of news, can a campaign have impact.

Over the weekend, I went out to lunch with friends from California. The Surge came up, and I asked them what there impressions were. My friend didn't have an opinion, but it was nevertheless interesting that a guy who travels all week every week and rarely if ever watches the news, nevertheless had the impression that The Surge was in disfavor.

That's the way it works--a simple, succinct message repeated endlessly becomes the received wisdom.

I believe it certainly originated with the Hillary campaign, but Obama-love is quite fervent among the left these days, and it will be hard for Hillary to find fertile soil from salacious rumors even among conservatives.

Hell, we enjoy a good dust-up as much as anyone.