On Monday, the White House announced that President Obama will co-host a Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Kenya in July, his first trip to his father's homeland as president. It will be Obama's "fourth trip to sub-Saharan Africa and the most of any sitting U.S. president," note National Security Council staffers Grant Harris and Shannon Green, comparing the Kenya visit to "President Kennedy's historic visit to Ireland in 1963."
At The New York Times, Peter Baker plays up the silly number of Americans who say they believe that Obama himself was born in Kenya, rather than Hawaii. But he also adds the substantive diplomatic problem that Kenya's president has been under a legal and ethical cloud since ethnic violence after disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,200 dead and 600,000 displaced.
"Now, the case against the president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has been dropped, and the perennial talk about Mr. Obama's birth has faded in the United States," Baker concludes. "So Mr. Obama seems to have concluded that a Kenya trip is acceptable at home and abroad." Obama has visited Kenya twice before, as a young man — a visit chronicled in his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father — and again as a U.S. senator in 2006.