*A new biography on former president Barack Obama claims that he twice proposed marriage to a woman he was dating before Michelle.
David Garrow, author of the new book, “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,” identifies the woman as Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who met the budding politician in the mid-’80s when he was a community organizer in Chicago.
Jager, of Dutch and Japanese ancestry, told Garrow that Obama first popped the question in 1986, but her parents were against it because they felt she was too young. Despite turning him down, they to see each other.
Then, Garrow says, Obama’s presidential ambitions caused a conflict because he worried a non-African-American spouse would not be a good look, politically. Garrow says he “felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his.”
Obama attended Harvard Law School in 1988 and the relationship was on the ropes, but Jager says Obama again asked her to marry him before he left. By this time, she was on a research trip in Seoul and rejected his proposal.
Obama fell for Michelle after their first year in law school but, according to Garrow, he was still occasionally seeing Jager.
Jager is currently a professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College.
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