Neil, I didn't vote for Obama either time.  I could see the secular socialist future when I, a Democratic voter, voted for Mr. McCain in 2008.

However, I think we should be more precise in wording biographical material, than saying that he was a foreign student from Indonesia who came to America to go to college.

It's possible that he did continue to live with his mother in Indonesia after the pre-teen period in which he came to live with his grandparents in Honolulu.  Perhaps the media is 

fooling us even about his years in Hawaii?  From what I've read (may be in error), he lived mostly in Honolulu until he was about six and his mother married an Indonesian, and again from when

his mother returned him to Hawaii and he was enrolled in the Punahou private school.  I believe he graduated from Punahou.  There are pictures of him with his class at Punahou,

which of course could be not real, or photoshopped.  Or how ever they falsify such things.  He did spend a year and a half, media reports, with his mother in Seattle when she was enrolled 

at the University of Washington, from when he was less than a month old until he was about 18 months old; at least that was as long as his mother resided there and went to the University.

Then he returned to Honolulu, I suppose, with his mother, and lived there until she married the Indonesian man she met at the University of Hawaii.

Now I have heard that he may have gone to college on an Indonesian student visa.  So there's the real problem.  Did he have dual citizenship?  Was he an Indonesian because his Indonesian stepfather, Soetero, adopted him?  Did he retain his American citizenship that his mother gave him?  I have heard so many different views as to whether the child of an American citizen is an American citizen too, no matter where they are born.  There are such different versions, all offered as proven truth, that I cannot possibly know.  But there may be a possibility that he had Indonesian citizenship, even though the majority of his school years were spent in Honolulu (years 10-17?).  In that case, yes, he might have been an Indonesian on a visa for attending college as a foreign student, and that could be wrong if it gave him a financial break on false premises.

So the fact that these records are sealed IS a problem, isn't it!  Yes, those records should not be sealed.  If they were unsealed, the problem would be 90% solved as to what his childhood background was. I know from Seattle papers that his mother WAS enrolled at the University of Washington less than a month after his birth--that record is unsealed.  He lived with her on Capitol Hill, a place I know very well as I lived in the area all my younger life, and worked at a college on Capitol Hill.  It's MY "stamping ground", or was.

Obama may seem more real to me just because I lived or went to school or worked in ALL of the areas his mother frequented during her own youth.  She at least seems real.  But the cloud of unknowing that hovers over his head, because of the records being secret, is a serious problem, I agree entirely.

Mariel