We’ve posted new profiles of Sasha and Malia Obama, the daughters of presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.
Both girls gave us a bit of trouble with their birthdays.
Many reputable sources say Malia’s birth year is 1999. For instance, see these timelines from The New York Times and George Washington University and fact sheets from CNN and The Daily Telegraph.
Obama’s Senate biography is silent on the topic. His campaign bio, however, says his daughters are “Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.”
Assuming the Obama website wouldn’t 1) be mistaken or 2) lie about his own daughter’s birth, the age of 10 firmly nixes a 1999 birth. The year 1998 would seem to be confirmed by the many news reports from this past July which mentioned Malia’s “10th birthday.”
The clincher, to us, comes from his family interview with the TV show Access Hollywood from July 2008. Not only does Malia receive birthday wishes, but Obama himself mentions her birth “10 years ago.”
You can hear the comment at the 1:22 mark here:
Given this sturdy evidence, we’ve listed 1998 as Malia’s year of birth.
Obama himself is also the source for Sasha’s birth date. There’s no dispute about her birth year of 2001, but we found the dates June 7 and June 8 online, among others. Most sources list no month or day at all.
But this blog post by Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, has Obama visiting a hospital on 10 June 2008 and telling a patient’s mother that it is his daughter’s 7th birthday.
It’s not quite as certain as Malia’s birth year, but it is solid enough for us to go with June 10th as her official date of birth.
So it’s June 10th, 2001 for Sasha Obama and July 4th, 1998 for her sister Malia.