Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are Cousins

By Anastacia Mott Austin

When it comes to politics, it seems that everything really is relative.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s wife Lynne was giving an interview to MSNBC this week, and after a seemingly unrelated question about Hillary Clinton, announced that she had discovered a common ancestor shared by her husband and Barack Obama.

The reporter interviewing Cheney had asked her about her feelings about Hillary Clinton as the first female president, and Cheney responded that rather than voting on the basis of gender, she would make her choice based upon national security.

Cheney then said, "But I have to admit to a certain bias here. To get back to my book for a minute…in my book there’s a lot of genealogical research, going back, about Dick’s family and my family, these amazing and heroic tales…one of things that I discovered is that Dick and Barack Obama are eighth cousins."

"Isn’t that an amazing thing?" continued Cheney. "If you go back eight generations, we have a common ancestor." While this doesn’t seem to correlate to Hillary Clinton, Cheney concluded the segment by saying, "I thought I should admit this fact as evidence that I’m maybe not completely objective about Mrs. Clinton."

So while vowing her loyalty to the Republican party, saying that they had a stronger record on national security, perhaps Cheney was saying that Clinton was not her favorite Democratic candidate because she was not part of the family?

A representative for Lynne Cheney explained to the Associated Press that Dick Cheney and Barack Obama share a common ancestor named Mareen Duvall, a 17th-century French Hugenot. Duvall’s son married the descendant of a man named Richard Cheney, related to – you guessed it – the current Dick Cheney.

"This is such an amazing story," Mrs. Cheney said to reporters. "That one ancestor, a man that came to Maryland, could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dick’s and Barack Obama’s."

Apparently, Obama’s family ties include several Presidents as well. Research has shown the Obama family is related to President Harry Truman, and according to a report by the Chicago Sun-Times, Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. According to that report, Obama and the current President Bush are 11th cousins.

But geneological researchers say that it isn’t all that unusual for Americans to find common ancestors, especially if they hailed from the early American colonies. Genealogist Christopher Challender Child told reporters, "With Presidents with New England ancestry, you will find a lot of them are related to one another."

Obama has a Kenyan father and a white American mother.

While Lynne Cheney exhibited a certain enthusiasm for having discovered the link between her husband and Obama, the latter had no comment about the connection.

However, Obama’s campaign spokesman Bill Burton had this to say: "Obviously, Dick Cheney is sort of the black sheep in the family."