Obama a distant cousin to Cheney, Bush

David Edwards and Jason Rhyne

Published: Wednesday October 17, 2007



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Vice President Dick Cheney and aspiring Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may not share a political philosophy, but they do share a family tree.

The vice president's wife, Lynne, said during an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday that her husband and Obama were eighth cousins, a fact she discovered while researching family ancestry for her new memoir.

This is such an amazing American story that one ancestor ... could be responsible down the family lines for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dicks and Barack Obama, she said.

Ginny Justice, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Cheney, told MSNBC that Obama is a descendant of French Huguenot Mareen Duvall, whose son wed the granddaughter of the Englishman Richard Cheney in the 1600's.

Fox News on Wednesday also cited a report last month in the Chicago Sun-Times, which indicated Obama also had a distant genealogical connection to President Bush. The two are 11th cousins, according to the paper.

"Every time some new president gets installed -- elected to the United States presidency -- somebody does the whole lineage and, invariably, it leads back to the Queen of England," said Fox and Friends co-host Steve Doocy. "Everybody's always related to the Queen of England."

An Obama spokesman commented that "every family has a black sheep."

The following video is from Fox's Fox & Friends, broadcast on October 17, 2007.







