Obama a distant cousin to Cheney, Bush
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.
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