Michelle was not the first lady Obama asked to wed

By in Washington BARACK OBAMA twice asked a previous girlfriend to marry him in the years before he met Michelle – and continued to see her after he met the future First Lady – a new biography has claimed.

The former US president fell in love with Sheila Miyoshi Jaher at the start of his political career, she is quoted as saying in the book Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow. Now a professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, Ms Jager described in the book how her family had been against the proposed marriage because they were concerned about the young Mr Obama’s “career prospects”.

“In the winter of 86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him,” she said, according to a review of the book by The Washington Post.

The couple stayed together but in the subsequent years, she said their relationship became subsumed by Mr Obama’s political ambitions. She said his questions about race were “directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career”. Garrow quotes a friend of the couple who recalls Mr Obama saying: “If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here”.

Just days before departing for Harvard Law School Mr Obama again asked Ms Jager to marry him, but she says mostly out of “a sense of desperation” that their relationship was ending.

The book also reveals Mr Obama’s first serious girlfriend was Genevieve Cook, a 25-year-old Australian primary school teacher in New York. In the book Ms Cook describes how she slept with him on the night of their first date. She wrote in a journal she kept of their “passionate” love making.

Ms Cook said that Mr Obama had taken cocaine in his early twenties with friends from Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has previously written about trying the drug when he was a teenager.