Even as south Delhi’s drawing-room cocktail circuit was going into convulsions about discrepancies in L.K. Advani’s new book, My Country My Life, half-way across the globe, the American presidential campaign was going through contretemps of an identical nature. The eerie similarity in the scenes that unfolded in New Delhi and Washington at almost the same time was a reminder of how the lives and styles of politicians have been altered by new tools of research, new media and search engines such as Google. It was also a reminder that those in or running for public office — whether in democracies like India and the United States of America or in societies with systems of governance as dissimilar as of China and Kuwait — have been slow to adapt to the demands of foolproof research that are unfolding in the 21st century.

The Democratic front-runner in the US presidential primaries was in an unenviable predicament last week after the mainstream American media picked holes in his assertion that the charismatic African-American senator, Barack Obama, owes his very life to the philanthropy of the Kennedy family. Obama’s story, which he narrated at a civil rights rally in Alabama last year and repeated at American University in Washington two months back, was that his father came to the US on money donated by the Kennedys for the airlift of Kenyan students to enrol in American universities to prepare them to shoulder responsibilities in the young African nation that was emerging from colonial rule.

While he was a student at the University of Hawaii, Barack Obama senior met and married a white woman from Kansas, Ann Dunham, and little Obama was born in August 1961. The candidate Obama said of his father: “This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.” The narrative was so touching that it was a factor in persuading JFK’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, to endorse the Illinois senator, an endorsement that was a turning point in his campaign against the powerful Clinton machine that had long seen former First Lady Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as a given in the presidential primaries.

The only problem with this beautiful story is that it now turns out that father Obama actually came to the US a year before the Kennedy family agreed to donate the princely sum 48 years ago of $100,000 for a second airlift of Kenyan students. Obama came on money that was donated by the African-American Students Foundation. Obama’s spokesman, Bill Burton, has now conceded that the senator made a mistake in linking the Kennedys to his father’s arrival in the US and his own birth.

Obama was in a pickle also because, on the 42nd anniversary of the historic Selma civil rights march, he claimed that events in Selma and their fallout had brought together his parents. “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama,” he had said of the march which commemorates “bloody Sunday”, the brutal attack on the marchers, who included Martin Luther King Jr. The problem for Obama, though, is the factual inaccuracy that he was already four years old when the Selma march took place.

A few days ago, the US’s Democratic presidential aspirant, Hillary Clinton, dug herself into a hole in the course of her intense fight against Obama when she claimed in a speech, and later in several interviews, that she and her daughter, Chelsea, risked their lives and ran for cover under hostile fire as their plane landed in Tuzla, Bosnia, in 1995 when she was first lady. “There was no greeting ceremony and we were basically told to run to our cars,” she told CNN. The claim was meant to reinforce her public persona as a strong leader with experience in foreign policy and to counter criticism from Obama’s camp that at best she had tea with foreign leaders when Bill Clinton was president.

Hillary’s Bosnia narrative got wide coverage on American TV, print and new media until reporters began to look for more details, especially visual details. The images that followed were far from pretty. A video of her trip surfaced showing Hillary and Chelsea calmly deplaning and then being greeted by a young girl on the tarmac with no sign of any imminent danger. Obama’s campaign immediately accused Hillary of overstating her foreign policy experience and she had to admit that she had erred.

Strangely, Hillary has gone through this before and has learned little. Like the Advani book uproar, what most people remember about Hillary’s poor fact checking was an episode 18 years ago when she published her book, It Takes a Village. She was on a book tour that was carefully crafted to rehabilitate her as first lady following her near hara-kiri over her doomed health care reform and early Clinton presidential scandals that came to be known as Travelgate and Whitewater. Hillary was a central character in both scandals. Hillary had claimed then that she had disclosed “every document we had” but was forced to retract when new documents surfaced about Whitewater.

Carl Bernstein, who was Bob Woodward’s partner at The Washington Post in uncovering Watergate, has written a well-researched biography of Hillary. According to Bernstein, who is now in great demand on American TV networks on anything to do with Hillary, “Her record as a public person is replete with misstatements and elisions and retracted and redacted and revoked assertions.” For this columnist, who has been covering US politics, there is nothing new or unusual about Advani’s travails over his book. Ronald Reagan, the “great communicator”, undoubtedly one of the most successful US presidents in recent memory, repeatedly made a mess of his facts. Perhaps Reagan had the excuse that his time was before the internet dramatically transformed the way research is done today.

It is possible, indeed likely, that Advani will find cold comfort in any comparison with Reagan. If that is the case, look at this. This columnist recalls covering the 2000 US presidential elections, when Vice-President Al Gore, now a Nobel laureate, lost a lot of credibility because of a claim that got wide publicity that he had invented the internet. The Gore campaign engaged in belated damage control in this instance by clarifying that Gore, as a senator from Tennessee, had sponsored legislation that paved the way for the internet to take its place in the 21st century. But by then, George W. Bush had gone for the kill. In a rare display of brilliance, Bush asked at a rally that if his opponent invented the internet, why was it that every internet address began with “W”, Bush’s middle initial. “Not one ‘W’, but three ‘Ws’ ”?

The real question raised by the Advani episode — and those of Hillary, Obama or Gore — is whether factual errors in a narrative memoir impinge on the leadership qualities of these men and woman or on their capacity to govern. Perhaps Hillary provided the most rational answer to the troubling questions raised by these episodes. She said in response to the furore over her misstatements about the Bosnia trip: “So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I am human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation.” Maybe Advani should say something similar and move on.