The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story today called “Sarah Palin’s College Years Left No Lasting Impression.” She moved around between schools, did a variety of jobs (waitressing, fishing) to earn money, and even tried her hand at pageants to pay the bills. She majored in journalism and shone on camera (as anyone who saw her convention speech and recent Saturday Night Live performance can attest) but her professors don’t remember much about her. “Looking at this dynamic personality now, it mystifies me that I wouldn’t remember her,” Jim Fisher, Palin’s journalism instructor at the University of Idaho, told the LA Times.

I’m not sure if it’s mystifying — the University of Idaho is large, and Hillary Clinton may be the only candidate who actually made national news in college among the major candidates this election cycle. What’s interesting is that LA Times reporter Robin Abcarian chose to start her feature by comparing Palin’s mystifying college years with the other three major players in this presidential race. “Sen. Barack Obama, who attended Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School, is remembered as a daunting scholar and calming influence,” she noted.

This may be true from his better recorded Harvard Law School days, but most of what we know from his Occidental/Columbia days and the few years before law school is based on his memoir, Dreams From My Father. In it, he weaves a certain narrative of the lost soul encountering the rough city. An idealist, he wants to be a community organizer right after he graduates, but no one hires him, so he takes a conventional job at a “consulting” company with a suit, a secretary and money in the bank. He is tempted by this vision of an alternate life — not unlike, oh, say, Jesus being tempted by Satan with all the kingdoms of the world — but The One decides to stay the course of community organizing.

Back in October 2007, before Obama became the Democratic nominee, the New York Times poked some major holes in this narrative with an article called “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say.” Dan Armstrong, who worked with Obama at that “consulting” job at Business International Corporation, told the New York Times that the story had required a lot of “exaggeration” to fit the Temptation of Christ narrative. And according to the Times’ interviews with multiple co-workers, Business International Corporation “was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets… Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it ‘high school with ashtrays.’ Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report. ‘It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,’ said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. ‘And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination.’”

Obviously, taking literary license in memoirs is nothing new (see my piece about James Frey in USA Today), but it takes a certain calculation of fitting one’s life to a narrative to turn a business casual newsletter-writing gig into working for the corporate dark side. It makes one wonder if Obama’s arrival-in-New York scene, in which he can’t get into his apartment, sleeps in an alley, and winds up bathing with a homeless man in a fire hydrant is perhaps a wee bit exaggerated too.

In fact, one wonders if the major problem many of the intelligentsia have with Sarah Palin is that she failed to retell her life to fit an appropriate narrative of political alienation, temptation and liberal ideals. She was a local girl who went home and married her high school sweetheart, raised lots of kids and ran for office. There was, apparently, no feminist consciousness-raising at college, no realization that small towns were stifling and she had to bring revolution (or organizing) to the masses. John McCain fell into his narrative when his plane was shot down, and it has been played up when appropriate, but since he didn’t go to seminary to work out his conflicted feelings about Vietnam afterwards (as Al Gore did), or throw his medals away (as John Kerry did) it also doesn’t have the appropriate ending.

The truth is, we don’t know much about Obama’s early years, including his Columbia years, just as we don’t know much about Palin’s early years. But because Obama is liberal, he is assumed to have been a “daunting” scholar during all of them. With Palin, on the other hand, someone chose to fake her SAT scores recently to show how dumb she must be. The problem is when we believe our narratives so seriously that we don’t remember that truth often fails to fit a neat story line.