Obama's handlers are trying hard to make the President 'more' black. With less than 100 days to go until the election, we discover Obama might be descended from "authentic American slaves" through his mother.

Pulling out all the stops, The New York Times reports the genealogy firm Ancestry.com  has come up with a possible ancestral link between Stanley Ann Dunham and a slave named John Punch.

Obama's newly discovered maternal slave roots are mired in supposition but distortions and misleading information are nothing new in American politics. The real story behind the NYT article is the fact we are in August of an election year and Obama is back to his old tricks trying to win white sympathy and stoke black anger.

Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama's mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that "strongly suggests" Mr. Obama's family tree - on his mother's side - stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch.

The company said records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.

The Ancestry.com team spent two years examining Mr. Obama's mother's past, focusing on the mixed-race Bunch line.

But the research left open a question: Was John Punch, the slave, a Bunch ancestor? Because records have been destroyed, there is no definitive proof.

The New York Times article goes to extra pains using words like "may," "might", and "suggests" in relation to the Dunham-Bunch-Punch composite. I

This is vintage Axelrod. Obama's public relations man has built his reputation on shaping black clients' bios enough to propel them into political office. Incidentals like facts and logic never get in the way of a good story.

In Obama's case Axelrod has manufactured a split personality. There's the post-racial Barack, a man above all the nasty race-baiting by his surrogates, and then there's the entitled first-black-ever president, Afrocentric Barack who attended a radical black church for 20 years.

 After four years of economic destruction and top-down government scandals Axelrod still wants Americans to judge Obama by the color of his skin. Will the race card play this time?

Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report

Thomas Lifson adds:

I believe this project was launched to address the lagging enthusiasm among blacks for getting out and voting for Obama. No doubt focus groups have turned up people who say that doubts about Obama's "authenticity" trouble them. Recall that it was n one other than Al Sharpton who introduced that question about Obama, his lack of background as the offspring of American slaves, as well as his being raised in white grandparents and sent to elite expensive schooling.

So one does online research, makes a few assumptions, produces a purported slave ancestry connection, and hopes to address the issue. Astroturf ancestry.