Barack Obama has been on so many television shows, from David Letterman's and Jay Leno's programs to The View and a host of others, one can hardly believe there is a program he would scrupulously avoid. But there appears to be one.

The program I'd like to see Pres. Obama appear on is the NBC program called Who Do You Think You Are?  that is sponsored, in significant part, by Ancestry.com. For those of you unfamiliar with this show, this is the American version of a BBC program in which one famous show business personality each week goes in search of their ancestors, meeting with genealogists, county and state historical record archivists, and academic historians. They travel to places as diverse as Africa and Ireland, Lithuania and Bulgaria. Invariably, the show business types found out things that visibly startle them, in some cases to the point of tears. This includes tales of ancestors being slave holders on a plantation (Paula Dean), having been free blacks before Emancipation who "bought" relatives in order to legally liberate them from ownership by whites (Blair Underwood), helped create the Wells Fargo Bank (Helen Hunt), and been a Hessian foot soldier in the American Revolution who was captured and later switched sides to become an American Patriot (Rob Lowe). 

What millions of Americans really need to see is Barack Obama -- accompanied by a television crew -- going on an odyssey to Hawaii, Kenya, and Seattle, to meet with newspaper archivists, historians, state birth record officials, U.S. Immigration officials, Indonesian government record administrators, Jack Cashill, the Registrar of Columbia University, the Registrar of Harvard University (to discuss the timeline of Barack Obama Senior's time in the U.S.). And possibly Obama could take a DNA test to compare his genes with those of an Obama family member in Boston or living in a "ramshackle hut" in Kenya.  For added drama, Pres. Obama could sit next to George Hussein Onyango Obama in a Nairobi clinic as they are told the results of the DNA test. Now that's a show even the talking heads at MSNBC couldn't disparage, if only for the fact it is from the same parent company.

I know. This is just a thought exercise and it will never happen, even after Pres. Obama leaves the White House. On the other hand, he might have a lot more time on his hands in a few months.