Michelle Obama Gets Her Husbands Timeline Wrong on Jon Stewart | Transferred to Columbia Before His Fathers Death, Not After

(Photo: Frank Franklin / AP)

Without divulging any more details about her husband’s high school “choom gang,” Michelle Obama explained on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday when and why her husband got his act together: “By the time [Barack Obama] was in college, like so many young people, he realized he could do more with his life.”

“He had a mother that was saying ‘you’re so gifted, you’re so talented,’ and would slap him on the head (and say) ‘get yourself together,” but it wasn’t until his father died, she explained, that her husband really grew up.

“That was one of those click-in moments,” she told Stewart. “And he really buckled down, he transferred schools, went to Columbia and thought about how to use life to the fullest.”

The only problem?

Barack Obama transferred to Columbia in 1981, and his father didn’t die until 1982.

(Related: The Fiction and Non-Fiction of Obama)

While it is certainly excusable to get dates off twenty years later, Michelle Obama is talking about life-changing events.  She is saying the death of her husband’s father is what made him “grow up,” and transfer colleges.

Here is the clip (relevant section begins around 3:22):

The president even details the matter in Dreams From My Father, starting on the first page of the book, where he describes getting the call that his father died in his New York City apartment.

After it was revealed his autobiographical girlfriend was actually a “composite” of several women, Twitter is lighting up about who doesn’t have the story straight– Michelle Obama, or the autobiography.

“Barack Obama, composite husband,” one tweeter wrote.  Another corrected: “It’s really just a composite biography…”

(H/T: Buzzfeed)