Back in 2009, in an article about the Obama's marriage, The New York Times' Jodi Cantor noted that Obama's wedding band was an "intricate gold design from Indonesia," but not the peculiar fact that he had apparently been wearing it, on the same finger, for several years before the wedding. It is especially interesting to recall that it was Cantor who in 2007 had written another article about Obama's Harvard Law Review days. In that piece, Cantor quoted from the Review's 1990 mock profile of Obama and also included a 1990 photo of Obama that clearly showed him wearing an intricate gold band on his left ring finger. However, Cantor neglected to mention that the profile listed "deflecting persistent questioning about ring on left hand" as one of Obama's "accomplishments," just as she neglected to note, two years later, that she had read about and seen this ring (or one very similar to it) before.
Could the ring be simply a family heirloom or treasured souvenir without other symbolic meaning? Why the reluctance on Obama's part to explain it, or on the media's to question it?
