Obama's Illinois Driver's License Abstract - a mystery?

There’s a bit of a mystery that I don’t believe has ever been brought up before regarding Obama’s Illinois driver’s license record.

This is BHO’s Illinois driver’s license abstract:



In addition to showing Obama’s Illinois driver’s license number, O150-0686-1221-0, it does show a clean record. But what’s with the “Cont. Lic. Date” of 8-19-96? The date seems to be when he first applied for his Illinois Driver’s License, which he held consistently through its expiration date of 8-4-08.

Some background:
Obama first moved to Chicago in 1985 and may have used some mass transit occasionally as a Community Organizer. In 1989, Obama worked briefly at the Sidley Austin Law Firm in Chicago, as a summer associate from Harvard Law School, where he met Michelle. They had a “long distance relationship” until he graduated from Harvard in May 1991. They were married on Oct. 3, 1992.

BHO definitely owned and drove a car while wooing Michelle in Chicago sometime after they met during summer of 1989. THIS is from the “60 Minutes” interview last year, reminiscing of their early years together:

Kroft: It is one bedroom? Studio?
Mr. Obama: Yeah, it was sort of a one bedroom. It had kind of the vintage, college dorm, pizza…
Kroft: Community organizer, right?, feel to it.
Michelle Obama: It reminded me of a little better version of the apartment you were in when we first started dating. That was a dump too.
Mr. Obama: Right near Harold's Chicken Shack.
Michelle Obama: Yeah.
Mr. Obama: Yeah. That's when I had the car with the-the hole in it.
Michelle Obama: And you could see the sidewalk, because the rust had gone through.
Mr. Obama: The air-conditioning.
Michelle Obama: So that was my side. I would look and see the ground going past. And I still married him.

One consideration might be that he let his Illinois driver’s license lapse while he was at Harvard from Fall 1988 to May 1991. In 2007, to clean his record for his presidential run, Obama paid for 17 parking tickets he received between Oct. 5, 1988 and Jan. 12, 1990. However, it is unknown if he had a Massachusetts drivers license during that time. It’s more likely that he kept his Illinois drivers license and drove his rusty car back and forth 1000 miles, nearly 16 hours, between Harvard and Chicago when visiting Michelle (see Obama finally pays local parking ticket).

Regardless, it’s unlikely he neither owned nor drove a car in Illinois for five years after returning to Chicago in mid-1991 (post-Harvard) until the date on the Illinois driver’s license abstract of Aug 19, 1996.

So why the 1996 date, just months before his first run (and win) as an Illinois State Senator with the socialist New Party in November 1996?