Barack Obama proposed to Jager — twice — before he met Michelle

A 25-year-old Obama asked Sheila Miyoshi Jager — now a professor at Oberlin College — to marry him well before Michelle Obama became his other half, according to Pulitzer Prize winner David J. Garrow’s biography, “Rising Star.”

“In the winter of ‘86, when we visited my parents, he asked me to marry him,” Jager told Garrow, according to a Washington Post review published Wednesday.

The couple lived together in Chicago. When Jager’s parents frowned upon their tying the knot due to Obama’s career prospects and her being two years younger than he was, she allegedly told him, “not yet.”

Months later, Jager said, the President-to-be grew “very ambitious” all of a sudden.

“I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he already had his sights on becoming president,” she told Garrow.

As Garrow details, black Chicago politicians at the time could come under scrutiny for having a non-black spouse — and as “the marriage discussions dragged on and on,” Jager said, Obama’s preoccupation with “race and identity” began to overshadow their relationship.

“(The) resolution of his black identity was directly linked to his decision to pursue a political career,” said Jager, who is reportedly of Dutch-Japanese descent.

“The lines are very clearly drawn ... If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here,” Obama once said, a mutual friend of the couple told Garrow.

Obama and Jager fought for hours over the issue during a stay at a summer home, friends told the author.

The 44th President reportedly proposed to Jager a second time, days before he left for Harvard Law School — asking her to accompany him “mostly, I think, out of a sense of desperation over our eventual parting,” she said. Jager instead jetted off to South Korea for dissertation work.

Obama met his wife-to-be, Michelle Robinson, working at a Chicago law firm in the summer of 1989.

He and Jager “continued to see each other irregularly throughout the 1990-91 academic year, notwithstanding the deepening of Barack’s relationship with Michelle Robinson,” Garrow wrote, with Jager admitting she “always felt bad about it.”

But their correspondence dwindled after he married the former First Lady: He allegedly wrote Jager a letter after 9/11 and once called her to check whether a biographer had gotten in touch.