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Barack Obama is lying about not being friends with Bill Ayers...

In 1981, the 19 year-old Barack Obama published two poems in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College's literary magazine, Feast.

One is a silly adolescent ode to "apes that eat figs" called “Underground.” (see above)
The second is an obviously superior poem called “Pop.” Critic Warwick Collins rightly describes it as "by far the more powerful and complex" of the two, and his is the consensus opinion.


Several mainstream reviewers have chosen to see in "Pop" the seeds of the literary genius that would flower in Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

A closer inspection, however, shows an early sign of Obama’s willingness to take credit for something he could not himself write.



This chicanery would reach fruition in Dreams, the acclaimed literary success that laid the foundation of the Obama genius myth. The evidence that Obama pal and mentor, Bill Ayers, largely ghosted this memoir now overwhelms the objective reviewer.

“Pop” too is almost surely ghosted, and the ghost in this case would have been an earlier Obama mentor, the communist poet and pornographer Frank Marshall Davis. What makes Davis’s involvement interesting is that the poem is surely about him as well.

My confidence in this thesis derives not just from the startling difference in style and sophistication between “Pop” and “Underground,” but from the equally startling similarities between “Pop” and a 1975 Davis poem titled “To A Young Man.”

In each of the poems, the young man is the narrator. This is more obvious in “Pop” as the poem was published under Obama’s name. In “To A Young Man” the young man’s narration is implicit.

In both poems, the old man, the Davis character, is discussed in the third person. In the 1981 poem, the narrator calls him “Pop;” in the 1975 poem, “the old man.”

In each poem, when this older character speaks to the young man, he does so without benefit of quotation marks. In “To A Young Man,” the Davis character says on one occasion:

Since then I have drunk

Half a hundred liquid years

Distilled

Through restless coils of wisdom​



Note the similar flow of language in “Pop”:

Pop switches channels, takes another

Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks

What to do with me, a green young man
​


As is evident in these two short samples, both poems are written in free verse and make ready use of what is called “enjambment,” that is the abrupt continuation of a sentence from one line into the next.

There are parallels in word choice as well as style. “Neat” means without water or ice. “Neat” and “Distilled” both suggest a kind of alcoholic purity. Each of these words is emphasized by isolating it from the flow of the text.

In each case, too, the older man shares his wisdom with a “young man” who may not be eager to hear it. The young man of “Pop” dismisses that wisdom as a mere “spot” in his brain, “something
/ that may be squeezed out, like a/ 
Watermelon seed between/ 
Two fingers.”

Comparably, the narrator of “To A Young Man” observes that the old man “walked until/ On the slate horizon/ He erased himself.”

Whether “squeezed out” or “erased” from the young man’s consciousness, the Davis character understands just how tenuous is his hold on the lad. For all his awareness, however, he finds a certain drunken satisfaction in the exchange.

Towards the end of “To A Young Man,” the old man “turned/

His hammered face/ To the pounding stars/ Smiled/ Like the ring of a gong.”

“Pop” also concludes on an upbeat note, “I see my face, framed within
/ Pop’s black-framed glasses/ 
And know he’s laughing too.”

There is no reason to believe that the “young man” of the 1975 poem is Obama. The reader is told that the younger fellow is twenty years old and that the old man is fifty years older.

Davis was precisely seventy in 1975, but Obama was no more than fourteen.

Lacking too in the 1975 poem is the intimacy and anxiety that characterizes “Pop.”

In fact, “Pop” hints at both a blood relationship between the two men and a sexual one. The very name of the poem implies paternity, and in the poem the young man uses reflections and mirrors to show a physical resemblance between himself and the old man.

As to a possible sexual relationship between Obama and the admittedly bi-sexual Davis, the poem offers some intriguing evidence: “Pop . . . points out the same amber/ Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and/ Makes me smell his smell, coming/ From me.”

Although it is impossible to confirm that Davis either sired Obama or sexually abused him, this imagery does at the least reek of some unsavory boundary violation.

As compensation, Davis may well have slipped this “green young man” a poem for publication. Such an everyday fraud would not have seemed unethical to an old man used to the “flim and flam” of a world where “one plus one” does not necessarily make “two or three or four.”


Obama has seemed from the beginning entirely comfortable with his counterfeit literary career.
 
Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .





Pop

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I'm sure he's unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he's still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He's so unhappy, to which he replies . . .
But I don't care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I've been saving; I'm laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I've got on mine and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; 'cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop's black-framed glasses
And know he's laughing too.
 
There are clues in Dreams, however, which suggest that Obama was creating a fiction for future use that he already knew to be untrue. He tells of coming across an article from the Honolulu Advertiser celebrating Barack Obama, Sr.'s planned grand tour of mainland universities on his triumphant way to Harvard.

Obama writes ruefully in Dreams, "No mention is made of my mother or me, and I'm left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father's part, in anticipation of his long departure." What Obama does not mention is that the article was dated June 22, 1962.

Obama was reportedly born on August 4, 1961. He was not yet a year old at the time Obama Sr. left Hawaii for good. More to the point, Obama fails to mention that he and his mother, Ann Dunham, were living in Seattle at the time and had been since at least August 19, 1961, the day she enrolled at the University of Washington.

In short, the family never lived together. There was no Obama family. The Obama camp surely knew this by the time he ran for president, but Obama kept dissembling about his origins nonetheless.

Although Obama's African relatives seem to have accepted the president as one of their own, there is even less clarity on the Kenyan side. According to Dreams, Obama Sr. had children with at least four different women, two of them American, and he occasionally circled back to the first of the four, Kezia.

Ruth Nidesand, a white American, had two children by Obama Sr., Mark and David, the latter of whom died young in a motorcycle accident. She was also forced to raise Kezia's two oldest children, just as the woman Obama knows as "Granny," the family storyteller, was forced to raise Obama Sr. as her own. In another time and place, the Obamas would have had their own reality TV show.

Questions linger about the paternity of many of these offspring. In Dreams, Obama's cryptic and contrarian Aunt Sarah would tell her presumed nephew, " ... the children who claim to be Obama's are not Obama's." Obama must have wondered whether she was referring to him.

Curiously, when Obama found the article about Obama Sr.'s departure, he found it "folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms." Later in Dreams, in a passage heretofore overlooked, Obama unwittingly reveals that there may have been problems with that birth certificate.

On the occasion of his father's death in 1982, lawyers contacted anyone who might have claim to the estate. "Unlike my mum," Obama tells his half-sister Auma in Dreams, "Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark's father was."

Ruth obviously could produce a marriage license and a birth certificate for her son Mark. Ann Dunham apparently could not do the same for her son Barack, at least not one that could tie him to Obama Sr. -- not even with a potential payoff on the table.

The long form birth certificate could pose a number of problems other than country of origin, including the date of Obama's birth, the state of his birth, and the identity of his father. Any one of these revelations could unravel the yarn that Obama has been spinning.

These problems derive from the fact that Ann Dunham enrolled at university on August 19, 1961 and returned to Hawaii only after Obama Sr. had left Hawaii for good. Both of these facts are more firmly established than President Obama's Honolulu birth on August 4, 1961. In my forthcoming book, Deconstructing Obama, I review these possibilities in some detail.

The failure of the mainstream media to even address the inconsistencies in Obama's story is downright shameful. That failure has created a windstorm of curiosity that is becoming increasingly difficult for the media to ignore. The final responsibility for the outburst in Congress last week is theirs.
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Jack is back with his new book, "Deconstructing Obama."
 
That was classy, the way you pissed all over Recidiva's MLK Day thread, and she's not even one of your "enemies..."




Don't worry. I made sure I added it to your greatest hits.
 
Ulaven_Demorte said:
Oh yay, More birther nonsense.

I'm not surprised that you're pushing that tired old lie Cap'n Hypocrite.
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What "lie" is that?

Jack's only point is the incuriosity of the press to Barack's background...



Did you see that the Arizona shooter turned out to actually not be a Birther, but a Truther?

lol
 
Frisco_Slug_Esq said:
What "lie" is that?

Jack's only point is the incuriosity of the press to Barack's background...



Did you see that the Arizona shooter turned out to actually not be a Birther, but a Truther?

lol
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What lie?

Seriously? Jack's only point is to try to spin up the birther nonsense.. again.. Asking questions that have been answered.

Where's the long form birth certificate? :rolleyes:

The Arizona shooter is a head case.. It would come as no surprise that he's a truther.. or a birther.. or even a Libertarian.
 
Ulaven_Demorte said:
What lie?

Seriously? Jack's only point is to try to spin up the birther nonsense.. again.. Asking questions that have been answered.

Where's the long form birth certificate? :rolleyes:

The Arizona shooter is a head case.. It would come as no surprise that he's a truther.. or a birther.. or even a Libertarian.
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No, he's not. He's merely pointing out the quirkiness of someone who would openly "create" a myth about their birth. If you even bothered to read, you would see that he's not a Birther, but actually explaining HOW the press has kept the movement alive by giving their selected candidate a pass on everything while at once sending out eleven reporters to fact check the book of a stupid, inexperienced woman, who's never ran anything of any importance and will never amount to anything in American politics...
 
Frisco_Slug_Esq said:
No, he's not. He's merely pointing out the quirkiness of someone who would openly "create" a myth about their birth. If you even bothered to read, you would see that he's not a Birther, but actually explaining HOW the press has kept the movement alive by giving their selected candidate a pass on everything while at once sending out eleven reporters to fact check the book of a stupid, inexperienced woman, who's never ran anything of any importance and will never amount to anything in American politics...
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Yes, he is.

He's not "just pointing out" anything. He's trying to fan to flame the dying embers of the brain dead birther movement. His "serious questions" aren't.

The President got a pass? LMAO.. What fucking bizarro planet have you been living on?

Jack may not be a birther, but he's certainly not above trying to stir them up to feed his Anti-Obama obsession.
 
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Ulaven_Demorte said:
Yes, he is.

He's not "just pointing out" anything. He's trying to fan to flame the dying embers of the brain dead birther movement. His "serious questions" aren't.

The President got a pass? LMAO.. What fucking bizarro planet have you been living on?

Jack may not be a birther, but he's certainly not above trying to stir them up to feed his Anti-Obama obsession.
Click to expand...

Show me the evidence.

Yes, the President got a pass. Not JUST from the press, but from John McCain himself...

He's seeking truth and pointing out inconsistencies in Obama's "story" of his life, which are considerable and undeniable. We deserve better vetting from the press, but what do you expect when year after year, survey's and polls show the press to be dominated by people who identify themselves as Democrats?

A search for truth need not necessarily amount to an anti-Obama obsession whereas shouting down the truth and hurling accusations at everyone who asks questions may be an anti-something obsession.
 
Dances With Falsehoods said:
A search for truth need not necessarily amount to an anti-Obama obsession whereas shouting down the truth and hurling accusations at everyone who asks questions may be an anti-something obsession.
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True, but with the majority of your 35,000+ posts devoted to de-legitimizing the administration of President Barack Obama, one could build a pretty darn good case about your anti-Obama obsession.

Now PLAY AJ'S THEME SONG!
 
At the National Prayer Breakfast on February 3, President Obama threw a knuckleball down the middle, and the media whiffed.

Most simply took Obama at his word that as a young man in Chicago, he "came to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace him as my lord and savior" and that as president, he asks "the Lord" every day to make him "an instrument of his will."

In a moment, I will address the sheer gamesmanship of this theological flutter to the center, but first, a word on the most revealing part of the sermonette. This revelation was missed by everyone in the media except the ever-observant morning radio host at 630 KHOW in Denver, Peter Boyles, who shared it with me.

Said Obama at one point in what seemed like a throwaway line, "My father, who I barely knew -- I only met once for a month in my entire life -- was said to be a non-believer throughout his life." Although he avoided specifics, Obama was referring to the Christmas of 1971, when Barack Obama, Sr. visited the extended Dunham family, including the ten-year-old Barry Obama, in Hawaii.

The president and his writers choose their words carefully for an occasion as public as the Prayer Breakfast. Obama could have safely left the relationship at "barely knew," and no one would have taken notice. Instead, he said he "met" his father, and then only once -- a locution that makes no sense for a boy who had allegedly lived more than two years with the man.

What Boyles believes -- and I think he's right -- is that Team Obama is preparing the media for a shift in the official Obama saga. To this point, the core of the Obama origins story has been that he and parents lived together as a family in Hawaii until Obama was two.

The marriage "might have worked out," Obama's mother tells her son as reported in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. When, however, Harvard offered Obama Sr. a fellowship to finish his Ph.D., he anguished his way to acceptance. "How can I refuse the best education?" he lamented. "It wasn't your father's fault that he left, you know," Ann tells Obama. "I divorced him."

Obama repeated this fiction as recently as September 2009, when he addressed the nation's schoolchildren. "I get it," he told the kids about childhood struggles. "I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother."

In my book, Deconstructing Obama, I coalesce the research done by several independent investigators on the question of Obama's origins, and my conclusions are irrefutable. There never was an Obama family.

Obama's mother left Hawaii for Seattle with little Barry in tow when he was just weeks old. Obama Sr. left Hawaii for Harvard before Barry's first birthday, while Barry and his mother were still in Seattle.

This may not seem like an earthshaking shift, but the official origins story served as the foundation for what biographer David Remnick rightly calls Obama's "signature appeal: the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal." As it happens, that ideal was grounded in sand. Obama ascended to the White House on the strength of a story he knew to be untrue.

As early as the summer of 2008, independent researchers had unraveled the oft-told Obama yarn. A single tug on the thread by anyone in the mainstream media -- the respectable conservative media, for that matter -- could have undone the candidacy. Instead, these "responsible" voices did all in their power to shore up the official Obama orthodoxy and scold those who would question it.
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Jack Cashill
The American Thinker
 
At the Prayer Breakfast, Obama shifted the focus from his earthly father to his heavenly one. He did not, however, present his sudden enthusiasm for Jesus Christ as a change of heart, but rather as a sharing of what had been in his heart all along. Unfortunately, nothing he has ever said or written supports this.

In Dreams, Obama talks about first attending Jeremiah Wright's Chicago church in 1988, but he speaks of Jesus only as someone other people embrace. He refers on one occasion to "Will's Jesus." On another occasion, a friend says to him, "We love you, man. Jesus loves you!" But Obama himself has nothing to say about Jesus.

Obama biographer David Mendell, who followed Obama on the 2004 Senate trail in Illinois, wryly observed, "Obama, without fail, would mention his church and his Christian faith when he was campaigning in black churches and more socially conservative downstate Illinois communities."

Yet when Mendell tried to talk to Obama about his faith and his "ever present bible," Obama proved "uncharacteristically short" in his responses. When Mendell persisted, Obama claimed that he was drawn to Christianity because "many of the impulses that I had carried with me and were propelling me forward were the same impulses that express themselves through the church." In other words, Jesus thought pretty much along the same progressive lines as he did.

In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama mentions Jesus only twice, both times with pure calculation. On one occasion, in an attempt to dispel the "liberal caricature," he claims that "just about every member of the Congressional Black Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins."

In another, even more cynical moment, Obama exploits Jesus to keep his position on gay marriage flexible. "I must admit," says Obama of his current opposition, "that I may have been infected with society's prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus' call to love one another might demand a different conclusion."

In his review of the Prayer Breakfast speech for Time Magazine, Michal Scherer acknowledges its "political advantages" and rightly observes that Obama is "laying the groundwork by seeking to short circuit conservative critiques."
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;) ;) I am whatever I have to be at the moment, like Bradbury's Martian...
 
Repeatedly posting about things that do not matter will not make them matter.
 
My first meeting with young Barack Obama raised strong feelings and left me with a positive first impression. At the time, I felt I'd persuaded a young man anticipating a Marxist-Leninist revolution to appreciate the more practical alternative of conventional politics as a channel for his socialist views.

I met Obama in December of 1980, a couple of days after Christmas, in Portola Valley -- a small town near Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. I was a 23 year old second-year graduate student in Cornell's Government Department, and had flown to California to visit a 21 year old girlfriend, Caroline Boss. Boss was a senior at Occidental College, where she had taken a class in the fall of 1980 with political theorist Roger Boesche. She met and befriended Obama in that class.

I had been an angry Marxist revolutionary during my undergraduate career at Occidental College. During my hyperactive sophomore year, in the fall of 1976, I founded the Marxist-Socialist group on campus and named it the Political Awareness Fellowship. As I recall, I developed this innocuous sounding name because there were so few students on campus as radical as I, and I was fearful of turning off moderate students who might be willing to learn more about Marxist theory.

On my watch, our group grew to a dozen student activists and managed to attract crowds of 80 or more to our events. The most successful of these was a campaign to raise awareness of the plight of homosexuals who were beaten by Los Angeles City police officers along the Hollywood strip. I promoted this event with a large banner in the Occidental College quad reading: Anita Byrant: Hitler in Drag? During my junior year, I left Occidental College with the mission to study Marxist economics at England's University of Sussex in the fall of 1977.

By the time I returned to Occidental in the fall of 1978 for my senior year, the Political Awareness Fellowship had morphed into something much bigger, an organization with strong leadership, its own office space and a new name. The group's president was Gary Chapman, an older student who had served as a Green Beret in Viet Nam. Chapman was a colorful figure who shared stories from his military career including how he was required to take apart and reassemble his rifle in the dark. Under Chapman's leadership, the group had changed its name to the Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA). As I recall, he told me "the old name wasn't letting people know what we stood for." I agreed. The DSA met weekly and brought in speakers about once a month. Events were advertised by big signs in the campus quad. During my time at Occidental, the group searched for ways to embarrass the administration, help students to see the evil of the U.S. capitalist system, and mobilize people in preparation for the coming revolution.

In the spring of 1979, Chapman and I joined forces with other students on campus to found an anti-apartheid coalition, called The Student Committee Against Apartheid, which included the leadership of the DSA as well as several other groups. Although the coalition included liberals as well as radicals, I think it is fair to say the most significant intellectual and organizational leadership came from students in the DSA. One of the ironies of our effort is that the white students took the lead in organizing these protests while African-American students seemed strangely passive and uninvolved in fighting the South African regime.

My romance with Boss began in the spring of 1979. Boss had joined the DSA and participated in the anti-apartheid events I helped organize that year. Like me, she was a committed Marxist, preparing for the approaching revolution. That year, I completed my senior honors thesis on Marxist economics. Boss and I danced together after I accepted my Occidental degree in June of 1979 wearing the red armband that signified my solidarity with my Marxist brethren around the world and my commitment to the anti-apartheid movement.

My relationship with Boss continued through the summer of 1979 and the academic year 1979-1980. She spent the summer of 1980 with me at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. When Boss returned to Occidental in the fall of 1980 for her senior year, she enrolled in Professor Roger Boesche's European Political Thought class. It was there that she met Barack Obama who was starting his sophomore year.

When I first saw Obama, I remember I was standing on the porch of Boss's parents' impressive home as a sleek, expensive luxury car pulled up the driveway. Two young men emerged from the vehicle. They were well-dressed and looked like they were born to wealth and privilege. I was a little surprised to learn they were Boss's friends from Occidental College until she articulated the underlying0 political connection. "They're on our side," she said.

The taller of the two was Obama, then only 19, who towered over his five-foot-five companion, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo - a wealthy, 21 year old Pakistani student. Chandoo had a full dark black, neatly trimmed moustache, and was dressed in expensive clothes. Nevertheless, Obama was the more handsome of the two. At six foot two, Obama carried himself with the dignity and poise of a model. The diminutive Chandoo, in contrast, came across as more of a practical, businessman type. Obama displayed a visible deference to Chandoo when they were standing together at the vehicle.

Chandoo was vaguely familiar to me as a participant in the earlier anti-apartheid rallies on the Occidental College campus. In David Remnick's book, The Bridge, Chandoo's bona fides as a committed Marxist were well-known to those close to him. Chandoo's girlfriend at the time, Margot Mifflin, told Remnick that "n college, Hasan was a socialist, a Marxist, which is funny since he is from a wealthy family." (See, Remnick, David, The Bridge, Alfred A, Knopf, 2010, page 104.) Young Obama, on the other hand, was completely new to me.

"This is Barack Obama," Boss said.

Since I was not much taller than Chandoo, I remember I looked up at Obama as we shook hands. I was completely mystified by the pronunciation of his name. He did not put up a fight over it, however.

"You can call me Barry," Obama said.

During the introduction, Boss and Chandoo were eager to let me know that Obama was a graduate of the prestigious Punahou Academy, an elite prep school in Honolulu. I vividly remember that Chandoo was intensely proud of Obama's ties to Punahou. This prestige, however, was wasted on me. I had never heard of the school and did not have a clue about what it meant to be one of its graduates. Obama seemed embarrassed by the fuss. Boss, I remember, wanted to make sure I understood that young Obama was not merely an attractive socialite dabbling in Marxist theory. "You've worked with us," she observed. "You've been at our DSA meetings. You've been active in the anti-apartheid movement."

After a while, all six of us -- the four students and Boss' adoptive parents -- drove in two cars to a local restaurant. The owner knew Boss's father. The food was delicious, the setting spectacularly "California casual," with tall redwood trees all around. At the restaurant, we six continued our talk. Chandoo was quiet, less forceful, and deferential to Obama. Obama was polite to Boss's parents, calm, and distinguished in his manner. Mr. Boss disapproved of his daughter's radical perspective and could barely disguise his contempt for me.

Despite the recent election of Ronald Reagan, the focus of our discussion was on El Salvador and Latin America. I remember I was especially angry about what was happening in El Salvador, particularly the recent rape and murder of four American nuns and a laywoman. We also discussed the recent assassination of John Lennon in New York City. After lunch, the entourage returned to the Boss's home in Portola Valley. Mr. Boss, a gruff Swiss-born businessman, was an aficionado of luxury cars who took pride in his successes in the greeting card and display case businesses.

"That's an impressive car. Which one of you is the owner?" he asked.

"It's mine," said Chandoo, graciously adding: "Would you like to see it?"

While Chandoo and Mr. Boss gave Chandoo's luxury car a once over, the rest of us engaged in small talk until Chandoo returned. Chandoo beamed smugly, having impressed Boss's father with his expensive car. Inside the house, Mrs. Boss prepared snacks for everyone. All four of the students lit up after-dinner cigarettes in the dining room of the Boss's home. Caroline Boss sat at the head of the table to my left. Obama sat directly across from me. Chandoo sat on the other side of the table on Obama's left. Naturally, our conversation gravitated towards the coming revolution. I expected that my undergraduate friends would be interested in hearing my latest take on contemporary Marxist thought. I was in for quite a bit of a shock.

My graduate studies that fall had tempered my earlier Marxism with a more realistic perspective. I thought a revolution was not in the cards anymore. There was no inevitability, in my mind, to the old idea that the proletariat would rise up and overthrow the ruling classes. Now, the idea that we could entirely eliminate the profit motive from an advanced industrialized economy seemed like a childhood fantasy. The future, I now thought, would belong to nations with mixed economic systems -- like those in Europe -- where there was government planning of the economy combined with a greater effort to produce a more equitable distribution of wealth. It made more sense to me to focus on elections rather than on preparing for a coming revolution.

Boss and Obama, however, had a starkly different view. They believed that the economic stresses of the Carter years meant revolution was still imminent. The election of Reagan was simply a minor set-back in terms of the coming revolution. As I recall, Obama repeatedly used the phrase "When the revolution comes...." In my mind, I remember thinking that Obama was blindly sticking to the simple Marxist theory that had characterized my own views while I was an undergraduate at Occidental College. "There's going to be a revolution," Obama said, "we need to be organized and grow the movement." In Obama's view, our role must be to educate others so that we might usher in more quickly this inevitable revolution.

I know this may be implausible to some readers, but I distinctly remember Obama surprising me by bringing up Frantz Fanon and colonialism. He impressed me with his knowledge of these two topics, topics which were not among my strong points -- or of overwhelming concern to me. Boss and Obama seemed to think their ideological purity was a persuasive argument in predicting that a coming revolution would end capitalism. While I felt I was doing them a favor by providing them with the latest research, I saw I was in danger of being cast as a reactionary who did not grasp the nuances of international Marxist theory.

Chandoo let Boss and Obama take the crux of the argument to me. Chandoo, in fact, seemed chagrined by the level of disagreement in the group. I cannot remember him making any significant comments during this discussion.

Drawing on the history of Western Europe, I responded it was unrealistic to think the working class would ever overthrow the capitalist system. As I recall, Obama reacted negatively to my critique, saying: "That's crazy!"

Since Boss and Obama had injected theory into our debate, I reacted by going historical. As best I can recreate the argument, I responded by critiquing their perspective with the fresh insight I had gained from my recent reading of Barrington Moore's book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). Moore had argued that a Russian or Chinese style revolution -- leading to communism -- was only possible in an agrarian society with a weak or non-existent middle-class or bourgeoisie.

Since I was a Marxist myself at the time, and had studied variations in Marxist theory, I can state that everything I heard Obama argue that evening was consistent with Marxist philosophy, including the ideas that class struggle was leading to an inevitable revolution and that an elite group of revolutionaries was needed to lead the effort. If he had not been a true Marxist-Leninist, I would have noticed and remembered. I can still, with some degree of ideological precision, identify which students at Occidental College were radicals and which ones were not. I can do the same thing for the Occidental College professors at that time.

By the time the debate came to an end, Obama -- although not Boss -- was making peace, agreeing with the facts I had laid out, and demonstrating an apparent agreement with my more realistic perspective. I have a vivid memory of Obama surrendering to my argument including signaling to the somewhat bewildered Chandoo -- through his voice and body language -- that the argument had concluded and had been decided in my favor. Around 9 p.m., Chandoo and Obama left for another appointment, either in Palo Alto or San Francisco. In retrospect, Obama had proved to me that he was indeed, as Boss had promised, "on our side."

Long before I realized Obama had grown into a spectacular political career, I have treasured this particular memory as an early example of my own intellectual growth and an early sign of my modest promise as a teacher. At the time, I had the impression that I might have been one of the first to directly challenge Obama's Marxist-Leninist mind-set and to introduce him to a more practical view that saw politics, rather than revolution, as the preferred route to socialism. Had I really persuaded him, or was he just making nice to smooth things over with a new friend? I'd like to think it was the former.

Whatever progress I made with Obama that evening, the price of our debate was a greater ideological wedge between me and Boss and a further decline in our rocky relationship. Our relationship would officially end in February and then flicker out completely by June 1981 -- much to the satisfaction of Boss's father.

I remember that Obama was friendly to me on at least three other occasions over the next several months. For example, Boss and I visited the apartment he shared with Chandoo. I spoke with him again on campus in the student union. I saw him on campus in The Cooler -- the school's coffee and sandwich shop. I also spoke with him at large party in June 1981. I certainly considered him a friend, a confidant and a political ally in the larger struggle against poverty and oppressive social systems.

Whatever impact our encounter might have had on him, I know something about what Barack Obama believed in 1980. At that time, the future president was a doctrinaire Marxist revolutionary, although perhaps -- for the first time -- considering conventional politics as a more practical road to socialism. Knowing this, I think I have a responsibility to place on the public record my account of this incident from our president's past.
Click to expand...

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a blogger at David Horowitz's NewsReal Blog . Dr. Drew earned his Ph.D. from Cornell and has taught political science and economics at Williams College.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html
 
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