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Saturday, February 13, 2010
Obama's College Marxism
Newsmax
has an interesting report from Ron Kessler on Barack Obama's college
Marxism.
As a college student, Barack Obama expressed Marxist views, including the need for a new socialist U.S. government, according to a student who says he shared the future president’s opinion at the time...
Dr. John C. Drew, a grant writing consultant in Laguna Niguel, Calif., tells Newsmax he met Obama in 1980 when Obama was a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Drew had just graduated from Occidental and was attending graduate school at Cornell University.
Drew’s then girlfriend, Caroline Boss — now Grauman-Boss — knew Obama because she shared classes with him at Occidental.
During Christmas break, Drew says he was at Grauman-Boss’ home in Palo Alto when Obama came over with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, his roommate from Pakistan.
“Barack and Hasan showed up at the house in a BMW, and then we went to a restaurant together,” Drew says. “We had a nice meal, and then we came back to the house and smoked cigarettes and drank and argued politics.”
For the next several hours, they discussed Marxism.
“He was arguing a straightforward Marxist-Leninist class-struggle point of view, which anticipated that there would be a revolution of the working class, led by revolutionaries, who would overthrow the capitalist system and institute a new socialist government that would redistribute the wealth,” says Drew, who says he himself was then a Marxist.
“The idea was basically that wealthy people were exploiting others,” Drew says. “That this was the secret of their wealth, that they weren’t paying others enough for their work, and they were using and taking advantage of other people. He was convinced that a revolution would take place, and it would be a good thing.”
Drew concluded that Obama thought of himself as “part of an intelligent, radical vanguard that was leading the way towards this revolution and towards this new society.”
In contrast, “My more pessimistic Marxist perspective indicated this was not a realistic possibility, that we really hadn’t seen a sort of complete revolution take place anywhere in Western Europe, and that this isn’t what had happened in more socialistic Germany or in France,” Drew says. “He was pretty persistent, that I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Drew’s viewpoint that a revolution was unrealistic “made me very unpopular that evening. It was considered a reactionary and insensitive thing to argue,” says Drew.
Drew saw Obama again at a party Obama and Chandoo gave in June 1981 at the house they shared. Drew went on to become an assistant professor of political science at Williams College.
In 1981, Obama left Occidental to attend Columbia University. During that year, Obama spent “about three weeks” visiting Chandoo and his family in Karachi, Pakistan, according to the account of Obama spokesman Bill Burton during the campaign.
Chandoo is now a financial consultant who was formerly a broker at Oppenheimer & Co. He has contributed to Obama’s campaign and helped raise more than $100,000 for him as a bundler.
“If that’s what John Drew said, that’s what he said,” Chandoo commented. “I can’t remember Obama ever talking like that. It sounds a bit absurd to me, but that’s my opinion. I can’t remember him ever expressing an interest in being a Marxist.”
Much of what is known about Obama’s past has been revealed and defined by Obama himself, largely through his two bestselling books “Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.”
In that memoir, Obama said that at Occidental, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
Congratulations Mr Drew - let's hope a few more people from mr Obama's past are willing to come forward with what they know.
Tags: OBAMA MARXISM Drew