What became of the innocent youth brainwashed by “the Moscow of Southern California” in the early 1980s? John Drew is once again hitting the RWNJ headlines for his attention-whoring of maybe 24 hours total acquaintance with Barack Obama three decades ago. John Drew, who visited Occidental College while Obama was a student there, claims (and claims and claims) that the President of the United States is a “Marxist-Leninist” or “Marxist socialist” today, as much as he was a “Marxist-Leninist” or “Marxist socialist” as a nineteen-year-old.
Among Obama’s actual schoolmates when he was at Occidental, who did know him, and have spoken of the young Barack: Robert McCrary became general manager of a sewing company; Vinai Thummalapally, president of a manufacturing company; Phil Boerner went into public relations; Imad Husain became a banker; Paul Carpenter, a lawyer; Kent Goss, a lawyer; Ken Sulzer, also a lawyer; Lisa Jack, a psychologist; Louis Hook, an executive in communications technology and systems management; Margot Mifflin, a journalism professor; Jon K. Mitchell, a bass player; Steve Coll, an author; Hasan Chandoo, a financial consultant; Wahid Hamid, vice-president at Pepsico; Eric Moore, commercial real estate executive; John Boyer, surgeon; Caroline Boss, writer and educator, in business with her husband, Tom Grauman.
Quite a crop of capitalist tools, there, turned out by “the Moscow of Southern California.”
John Drew, a graduate of Occidental College, was not a contemporary of Barack Obama’s at Occidental College. He met him a few times on visits from graduate school on the other side of the country. While Drew makes a big deal of this connection, he barely knew Barack Obama. How well could he possibly know Barack Obama from a couple of parties and seeing him near the mailboxes?
Drew grew up to be “a Ronald Reagan, churchgoing, Baptist conservative,” making his living helping people write proposals for socialistic government grants. He believes greater success would have come to him, had he not been held back by affirmative action; although, like President Obama, Drew attended private colleges on scholarship, so he wasn’t exactly deprived.
Barack Obama grew up to be President of the United States, leader of the free world, a circumstance which drives (the jealous beyond belief) John Drew to simultaneously bask in the Obama glow, a filament-thin connection though he has; while obsessively hitting hundreds of comment sections all over the Internet, copying and pasting his tale, again and again and again, for years on end, in a sick effort to destroy the one who succeeded in life so spectacularly beyond him.
It’s just plain pathetic, but John Drew is writing a whole book about his fleeting brush with somebody else’s future fame. So what do the people listed above, who actually knew the young Obama, have to say about John Drew and his McCarthy-like red-baiting of President Obama? Nothing, so far, unless you count Hasan Chandoo, answering a direct question:
The only person Drew references in his tales who has spoken publicly about them is a former Obama associate named Hasan Chandoo. Two years ago, when asked about Drew’s assertions that Obama was an ardent Marxist, Chandoo, who is now a financial consultant, told the conservative magazine NewsMax that…
“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.”
There is no shame in it, if a college student discusses Marxism; it’s supposed to be that way in becoming educated, as John Drew well knows. I would be surprised to learn Obama discussed the topic only with John Drew. But is only John Drew allowed to have evolved his political thinking as he grew up?
If John Drew, who touts himself as an award-winning political scientist, a respected scholar–”among the most talented scholars of my generation,” no less–is writing a book about President Obama’s college years, surely he has gathered substantiating statements from those who were there when Obama was there. That’s the way it’s done. Yet we see one statement by one classmate of Obama’s, who discounts John Drew’s story.
Is there no one who will back up the word of John Drew?
Drew argues that The Bridge by David Remnick
, which includes interviews with Occidental classmates of Obama’s, substantiates his view of Obama as a latter and present day Marxist, but anyone who has read the book knows John Drew had to have been dreaming when he took that conclusion from Remnick’s book.
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