Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Rush Limbaugh Reports: John Drew Dated "Regina" One of Obama's Composite Women

I was pleased to run across the bit of tape where Rush Limbaugh called public attention to my story about dating the real Marxist Regina for two years and my additional comments regarding young Obama's ideological extremism.



As far as I can tell, Rush was genuinely pleased by this bit of news even though he was not surprised to learn young Obama held to Marxist socialist beliefs. I was startled at the calls and e-mails I got after Rush mentioned my story on the air. This went out to about 20 million listeners.

Apparently, Rush had read through, or scanned, my recent article in American Thinker on how my white college era girlfriend, Caroline Boss, became the black Regina in Obama's Dreams from My Father. Here's the actual transcript right off of Rush's website.
RUSH: There's also a guy out now, John Drew, I forget where this is. I've got somewhere in the stack. Apparently this guy dated one of the composite women in Obama's book. The woman named Regina, this guy dated her for two years. And according to this guy, Regina was not black. She wasn't from the south side of Chicago. She was white. They were all left-wing radicals. They spent their summers in San Francisco. Obama, at Occidental College, was a Marxist. This is this guy's writing. We finally found a friend of Obama's from back then. Now, this is not gonna get a wide berth, but it's out there. I don't care about the labels, communist this, we don't even need 'em. Obama is now telling us who he is. And I must admit, there's a bit of rejoicing going on with me, El Rushbo.
This, my friends, is something that I've been confident in knowing since Obama was a Senator. It's not hard. Like I said, you don't even need a high school diploma. All you have to do is understand who modern liberals are and what they are, what they want to do. After that it's easy. The hardest part is admitting that there are people like that amongst us in positions of power with so many friends. But it ought not be. The more people that could come to grips with that, the farther along we would be.
Of course, what Rush may not have realized is that I have been trying to get my story to his attention for about four years now - ever since I first realized that I had valuable insight into the real Barack Obama. Ironically, I discovered that my take on young Obama's ideological extremism was also a topic of discussion on the Sean Hannity radio program featuring Paul Kengor and his new book, The Communist - Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist. He applies his skills as a grant writing consultant in the Southern Calfornia area. His website is at the following link: http://drdrewguaranteedgrants.com/about-us/

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Here At Last: PJMedia Welcomes Dr. Drew as Blogger

As you may know, I am very honored to have my first article appear in PJMedia this afternoon. This is a top-notch publication which supports the work done by the on-line television programs of PJTV. This article was called, "Barack Obama's Marxist Ghosts of Christmas Past."

This imaginative title inspired a series of cartoons from Chris Muir over at Day By Day Cartoon.



All in all, I'm grateful that we are going into the 2012 presidential campaign with a lot more visibility regarding Obama's past than was the case in 2008. Back then, no one knew I existed for that my story could be verified. Now, it is up and running at American Thinker, Brietbart.com and PJMedia. It looks like my testimony of young Obama's ideological extremism is now available despite the mainstream media.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

The Tale of Two Road Trips: Sanitizing Obama’s Radical Past

A striking clash between those who feel a profound duty to report that the young Obama was nurtured by Marxists, socialists and Communists, and those who think it is a better idea to erase this information from the public record is on display in two current books. One book provided key, politically significant details of a heated debate I had with the young, Marxist-Leninist Obama over Christmas break 1980. The other book only confirmed that young Obama was in my vicinity at the time. The gap between how Paul Kengor covered Obama’s Christmas break in The Communist, and how David Marannis covered this same moment in Barack Obama: The Story is chilling.

As an eye witness to young Obama’s Marxist-Leninist ideology, I count myself among those who think it is our duty to report the truth about young Obama, especially if it helps us understand the persistent, contemporary influence of Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist who became young Barack Obama’s mentor. I do not think it is any exaggeration to suggest that in the long-run mainstream media’s failure to confront the reality of young Obama’s ideological extremism is almost as important than the reality of Obama’s tenure in office.

In The Communist – Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor Threshold Editions/Mercury Ink (2012), Paul Kengor writes that “The people who influence our presidents matter.” (p. 298)

Kengor, a political scientist, builds on his long-standing expertise in Cold War politics to write a balanced and well-documented account of the life, writing and political beliefs of Frank Marshall Davis (1917-1995). To keep the focus on Davis’s political views, Kengor modestly leaves out the unpleasant, possibly salacious details of Davis’s earthy self, including Davis’s roles as a producer of both visual and written pornography. Davis’s pornographic writing is so deviant that it describes ugly details of child sexual abuse. Skipping this aspect of Davis’s unseemly life, Kengor seeks to create a credible account of Davis’s thinking which addresses genuine examples of racially motivated hatred which scarred young Davis’s life, while still focusing unremitting attention on how Davis excused the brutal violence of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Mihn.

In the context of describing how, possibly, Frank Marshall Davis influenced the thinking of young Barack Obama, Kengor shares a warts and all transcript of an interview he did with me on a radio program in 2011. If I had known my words were going to appear in a book, then I would have used more of my rusty Toastmaster’s skills to eliminate the unnecessary words in my oral communications that morning. Nevertheless, Kengor’s objective is to provide readers with every opportunity to judge my character and credibility for themselves. I am embarrassed, but I am okay to take one for the team.

Surprisingly, I am not the only one who appears to be more than eager to help Kengor set the record straight. The back story behind Kengor’s book features the crucial role so many of Kengor’s acquaintances and mentees have played in digging up archival information on the writings of Frank Marshall Davis. Kengor, in particular, credits Spyridon Mitsotakis – an enterprising student at New York University - who discovered that every issue of Frank Marshall Davis’s Chicago Star was available at NYU’s Tamiment Library, a library which also holds the archives of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

The political significance of Mitsotakis’s discovery is sobering when Kengor writes that the Library of Congress one asserted it had archives of the Chicago Star, but “...upon taking a closer look, discovered it does not.” Even worse, Kengor shares: “The reels of micro-fiche from the Chicago Star seem to have disappeared from the shelf.” (p. 300) Accordingly, Kengor’s new book is the timely result not only of his skill as a writer, but also of his ability to inspire the heroic efforts of an all volunteer research work force in the midst of a national crisis.

I am a big fan of Paul Kengor, so it pains me to offer even the most gentle criticism. Nevertheless, my only complaint with Kengor’s work in The Communist comes on page 299 where Kengor writes: "More than that, Frank even more likely explains how and why our president, as a young man at Occidental College circa 1980, was possibly once on the Marxist left." As an eyewitness to young Obama’s ideological extremism, I would have more comfortably switched out "...possibly once on the Marxist left" to read “...solidly on the Marxist left.” If I had had the opportunity, I would have made the case for stronger language on that point, not only because of my face-to-face observations of young Obama, but also because of my familiarity with his social and intellectual environment.

When I debated young Obama, I did so in the company of two of young Obama's closest friends, Caroline Boss - the radical student leader who became part of the composite character Regina in Dreams, and Hasan Chandoo - the Marxist student who was Obama's sophomore year roommate. If the real life Obama had been to the right of either Boss or Chandoo as Maraniss reports, then I am certain I would have noticed this gap.

Part of the reason I can still remember such details is because it was no small thing to consider yourself a Marxist in 1980-1981. Similar to Obama, I remember I chose my friends carefully too. As I recall, our nation was still deep into the Cold War and my heartfelt ideology controlled my career choices, influenced the mentors I picked, and placed me on a certain collision path with some of the most powerful forces in the world. I would say that this is the ideological and cultural space that Obama, Boss and Chandoo and I all shared in December 1980, as potentially grandiose -- or as actually silly -- as this thinking seems today.

As Kengor writes, "Nonetheless, whatever our biases, reality is reality, history is history, truth is truth." After reading Maraniss's book, I'm chilled that a Pulitzer Prize winning presidential historian like Maraniss does not seem to share these common sense assumptions.

Maraniss’s book is particularly frustrating to me because he verifies -- through the testimony of Sohale Siddiqi, who was Obama’s roommate in New York -- that young Obama was on a road trip in the San Francisco area at precisely the time I indicate I debated the young Obama. Maraniss's account also suggests Chandoo made a brief visit to the San Francisco area too during Christmas break 1980.

Unfortunately, Maraniss did not interview me. I think it is quite strange that Maraniss does not mention any of the reports of my debate which have surfaced in books by other authors including Michael Savage’s insightful appreciation of Marxist ideology in Trickle Down Poverty or Stanley Kurtz’s well-researched investigation of Obama’s extremist ties in Radical-In-Chief.

My frustration with Maraniss is only enhanced because he has revealed that my old college era girlfriend, Caroline Boss, provided Obama with the name of the composite character “Regina.” The name “Regina” was the name of Boss's  working-class grandmother. I think this is highly significant because Obama tells us in Dreams that the character “Regina” helped inspire his decision to become a community organizer in Chicago. As Obama writes:

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can construct a certain logic to my decision, show how becoming an organizer was part of that larger narrative, starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers and the loss of Lolo to power, on through Ray and Frank, Marcus and Regina; my move to New York; my father’s death.” (pp. 133-134.)
Along with Maraniss’s verification of the significant role Boss played in young Obama’s life, Mariniss simultaneously verifies other key elements from my first February 2010 testimony as recorded by Ronald Kessler. As careful comparison shows, Maraniss’s new book ends up supporting my original take on young Obama’s friends including the radical beliefs of both Hasan Chandoo and Caroline Boss, and their mutual closeness to Obama.

Unfortunately, Maraniss’s account does little to help us understand President Obama’s attitude toward our capitalist system. Of course, this is a difficult challenge. I am still trying to wrap my brain around Obama’s bizarre suggestion that the success of my management consulting business is more dependent on the pavement outside my office than the cold calls I make every Thursday. From my perspective, Adam Smith is right. My success as a businessman and a scholar seems more dependent on the favors I have done for others than on anything others have done for me.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Friday, July 20, 2012

ABC Quick to Associate Tea Party Member with Aurora, CO Shooting

I am starting to think I have seen this movie before. Today, I woke up to learn that the folks at ABC were seeking to make it look like a Tea Party activist was associated with the Aurora, CO shooting. For a look at the shocking footage, watch this video from Breitbart.com.

In this brief tape, Brian Ross and George Stephanolpoulos seek to associate this violent crime with the peaceful Tea Party movement.


I was incensed in 2011 when the leftist media, including the soon-to-be-fired Keith Olbermann, started making similar statements in reaction to the mass shooting in Tuscon, AZ.

In the end, as I was among the first to report the truth - that Jared Loughner was a mentally ill leftwing extremist. It is difficult to think about politics today given the shock of this mass murder. In the long-run, however, I am expecting that even independent voters are waking up to the reality that ABC news is a biased organization that does not deserve their viewership or support.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Rush Limbaugh Rejoices: We Finally Found a Friend of Obama's Who Knew Him from College

I was startled today by a large number of phone calls and e-mails alerting me to the fact that my story about the real, white Regina was mentioned on the Rush Limbaugh radio program this morning.


Apparently, Rush had read through, or scanned, my recent article on how my white college era girlfriend, Caroline Boss, became the black Regina in Obama's Dreams from My Father. Here's the actual transcript right off of Rush's website.
RUSH: There's also a guy out now, John Drew, I forget where this is. I've got somewhere in the stack. Apparently this guy dated one of the composite women in Obama's book. The woman named Regina, this guy dated her for two years. And according to this guy, Regina was not black. She wasn't from the south side of Chicago. She was white. They were all left-wing radicals. They spent their summers in San Francisco. Obama, at Occidental College, was a Marxist. This is this guy's writing. We finally found a friend of Obama's from back then. Now, this is not gonna get a wide berth, but it's out there. I don't care about the labels, communist this, we don't even need 'em. Obama is now telling us who he is. And I must admit, there's a bit of rejoicing going on with me, El Rushbo. This, my friends, is something that I've been confident in knowing since Obama was a Senator. It's not hard. Like I said, you don't even need a high school diploma. All you have to do is understand who modern liberals are and what they are, what they want to do. After that it's easy. The hardest part is admitting that there are people like that amongst us in positions of power with so many friends. But it ought not be. The more people that could come to grips with that, the farther along we would be.
Of course, what Rush may not have realized is that I have been trying to get my story to his attention for about four years now - ever since I first realized that I had valuable insight into the real Barack Obama. Ironically, I discovered that my take on young Obama's ideological extremism was also a topic of discussion on the Sean Hannity radio program featuring Paul Kengor and his new book, The Communist - Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor. The day before, Kengor cited my take on young Obama extremism on The Blaze TV - see my story featured at 12:20.


 All in all, I'm particularly grateful to everyone who worked behind the scenes to assist me with writing the article that eventually came to Rush's attention this morning. For a short YouTube video including my take on young Obama's ideological extremism, please click here.

  John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist. He applies his skills as a grant writing consultant in the Southern Calfornia area. His website is at the following link: http://drdrewguaranteedgrants.com/about-us/

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Ghosts of Marxist Christmas Past: Why Didn’t David Maraniss Call Me Regarding Young Obama’s 1980 Road Trip to San Francisco?


John Drew with Caroline Boss
in June 1981.
 I met the young Obama over 32 years ago while I was visiting Caroline Boss, an undergraduate at Occidental College, at her home in northern California, over the Christmas break in 1980. I had met Boss in the spring of 1979 and maintained a relationship with her up until her graduation from Occidental College in 1981. She had met the young Obama in early 1980. She knew him well because she had been in two classes with him by the time she introduced him to me along with his friend, Hasan Chandoo. As evidence of my relationship with Boss I have a number of her old cards and letters still laying around along with a photo of us together in 1981, a photo which was taken in the yard of my parents’ house in Newhall, CA.

In a story first released in February 2010, I shared my face to face account of how I later confronted young Obama’s naïve faith in an inevitable Communist revolution during a heated debate at the Boss’s home in Portola Valley, CA. This small but significant memory remains as a powerful bit of evidence that the young Obama was not always committed to the pragmatic centrism that President Obama claims as his long-standing, guiding philosophy.

Luckily for historians, Maraniss new book, Barack Obama: The Story, supports my account of young Obama’s general whereabouts during Christmas 1980, but unfortunately Maraniss distorts the specifics both, I suspect, to protect Obama and potentially to discredit me.

To put Maraniss’s new information into its correct perspective, I need to share that Maraniss reports that young Obama was in San Francisco over Christmas break in 1980 only to tell a larger story of how young Obama first meet Sohale Siddiqi, the Pakistani who later became Obama’s Columbia University roommate. “During the Christmas break that year,” writes Maraniss, “Sohale Siddiqi, a friend of Hasan’s and Wahid’s who lived in New York, came out to visit.”

In Maraniss’s book, Siddiqi is the recipient of some minor good fortune during his trip out west since he is able to use young Obama’s empty room in Pasadena during Obama’s absence.

“There was a room available at the apartment in Pasadena,” Maraniss writes, “Obama had left on a road trip and ended up in San Francisco. On the night of December 31, Hasan and Sohale and some buddies drove up to San Francisco for a New Year’s Eve party, and it was there that Siddiqi encountered Chandoo’s roommate for the first time.” (See, Maraniss, 2012, p. 367.)

What is highly inaccurate about Maraniss’s account - from my perspective - is that I met with both young Obama and his roommate Chandoo while I was staying at Caroline Boss’s northern California home. I would have been happy to verify that fact for Maraniss if he had interviewed me. As I recall, the debate with Obama and his friends ended, in part, because both Obama and Chandoo needed to leave to meet up with some other people. I do not recall the exact details of where Obama and Chandoo were heading later on after visiting with me and Boss.

If Maraniss’s was working to minimize public attention regarding my comments on young Obama’s extremist ideology, then Maraniss’s efforts to disconfirm my story were probably thwarted by new information from his interview with Sohale Siddiqi. Whether Siddiqi appreciated the gravity of his observation or not, Siddiqi’s comments inadvertently confirmed my earlier report that young Obama was in Portola Valley, CA sometime after Christmas and prior to New Year’s Eve.

Maraniss’s decision to suggest that Obama and Chandoo were travelling separately leads to some bizarre and implausible events regarding the pair’s return to the Los Angeles area. Specifically, Maraniss writes that the very next morning - New Year’s Day, 1981 - Obama joined Chandoo, Siddiqi and at least two other individuals for the drive back to Los Angeles. Whether or not this was Maraniss’s intention, his report on Obama’s lonely road trip has the impact of making it harder for me to have debated with both Obama and Chandoo at Boss’s home in Portola Valley.

Given the great distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco, however, I think most readers of Maraniss’s book will find it highly implausible to imagine that anyone would to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a one night party and then drive all the way back to Los Angeles on the very next day.

For now, my best theory is that Maraniss knows all about me and that the last thing he wanted to do was to verify my story that young Obama was in the San Francisco area over Christmas break 1980. Maraniss, for what it is worth, knows me well enough to have blocked me as one of his Twitter followers.

Given Siddiqi’s comments, however, there was no way Maraniss could leave this important, historically significant detail out of his book. To lessen the damage, in my theory, Maraniss separated Obama and Chandoo as travelling companions and sought to make my story appear less than completely accurate – even as he confirmed one of my story’s most highly significant and unusual facts.

So far, my take on young Obama’s ideological extremism has appeared in at least five books by serious authors including Stanley Kurtz’s well-researched Radical-In-Chief. It seems odd to me that Maraniss did interview me for his book. My theory, of course, is that it is easier to get President Obama to talk with you if you promise to leave out the parts of Obama’s story that are most connected to my face-to-face knowledge of young Obama’s Marxist-Leninist perspective.


John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Yes She Did: My White Girlfriend Inspired Obama’s Big, Dark Regina in Dreams from My Father

John Drew and Caroline Boss
in June 1981.
As far as I know, I am the only person in the nation willing to verify that young Barack Obama was an ardent Marxist-Leninist. Bloggers who have sought to discredit my story have asserted that I never met young Obama, that I was not part of young Obama’s inner circle and that I was in no position to verify his most private ideological views. I am expecting that these defenses of young Obama’s credentials as a pragmatic centrist will fall apart now that David Maraniss has revealed in Barack Obama: The Story that the Occidental College coed who introduced me to young Obama was one of the inspirations for the composite character “Regina” in Obama’s Dreams from My Father. True, Regina appears in Dreams as “a big, dark woman,” but why deny Obama a little poetic license.

According to Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and Pulizer Prize winning journalist, Obama created the composite character Regina out of the European adventures of a black female student at Occidental named Sarah Etta-Harris, the Chicago family stories of Michelle Robinson – the President’s future wife, and anti-apartheid activism of my then 22 year-old white girlfriend, Caroline Boss. This somewhat disconcerting news came to my attention last month along with the even more shocking news that the very name Regina was the name of Boss’s real life grandmother, a Swiss woman who worked as a maid.

When I first read Dreams in 2008, I remember thinking the character of Regina reminded me of Boss, a girl I dated - and lived with - off and on for slightly over two years between the Spring of 1979 and the Spring of 1981. Much of the information I have shared about my relationship with Boss has recently been published in Paul Kengor’s new book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. There, Kengor reports on my relationship with Boss along with details of a heated debate over the 1980 Christmas break where I confronted the impracticality of Obama’s anticipation of an inevitable Communist revolution.

Obama introduces composite Regina by writing: “I had seen her around before, usually sitting in the library with book in hand, a big, dark woman who wore stockings and dresses that looked homemade, along with tinted, oversized glasses and a scarf always covering her head.” (Dreams, pp. 103-104.) In contrast to this description, I can report the real Regina was a fun, scintillating, hyper-extraverted figure on the Occidental College campus. In contrast to the seriousness of Michelle Obama, I would say the young Caroline Boss was more like that character played by Lisa Kurdow on Friends - the fiercely independent, quirky, nurturing Phoebe Buffay.

Like Phoebe, Boss had long blond hair which she wore pinned back in a bun or twisted up in a pony tail. Her posture was terrible. When she stood up at her full 5’8” height, however, she was somewhat taller than me – especially in her clogs. By the time Boss introduced me to young Obama – who she had known for almost one year - she was a thin, almost anorexic girl.

I remember she dressed like a hippie from the 1960s complete with a woven ankle bracelet, blouses that reflected her Swiss heritage, and big colorful Indian print skirts. Boss did wear big sunglasses. She was also fond of wearing scarves round her neck. I cannot remember her ever wearing a scarf over her head. What I recall best about her clothing was that she had a habit of wearing shirts tucked inside bulky overalls. I clearly remember the real Regina also had a sensible, if somewhat guilty, appreciation for the superior fit of designer jeans from Gloria Vanderbilt.

In contrast to the composite Regina, Boss was a Marxist and a socialist looking forward to a Communist revolution in the United States. She believed this revolution would be the inevitable result of larger social forces working through the dialectic logic of Marx’s scientific socialism. In the end, however, I do not remember Boss so much as a Stalinist leader as I remember her as an uninhibited girl with a permanent, mischievous smile who pushed the boundaries of social norms.
Boss appeared in her own Occidental College magazine, Tattooed Lady, as a tasteful nude in a manner that still reminds me of Gwyneth Paltrow in the film Great Expectations. At Occidental, my circle of radical friends deeply enjoyed mixing politics with art, literature, film and photography. According to Maraniss, Boss is the person who referred young Obama to her friend, Lisa Jack, the student photographer for whom young Obama posed in those now famous photographs that document his straw hat and rakish style as a cigarette smoking freshman.

I remember that my Marxist girlfriend was bookish, but struggled in school. As I recall, she often failed to turn in papers on time and piled up strings of incompletes that would stretch out her academic career. As I recall, she would take about five years to finish the normal four year program at Occidental. She ended up being something of a perpetual student. Although I lost track of her whereabouts in 1982, I learned later that she earned an M.S. in Political Philosophy from the London School of Economics and another M.Phil. in Politics from Columbia University.

It is not hard for me to imagine that Boss’s intense interest in politics might have made for good reading in a more truthful version of Dreams from My Father. In 2011, for example, I was interviewed by David Garrow – a Pulizer Prize winning author himself – and I quickly discovered that Garrow was less interested in my college or graduate school memories than he was in a tattered green address book that contained Boss’s old contact numbers.

Although I was thrown off by Obama’s statement that Regina was a big dark woman, I had noticed highly significant traces of Boss in the character Regina. There were numerous clues that matched up with my memories of Boss including the fact she and I had both enjoyed - practically lived in - Occidental’s on-campus coffee shop, The Cooler. As I recall, The Cooler was the center of our lives because it was open at the times when you could not get a meal at the student union and because we could smoke our Marlboro Light cigarettes.

Similar to the character Regina, Boss expressed an exceptional interest in my graduate school papers, what I was reading, and my future ambitions as a scholar. Her positive vision for my future as a great scholar was a striking contrast to my own family’s lack of support. In retrospect, Boss’s interest in my academic work was particularly noteworthy since even subsequent girlfriends displayed only the most cautious indifference to my political science research. (In spite of them, my doctoral dissertation ended up winning the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association.)

Boss, as I recall, fed into my ambitions. In one of the many cards and letters she sent me, she wrote: “Go for greatness!”

Much like the Boss I remember, the character Regina is highly curious about Obama’s reading and academic work. Regina speaks in such an overwhelmingly encouraging and uplifting fashion that she seemingly transforms Obama. Referring to his heart-to-heart with Regina, Obama later writes: “Strange how a single conversation can change you.” (Dreams, p. 105.) I can report that those vignettes featuring Regina are an accurate echo of the curious, enthusiastic, and intellectually supportive Caroline Boss I knew between 1979 and 1981.

Obama’s Regina, however, struck me as distant from Boss’s life when Regina begins to share that she grew up in Chicago, with an absent father and struggling mother. This is because the real life Regina I knew had been adopted by her Swiss parents. Boss, in fact, had grown up as the only child of a wealthy family. (A younger brother had died in early childhood.) In contrast to Regina’s poverty, the real life Boss family lived in a spacious house with a pool in the Portola Valley - close to both San Francisco and Stanford University in Palo Alto.

Boss’s father was very much alive. Mr. Boss was a gruff, materialistic Swiss businessman who was more than happy to share with me the fact that he could live a much richer lifestyle in California than he could in his native Switzerland on the same annual income. I remember him once disparaging a waitress who was doing an exceptional job of serving us at a Lawry’s Restaurant. “She thinks she has a good job,” Mr. Boss remarked.

Looking back, I think I had more rapport with Boss’s adopted mother. She had refined tastes in antiques and jewelry. I remember Mrs. Boss wore a huge diamond ring. She once shared a story about how she had evaded a mugging attempt inspired, in part, by the size of that diamond. Mrs. Boss also enjoyed giving lavish gifts to her daughter and taking her on shopping sprees at the most elite stores in San Francisco. Around graduation time, Mrs. Boss even talked her daughter into cutting off her woven ankle bracelet so that she would wear a pretty formal dress with nylons.

In understanding Boss’s role in Dreams from My Father, however, I think it is important to point out she was not a spoiled rich kid.

Although she had her own car and could afford her own apartment, she did work as a house cleaner on the side to make money. For example, I remember vividly that Boss had a job cleaning the home of one of Occidental College’s political science professors, Jane Jacquette. In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama makes a big deal about Regina being angered at the rude treatment Obama and his friends offered their maids when they messed up their Haines Hall dorm rooms and hallway.

I would not be surprised to learn Boss might have lectured young Obama on the value of housework and on the importance of not making fun of people, like her grandmother, who worked as maids.

Politically, the most significant issue missing from Obama’s composite Regina is that the real life Caroline Boss was a strongly committed Marxist socialist. Boss served as the co-president of the Democrat Socialist Alliance (DSA) at Occidental College while Obama was a sophomore.

We also know from David Maraniss’s book that Boss held a leadership role on campus because she was one of the main speakers at the anti-apartheid event on February 18, 1981. In Maraniss’s book, the young Obama’s stirring portrayal of a soon to be arrested South African activist offers a stark contrast to Boss’s speech in which – reminiscent of Phoebe Buffay – she is so nervous that she flubs the introduction of the guest speaker, a visitor from South Africa named Tim Hgubeni.

Looking back on my own memories, I think it is safe to say the story of the real life Caroline Boss would have been much more interesting than the story of the fake Regina – even the parts of the fake Regina that seem to drawn on the real life of Michelle Obama.

I am asking myself why would Obama delete a vivid white girl from his autobiography and replace her with a big, dark composite character from Chicago? As a political scientist, I think the best theory is that the story of my real life white girlfriend would not have scored Obama many points among his potential black constituents in Chicago. Acknowledging the influence of the white, Swiss-American Boss would have called attention to the fact that virtually all of the women who played an intense role in young Obama’s life were white and not black.

Moreover, if Obama had been deeply in love with Boss, then the story might have revealed his discomfort with the way I would routinely disrupt his romantic plans through my frequent visits to the Occidental campus. (Maraniss, oddly enough, does discuss how Boss’s future husband, Thomas Grauman, battled with young Obama for the attention of Alexandra McNear.) More significantly, if Obama told a story about the influence of the real life, white Regina, it would show Obama had little interest in black girls and instead displayed much greater interest in hanging out with - and perhaps falling in love with - wealthy white girls including Caroline Boss, Alexandra McNear and Genevieve Cook.

Finally, a white Regina would have more quickly led objective readers to the real Barack Obama, the young guy I met during Christmas break in 1980 who seemed like a white guy to me. It might have more quickly introduced the American people to the prickly young Obama, the one who got in my face when I confronted his naïve faith in a Communist revolution.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Washington Post’s David Maraniss Verifies Obama in SF Area In Time for Famous Pro-Marxist Debate with Me Back in 1980.



John Drew and Caroline Boss in June
1981 - two Marxist friends of young
Barack Obama. 
 In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss writes young Barack Obama was in the San Francisco area during his Christmas break from Occidental College in 1980. As the only person in the world willing to verify young Obama was an ardent Marxist socialist extremist, I am pleased Maraniss - a Washington Post associate editor, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and the co-author of Tell Newt to Shut Up! - provides a clear, compelling and independent verification of a key element of my story – that I first confronted young Obama’s radicalism at the home of Caroline Boss in Portola Valley - a small city outside of Palo Alto and just beneath San Francisco.

This verification is especially since it comes from a liberal author who has otherwise minimized young Obama’s ties to radical ideologues like Obama’s Communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, Chicago socialist politician Alice Palmer or our nation’s number one unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers.

Ronald Kessler began the work of verifying my face-to-face confrontation of young Obama’s naïve faith in an inevitable Communist revolution in a NewsMax article titled “Obama Espoused Radical Views in College” on February 8, 2010.

Back then, Kessler sought to make contact with President Obama and two of his fellow Occidental students who witnessed that debate including Obama’s sophomore year roommate, Hasan Chandoo, and my college era girlfriend, Caroline Boss. Both Boss and the White House wisely declined to comment on Kessler’s article. Chandoo, however, verified the debate took place and added his own spin to soften the damage my story did to President Obama’s reputation as a pragmatic centrist.

In retrospect, I think what is most startling to me is that Maraniss did not bother to interview me but nevertheless verified key portions of my testimony in Barack Obama: The Story. Maraniss confirmed Obama’s whereabouts at Christmas break 1980, confirmed Chandoo’s Marxist credentials, and confirmed both that Boss was a socialist and that she was Obama’s inspiration for the composite character Regina in Dreams from My Father. (Boss’s working class Swiss grandmother was named Regina.)

Given the way my report on young Obama’s ideological extremism has endured the test of time, I would think Maraniss would be eager to interview a fellow like me – a published author and a political scientist - to get more details about the exact specifications of young Obama’s political views. After all, other authors have reported my story in their books including Michael Savage’s Trickle Up Poverty, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief, Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama and most recently Paul Kengor’s The Communist – Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.

The gist of my story is that I had been romantically involved with the Marxist Caroline Boss starting in the Spring of 1979 when I graduated from Occidental until the Spring of 1981 when she graduated from Occidental.

At the time I met young Obama, Boss was serving as the co-president of the Democrat Socialist Alliance (DSA) at Occidental. As I had done the previous Christmas break, I had flown back to see Boss during the holidays in 1980. As evidence of this significant relationship, I still have a number of cards and letters from her and the attached picture of me and Boss (see above). It shows what we looked like as a young couple in 1981.

My side of the story is that after a year and a half of study in political science at Cornell University, I no longer believed it was plausible to anticipate a Communist revolution in the United States. Moreover, I no longer thought it feasible to eliminate the profit motive from a modern economy. Given my new evidence-based insight, I thought I was doing Boss, Obama and Chandoo all a great favor when I confronted their belief in an inevitable Communist revolution.

My goal of enlightening my friends backfired with both Boss and Obama strenuously objecting to my argument.

I am sure Maraniss realizes my face-to-face testimony makes it perfectly clear that young Obama was not to the ideological right of Boss and Chandoo - as Maraniss writes - but instead completely shared his undergraduate friend’s radical, revolutionary ideology.

Accordingly, I think Maraniss inadvertently did grave damage to Obama’s carefully protected reputation as a pragmatic centrist. He did that by simply verifying that the young Obama was in northern California at the exact the time when I reported that I had confronted Obama’s absurd faith in an inevitable Communist revolution.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

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