Did Trump Really Save America from Socialism?

There is a lot of material out there right now encouraging folks to check out Dinesh D’Souza claims in Death of a Nation. I have already seen the film and I probably need to go back and watch it again to make sure I got all the details.

Among the pieces promoting the movie is a terrific article by Steve Baldwin, a former California assemblyman (1994-2000) and minority whip, which appeared in The American Spectator called, "Did Trump Really Save America From Socialism? This article makes a comprehensive and convincing case that ties together a number of stories to leave us with the stone cold truth: Barack Obama was attempting to turn the U.S. into a socialist utopia. Frighteningly, his major goal was to turn the U.S. into a one party state where a Republican would never again win the office of president.

Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice.

Baldwin asserts that the key element of this strategy was bringing in illegal immigrants to vote for Hillary Clinton. It is scary to reflect the extent to which Obama almost achieve his objective if not for the surprising, seemingly impossible election of Donald Trump. This article appeared came to attention through an old Google alert which scans for on-line articles that mention both my name and Obama's. Below, I have marked the part in bold where Baldwin uses my little data point to help nail down a key point about Obama's long-standing commitment to socialism.

However, Americans were so propagandized by the media concerning Obama’s “mainstream Democrat” background that very few know the real truth about who he really is. But the evidence of Obama’s socialist background is overwhelming.

Researchers have dug up quite a bit about him since he burst onto the national political scene over a decade ago. Four books in particular have ripped off the propaganda cover: Aaron Klein’s The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and other Anti-American Extremists; Paul Kengor’s The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, the Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor; Trevor Loudon’s Barack Obama and the Enemies Within, and lastly, Stanley Kurtz’s excellent Radical-In-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. These authors have exhaustedly documented Obama’s involvement with numerous groups dominated by communists and socialists.

(Note: My take on young Obama is featured in the works by Kengor, Loudon and Kurtz.) 

Indeed, Obama launched his political career at the house of former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, who calls himself a “small c communist.” Obama’s mentor at Harvard was Charles Ogletree, a radical Marxist professor, former Black Panther, and leader of the nutty “reparations” movement.

We now know his father was a socialist economist and that his boyhood mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying Communist Party member who, according to his FBI file, was engaged in espionage. Davis even appears on the FBI’s Cold War era “watch list” of people to be rounded up should the Soviets launch a war against the USA.

We also know that Obama spoke at the funeral of leading Marxist theoretician Saul Mendelson. We know that in the 1996 he actually joined the New Party, a Marxist party in Illinois. And we know the Communist Party itself lavished praise on Obama, boasting of how they “actively supported Obama during the primary election.” Upon Obama’s 2008 victory, Sam Webb, the president of the U.S. Communist Party, announced we “now have a friend, a people’s advocate and the first African American in the White House.”

Former Communist activist John Drew attended Occidental with Obama and says not only that Obama was a well-known “Marxist-Leninist” on campus but that he actually said “There’s going to be a revolution” in the USA. And there has been of sorts.

One cannot dig into Obama’s background without stumbling into Communists and other assorted socialist revolutionaries everywhere one looks. And much of the media knew this when Obama ran for the presidency in 2008 but decided Americans didn’t need to know. But they covered every mistake and every shady relationship that Donald Trump ever had. Nor is there any evidence Obama ever modified his views. His background and his legislative legacy demonstrates contempt for America; its history, culture, constitution, and political system. All of this is consistent with Obama’s Marxist worldview that he took great pains to disguise. As Stanley Kurtz wrote, “Obama has made concerted efforts to hide his socialist convictions from the voters who put him into office.”

Although I think it is over-the-top to say I was a Communist at the time, I have to admit that I was well versed in Marxism and had been rooting for the USSR to win the Cold War. Nevertheless, this is a really helpful article for making sense of the Obama legacy and the story of how we barely escaped losing our country for good. You can read the entire article by clicking on this link to Baldwin's article, Did Trump Really Save America From Socialism? If I was hired to teach a political science class, this article would be on the syllabus. 

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

Bad Book: What Will We Remember About Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father?

Aside from Obamacare, I think Barack Obama is best known for his book, Dreams from My Father.

This book was extremely important to his early political career in Chicago. Over time, many people took the book literally and it became a way for people to learn about Obama in such a matter that it empowered him. Many charismatic leaders write books about themselves which end up building their own fame and charisma including George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, and John F. Kennedy.

This is part of the reason why there is so much intellectual controversy surrounding Dreams from My Father right now, particularly arguments about the extent to which it is historically accurate or is only a historical novel.

To a large extent, I think that presidential historians are coming to the conclusion that the book for which Barack Obama is best know was in large measure a carefully crafted fiction. It included a number of stories in which Barack Obama tried to exaggerate his ties to the African-American community, including claiming he dated black women, which subsequent research has found to be untrue.

According to David J. Garrow’s new book, Rising Star, it appears that Dreams from My Father overstated the closeness of Obama’s parents, understated the time he spend with Frank Marshall Davis, and minimized young Obama’s post-Columbia marijuana and cocaine usage. There are also indications that the young Obama was quite concerned about his weight since he was fat as a child.

All in all, I think that Dreams from My Father will remain as one of the most important of Obama’s legacies, especially since subsequent research has found that much of this first book was highly inaccurate even as it help to form a myth that helped Barack Obama become president.

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

Trust Me, I’m from the Past

I watched Mitt Romney dominate the presidential debate immediately after viewing the time travel movie, Looper. If I had access to time travel, I would use it now to leverage my role as the only person on Earth willing to testify that young Obama was a genuine Marxist socialist in 1980. Energized by Romney’s performance, I am asking myself what can I do - right now - to forestall a real life enactment of the future imagined by Rian Johnson, writer and director of Looper. After all, Johnson’s vision looked so bleak that my wife’s reaction was to say: “Looks like Obama won.”

If I had the advantage of time travel, I would go full on Bruce Willis right now. I would go to 2008 and introduce myself to the television studios of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

I believe public knowledge of my face-to-face confrontation with young Obama’s ideological extremism in 1980 would have helped prevent Obama’s election in 2008. My account of Obama’s anticipation of a Communist revolution would have alerted voters to the reality that Obama was not a bipartisan politician, but rather a long-standing advocate of class warfare and other hateful ideas promoted earlier by the likes of Frank Marshall Davis. My story would have highlighted the real Obama, the Obama who asserted, as he did at a at a Martin Luther King Day speech at the University of Chicago in 2002, “that rich people are all for non-violence” simply because “they want to make sure people don’t take their stuff.”

I would share with the people of 2008 that Obama is stuck in the ideological past. He is a partisan extremist who cannot imagine doing what Clinton did to save the American economy or uplift the black urban underclass. Obama is the sort of ideological purist who would never pivot to the middle. I would tell the people of 2008 that Obama’s lack of bipartisan skill would blow a perfectly good deal with House Speaker John Boehner for reducing the federal deficit. Instead of cutting the deficit in half, I would tell them Obama will increase the deficit more than all the presidents before him. I would alert the people of 2008 to the fact that Obama would be eager to weaken the previously rock solid work requirements of welfare reform. I would repeat a key line from the movie: “Trust me, I’m from the future.”

Lacking the option of time travel, I still think my story helps explain why it was fairly easy for Mitt Romney to defeat Barack Obama in a formal debate. I can report that young Obama was no genius. I saw signs of that young Obama last week when Romney pointed out that in 25 years in business he had never seen a special tax break for corporations who send jobs overseas. Obama - without his teleprompter and entourage of liberal sycophants – is apparently incapable of reacting forcefully to a verbal punch from a true business and political heavyweight.

Temperamentally, I remember young Obama treated my more accurate understanding of world history with an abrupt, even demagogic hostility. I distinctly remember young Obama’s dismissive, arrogant attitude even as I was presenting him with compelling evidence that Marxist theory was dead wrong at predicting the path of European social and economic events. I remember schooling young Obama so thoroughly in just one evening myself that he left my girlfriend’s house agreeing with my more moderate neo-Marxist perspective.

Culturally, I can report that when I debated young Obama in 1980 he talked like a white guy. I did not see a trace of the phony accent that highlighted Obama’s shocking comments regarding the redistribution of the wealth to a conference of black ministers at Hampton University in Virginia in 2007. In fact, the young Obama I met in 1980 talked like a wealthy, privileged white guy. It never occurred to me to think of young Obama as African-American. After all, the African-American students at Occidental College were largely uninvolved in radical campus politics. They were more likely to be active in the Gospel choir than the Democrat Socialist Alliance. Instead, young Obama seemed more like a foreign prince visiting in the United States.

While I cannot enjoy the benefits of time travel, I do live within six hours of Las Vegas, NV. I suspect my Bruce Willis moment will come when I share my story of debating young Marxist Obama with swing voters in the nearby Silver State. My wife and I have signed up to spend a weekend in Las Vegas walking precincts for the Romney/Ryan campaign. We will enjoy some meals, hotel accommodations, a night on the town and an opportunity to impact this historic election. I have my tagline ready: “Trust me, I’m from the past.”

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/

Dr. Drew's Contribution to Today's Empty Chair Campaign

I thought I should add my two cents regarding the Obama empty chair campaign today. I'm not quite sure what the empty chair is supposed to signify except that Obama has not done a lot to bring back jobs. Sadly, new data shows that family income has decreased during the Obama years. As the Wall Street Journal points out: "For household income, in other words, the Obama recovery has been worse than the Bush recession."

As for me, I'm still mystified about why the Romney campaign fails to dig into the now substantial literature regarding young Obama's ties to Marxist socialist extremists like Frank Marshall Davis - a known Communist on the FBI's watch list. At any rate, this is how I would have set up Mr. Eastwood's famous performance piece at the RNC.

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.

Dr. Drew on Meeting Young Obama - Excerpts from Speech to Capistrano Republican Women's Federated

I pulled together the highlights of the talk I gave at the Capistrano Republican Women's Federated Club on April 22, 2011.  This was the first time I ever gave this talk.  As you will see, the audience is very supportive and attentive. 

After watching myself on this video tape, I'm reminded why it is important for political leaders to view their tapes as part of their effort to improve their presentations. 

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

Barack Obama and the Legacy of Frank Marshall Davis: A Note From Dr. Drew to Davis's Son, Mark Davis

John Drew with David Horowitz

at a special event for the Freedom

Center.

I think it might be valuable to place on the public record my most recent comments to Mark Davis, the son of Obama's famous mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. Pictured here, me and one of my favorite people, David Horowitz.

Dear Mark:

I think you are missing the forest for the trees right now. Your argument seems to be missing the big picture. Stalin died in 1953. You father was interested in the Communist party beginning in 1931 and was officially a member of the Communist party long before Stalin's death.

If your father's famous friend, Paul Robeson, knew about - and helped cover up - Stalin's atrocities, then I don't think it is unreasonable to assume Frank Marshall Davis was also totally aware of Stalin's murderous ways - at least by 1953.

As I understand it. Never once did your father complain about Stalin's behavior as a mass murderer. In fact, your father praised Stalin's views on Christianity and praised the Red Army.

I've never heard that your father apologized for supporting Hilter during the Hitler-Stalin pact. Your father sounds like a very scary, very dangerous person to me.

I think Tidwell made a big mistake by not using all the information available in your father's FBI file. I think Tidwell made a mistake when he underestimated the significance of your father's long standing interest in the Communist Party USA, a party which lives in infamy because of the way it ended up supporting both Hitler and Stalin - two of the worse mass murderers of the last century.

Unfortunately, your father's devotion to Marxism and the Communist Party USA, as revealed by Tidwell in a letter from your father to a friend, helps us understand why your father was so closely tied to some of the most extremist ideologues of the last century.

Your father's ideology - and distaste for Christianity - meant that he did not have the moral compass needed to stand up and fight child pornography or the  evil of either the Nazi or Communist parties. It is frightening for me to realize that the president of the United States would choose as his mentor a fellow who was on the wrong side of both our fight against Hitler in WWII and the USSR during The Cold War.

I think it is a real stretch for you to suggest that your father was a normal, wholesome, average American who should be honored at the same level as Martin Luther King. In my view, your father's decision to publish his fantasies about child rape sort of disqualify him from MLK status. I'm also thinking your father is unworthy of MLK status because of his decisions to side with some of our most cruel enemies during some of the great conflicts of the past.

Sincerely, John

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

The Seedy Side of the Obama Story: Dr. Drew Reviews Jack Cashill's Deconstructing Obama

Jack Cashill voices the pain of those of us who are doing the journalistic work we once thought was the sole responsibility of CBS’s 60 Minutes.  You can catch his appearance on CSPAN2 by clicking here.  I identify with Cashill. In his newest book, he indicates it is not so easy to balance his efforts to save Western civilization with his concurrent responsibilities for bagging leaves in time for the city leaf collectors. In my case, I have sought to expose President Barack Obama’s intellectual roots as a revolutionary Marxist while addressing my nagging doubts about the necessity of rinsing dishes prior to racking them up in the dishwasher. If you understand that neither Cashill or me are kidding about our lives, then you will be thrilled by the tone and fresh insight in Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President.

As an eye witness to young Obama’s Marxist ideology, I was excited to see Cashill busting up the myths surrounding Obama and replacing them with a simpler, easier to believe story that is a much better fit with accessible, on-line evidence. Cashill’s results are politically significant because President Obama's charisma is dependent on the images Obama created about his early life in his first book, Dreams from My Father. Cashill’s new insights about the real Obama should be particularly relevant to the sort of swing voters who tell survey researchers that they do not care for Obama’s results even thought they still like Obama as a person. After reading Cashill’s book, I suspect these swing voters will be disappointed by the titanic gap between Obama’s all-American myth and the cold facts of his real life.


One of the coldest facts is that there are now nude photos on the Internet of a woman who looks exactly like Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. This news was so unpleasant to me that I was nervous about checking up on Cashill’s report by searching for these photos through Google. (To my relief, the samples I found are clear enough to show the girl’s face, but cropped tight enough that I did not feel I violated any laws.) Along with Cashill, I see these photos as evidence of a much larger pattern of unfortunate mistakes made by the young Ms. Dunham. These photos are politically significant because they offer a convenient segue into a larger discussion of an unwholesome side of the young Obama story - the odd, deviant, dysfunctional world of Frank Marshall Davis. Davis, as readers may know, was a member of the Communist party and also handy in the craft of producing pornographic literature and photography.

Cashill reframes the Obama story by pointing out that Frank Marshall Davis and his friend Paul Robeson were Stalinist Communists, a political label which is shocking to most Americans and yet useful to me in understanding the roots of the Marxist ideology and earnest revolutionary fervor I observed in the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College in 1980-1981.

Cashill adds to the sheer seediness of the world surrounding little Obama plenty of new evidence that infant Obama had no conscious contact with his birth father. This unpleasant reality is an abrupt challenge to Obama’s claim, in Dreams, that his father left him and his mother behind in Hawaii after two years of dutiful fatherhood. Here, Cashill leverages the outstanding reporting done by one of our nation’s most intelligent and charming citizen journalists - Michael Patrick Leahy. Leahy interviewed a few of Stanley Anne Dunham’s childhood friends and reported the results in his book, What Does Barack Obama Believe? Leahy’s research shows Anne Dunham took infant Obama with her to Seattle, Washington in the summer of 1961 and did not return with her baby to Hawaii until Obama, Sr. was long gone from the island. Leahy, in my view, has been doing the hard work I assumed New York Times reporters should have been doing including interviewing members of the extended Dunham family, sharing freely available information from the Internet, and combing over public records to determine the precise details of Barack Obama's birth and early childhood.

Even as somebody who met young Obama in the early 1980s, I'm was still startled by Cashill’s most controversial argument – the theory that Bill Ayers was the ghost author of Dreams from My Father. Cashill’s thesis was supported, of course, by the independent reporting of a liberal author, Christopher Andersen. Andersen unwisely confirmed Ayers’ participation in creating Dreams in an otherwise flattering book called Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage (2010). The weight of Cashill’s argument, however, rests on his careful textual analysis of the striking similarities between the language used in Dreams and the language used in Ayers’ own writing. Here, I’m most convinced by Cashill’s description of how Obama correctly applies nautical images to his life story. The accuracy of the nautical language in Dreams strikes me as much more consistent with Ayer’s experience as a merchant marine than with Obama’s experience as a community organizer.

I would like to add more details that support the idea that Ayers was a major player in drafting Dreams from My Father. The young Barack Obama I knew, for example, displayed absolutely no hostility to white people. He appeared to be culturally and emotionally white. The young Barack Obama I knew was not particularly close to the African-American students at Oxy either, but was - instead - deeply involved in the lives and political activities of the most radical foreign and Muslim students. The young Barack Obama I knew would have been excited to meet Bill Ayers, would have been comfortable with Ayers’ anti-American hostility, and would have been more than capable of persuading the jaded ex-terrorist that he was a sincere believer in the necessity of a socialist transformation of the U.S.

My only difference with Cashill is that I’m not impressed with the quality of Dreams from My Father.

This is true even after Cashill’s book single-handedly improved my taste as a consumer of contemporary literature. My reading of Dreams did not leave me with any useful paradigm shifts, any evidence of encyclopedic knowledge or any immediately relevant information. I think it is more accurate to assert that President Clinton’s book, My Life, articulates the insights and raw memory capacity of a true genius. In comparison to My Life, I found Dreams dull and boring - except for the parts tangentially related to my own intellectual development or linked to my nearly insignificant participation in what Obama reports were the pivotal, life-changing moments of his sophomore year at Occidental College.

Aside from this relatively minor disagreement regarding the quality of Dreams, I whole-heartedly agree with Cashill’s take on the challenge of confronting Obama’s charismatic power: The alarming sense that media elites greet one’s modest, factual, painfully obvious news tips with an astonishing lack of appropriate attention. I have come to believe there is something broken in American journalism. I would think a healthy, well-functioning democracy would include mainstream media outlets that would snap open the delightful fortune cookies Cashill has set out for them. For now, my confidence for winning our future rests in the outspoken courage of Jack Cashill, a writer who is willing to go to extreme lengths – short of leaving his home surrounded by leaves - to make sure that his fellow citizens learn the truth about President Obama.

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/