The most striking feeling I have after watching Obama's speech on television tonight is that I expect the folks who voted for this guy in 2008 now realize that he simply was not up to the job of being a successful president.
I first listened to his speech on the radio in my office. It did not sound quite so bad to me in that environment. Maybe I was not really paying attention. On television, however, his speech was clearly a disappointment. On that stage, Obama looked small...like a little ant in a suit. He looked grey and ashen. It looked to me like his eyes were tearing up for about 15 minutes of his speech. All in all, he did not have the usual energy I associate with his standard stump speech, certainly not the energy of his famous 2004 speech.
I also noticed, when I watch the speech on television, that the camera brought to my attention that Obama's face was twitching with stress. Finally, he seemed to be droning on in the same, boring pace - not much vocal variety or spontaneity in this presentation.
The most chilling moment for me? Obama's assertion that Al Queda is more dangerous that Russia. What, after all, is Obama going to be more flexible about after the election?
The most bizarre? Praising the guy who won the lottery, but then went back to his factory job.
The reference to Lincoln? It made me feel Obama is overwhelmed, frightened and incompetent in his job.
My advice? Send all the illegal aliens and their children home and I will be just fine with our existing roads and bridges.
All in all, there was a surprising lack of facts and details in his speech. It was as if he made no effort at all to persuade me to vote for him. Instead, he offered a silly idea that the economic crisis was worse than we expected and that we should endure more and more pain until he figures out how to turn things around.
Ironically, this poor performance comes to us on the heels of a couple of stories which call vivid attention to Obama's short-comings as a leader. The first is Bob Woodward's new book, "The Price of Politics," which goes on sale Sept. 11, 2012. It shows how Obama underestimated Boehner and pressed him for additional tax increases after Boehner thought a deal had been made. Obama's insistence of pushing Boehner further ended up breaking the whole deal apart.
(There is, by the way, a great story in Woodward's book: The bored Pelosi put Obama on mute while he was delivering an empty pep talk to her while she was doing the real work of hammering out the stimulus package.)
Further evidence of dysfunction showed up in a report by Jodi Kantor who sees in Obama some of the same perfectionistic dysfunction which made Jimmy Carter such a poor president. Her behind-the-scenes report shows Obama majoring in the minor things with a misplaced confidence in his own greatness and skill. Meanwhile, Obama's arrogance is thoughtfully considered by Thomas Sowell who remarks that Obama is "...seldom right, but never in doubt." (This, of course, is consistent with my own take on the young Obama who thought he - as a sophomore - had a stronger take on the possibility of Communist revolution in the U.S. than I did as a graduate student at Cornell.)
He also seems to be underestimating my intelligence once again. Obama seeks to suggest that Romney is inexperienced in foreign policy when it is perfectly clear that Obama himself had little experience in foreign policy when he was first elected president. Obama offers us a path for the future and does not address the natural questions of whether or not that path is working out for us now. He argues "everyone plays by the same rules" and yet supports affirmative action policies that make it harder than ever for young white boys and girls to succeed.
The internal contradictions are just mind-numbing. The vacuousness of Obama's lazy thinking was on full display tonight. He tries to score points when he makes fun of Republicans who seem to offer tax cuts as the inappropriate solution to having a cold, but then undercuts his own argument by reminding us that he has made tax cuts. He praises entrepreneurs, but takes away from their success by demanding that they become better citizens. He praises government and then talks about the need to reform it more - something he has neglected to do in situations like junkets in Las Vegas or Solyndra. He asserts that the Republicans are vague about their plans for the future, but then only offers vague ideas himself.
I suspect at this point in his political career Obama expected to be teaching us the value of socialism and wealth redistribution. Instead, he is suffering from the failure of his own collectivist ideas. It frightens me to imagine what Obama will be doing to our country when he no longer fears the verdict of the American people regarding his foreign policies or Supreme Court appointments. Give our reduced family income and abnormally high unemployment I think Clint Eastwood is right: We need to get a new president - a smart one who knows how to create economic prosperity.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I used to teach political economy at Williams College and it sort of annoys me when we allow Democrats to say silly, obviously false things about the workings of the U.S. economy and the state of knowledge we have about politics and economics. Nevertheless, I ran across a great article by John Lott, Jr. who is an economist and author of the revised edition of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
I thought it might be fun to repeat his take on these seven myths that he asserts the Obama administration is pushing on the American people and add my own comments:
1) Not increasing the debt ceiling means the U.S. government will default on its debt. This is probably the biggest lie that almost all other claims arise from. Default occurs if the government stops paying interest on the money that it owes. Not increasing the debt ceiling only means that the government can't borrow more money and that spending is limited to the revenue the government brings in. And, with interest payments on the debt making up less than a ninth of revenue, there is no reason for any risk of insolvency. Time after time, congress and the president have failed to agree on a debt ceiling increase and still there has been no default. Examples include: December 1973, March 1979, November 1983, December 1985, August 1987, November 1995, December 1995 to January 1996, and September 2007. Indeed, this really shouldn't even be a point of debate. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution requires that the debt payments come first before any other spending.
Dr. Drew adds: Obama is trained as a Constitutional scholar. We can be sure that he is aware of this portion of the 14th Amendment and that he can rightfully be expected to abide by it.
2) Until the debt ceiling is raised, uncertainty over the payment of U.S. debts will create chaos in financial markets. Given that the Constitution mandates U.S. debts be paid before any other spending and that sufficient money will be available to cover our interest payments, the only uncertainty arises from Obama's actions. Will he try not to pay the interest? Even a delay of a day in paying this interest will create a default. Court action could eventually force Obama to follow the Constitution but a default would have already occurred. But there is a simple way to end this uncertainty: have the president declare now that he will indeed follow the Constitution and make those payments. Failure to increase the debt ceiling clearly doesn't mean default. During one three week period at the end of 1996 and the beginning of 1996, some of the government shutdown when a similar battle over the debt ceiling occurred, but there was no default. President Clinton used the revenues that were coming in to pay the interest on the debt.
Dr. Drew adds: Even if Obama chooses to default, it will be easy for Republicans to blame his excessive spending and poor priorities as the cause of the default. I knew the young Obama and I've studied the contemporary Obama. I suggest he holds tightly to John Rawl's A Theory of Justice and that the reason we are in this crisis is that Obama does not want to give up his long-standing hatred of the rich or his desire to redistribute income. He has never explained how, if at all, he dropped the commitment to Marxist thought I observed in him when he was a sophomore at Occidental College. See, my article, Meeting Young Obama in American Thinker, February 24, 2011.
3) Obama doesn't know if there is money to send off Social Security checks on August 3. The president knows very well how much revenue will be available to send out checks on August 3. Indeed, enough money will be available to not only pay the interest, but to also cover all Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and children's health insurance, defense, federal law enforcement and immigration, all veterans benefits, Response to natural disasters. Terrifying elderly people who are dependent on their Social Security checks may make good politics, but it is unconscionable. Yet, these scare tactics aren't really very surprising. The Democrats behaved no differently when they ran television ads bizarrely depicting Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as pushing an old lady in a wheel chair off a cliff.
Dr. Drew adds: If my take on Obama is correct, then he will - reflexively - seek to defend those aspects of redistribution which he thinks are most widely supported by the American people, whether or not these aspects of redistribution are really in play for not.
4) Mortgage interest rates will rise dramatically if the debt ceiling isn't increased. Not true. Indeed, the opposite is more likely, for not raising the debt ceiling stops the government borrowing more money. Less borrowing by the government could lower mortgage rates as there would be more lending available for potential homeowners. The interest rate paid by the government might go down for a second reason. Just as banks charge individuals a lower interest rate for those who have less debt compared to their incomes, the same is true for governments.
Dr. Drew adds: One of the main reasons the stimulus package failed us is that it sucked up resources that would be better spent and more efficiently spent by by private sector. Freeing up that capital and keeping it in the private sector would help turn around the economy.
5) Time is Running Out on Debt Deal, and it must be done immediately. Despite Obama’s insistence that a deal be completed by July 15 and Geithner’s claim that a deal had to be reached by July 22, as already noted, there have been many times over the last few decades where negotiations have extended past when the debt limit has been reached. The longest delay lasted three weeks. Besides claiming that there will be a default, no explanation has been offered for why the debate is any different this time.
Possibly all these claims of urgency are part of some grand strategy to scare people, but that strategy depends on voters not knowing what is necessary for a default to occur.
Dr. Drew adds: I don't feel any sense of urgency about this myself. My sense of urgency is based on the idea that big government is dangerous and that Obama is using his executive power to grow it. If Obama were more honest about his past and more honest about his future intentions for us, then I'd feel safer with him as president. For now, however, I'm deeply afraid he is taking us in the wrong direction. Now is the time to use all the tools in our power to fight big government. The last time the government got shut down, we enjoyed substantial economic prosperity later on.
6) If government spending is cut, there will be a depression. Obama promised that a "temporary" increase in government spending would "stimulate" the economy, but he is now telling us that we can't cut that "temporary" increase -- that we are stuck with it.
If Obama's program -- including a 28 percent spending hike since 2008 and more than $4 trillion in deficits -- worked so well, why has our unemployment rate risen more than elsewhere? The European Union, Canada, South America, Japan, and Australia have all had smaller increases in unemployment compared to the U.S. after Obama's "stimulus." We have also had these shutdowns before and the numbers don’t show any negative impact on unemployment or GDP. Figures for the longest shutdowns during the fourth quarter of 1995 and the first quarter of 1996 are available here.
Dr. Drew adds: This one is just plain silly. Based on what we know about monetary policy it is physically impossible to ever have another Great Depression. Moreover, Burton Folsom's book, Raw Deal, teaches us how FDR made the Great Depression worse through frightening off business owners and investors.
7) The value of the dollar will plummet. Again, the supposed collapse occurs when we default. But there won't be any default. In addition, less government borrowing means lower future taxes, thus making the U.S. a more attractive place to invest. More foreign investment will actually cause the dollar to rise.
Dr. Drew adds: The value of the dollar is based on our political culture, economic power and military strength. Clipping Obama's spending wings will provide great benefits to us and to all the people that want to invest in the safety and security we provide to them and ourselves.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
As you may know, I post at http://www.ephblog.com/ with a great deal of frequency. EphBlog is edited by a William College alumnus, Dick Swart '57 of Portland, OR. This steamy blog site has true blue liberal contributors, but has no official connection with Williams College. Nevertheless, I like to post there to remember the good things I liked about my first two years as a young assistant professor in the political science department at Williams College. It was a pleasure, for example, to teach in a classroom filled with some of the brightest young people in American in the late 1980s.
One of my debates at that site seems important enough to recycle in Anonymous Political Scientist. As a political scientist, I think a bright moon is associated with some dim prospects for Obama's second term. I'd like to explain why I think that way as briefly as possible.
First, it is silly to suggest - as one of the folk at Ephblog did - that Obama is doing okay right now simply because he out polls Congress. For better or worse, the ratings of Congress are almost always lower than the ratings of the President. See, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/behind-the-numbers/post/no-contest-president-vs-congress/2010/12/20/ABelgvF_blog.html The public’s strong desire to elect generic Republicans over generic Democrats shows how damaged the Democrat party brand is after two years of Obama’s incompetence. It is a much better measure of the problems facing Obama than his relative popularity compared to Congress.
Second, one of the most immediate pieces of evidence that Obama is in trouble with the voters is dramatic shift in the generic congressional numbers as reported by Rasmussen. According to Rasmussen Reports, Republicans have a nine-point lead over Democrats on the generic congressional ballot. I think this number is significant because Rasmussen Reports limits its results to likely voters. By their numbers, an impressive 46% of likely voters responded by saying they would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate. Only 37% of these likely voters said they would pick the Democrat. "The gap is three points larger than it has been for the past two weeks," said Rasmussen Reports.
I find more bad news for Obama in Rasmussen's report on the public's lack of confidence in Obama's skills relative to turning around the economy. See, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/march_2011/just_31_now_give_obama_positive_marks_for_the_economy
The positive ratings for Obama on the economy are now at the lowest level they have ever been at since Obama took office in January 2009. As a political scientist, I know the economy is the most important issue deciding presidential campaigns. That’s why I think that polling result is so significant…no matter where it comes from.
Personally, I think Obama made a huge political mistake when he took out time on television to announce his basketball picks instead of paying attention to the serious issues surrounding Japan and Libya. As far as I'm concerned, Obama’s decision to call massive public attention to his basketball picks is as politically tone deaf as his defense of the GZM during the height of the mid-term elections. All in all, it looks to me like voters are making up their minds and they are not pleased with the direction our country is going under Obama's leadership.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
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/
If you'd like a quick glimpse of the young Barack Obama's ideology, then I recommend you check out my article in American Thinker this morning called Meeting Young Obama. As far as I can tell, this article shifts Obama's biography by linking young Obama to the Democrat Socialist Alliance at Occidental College and verifying his commitment to Marxist socialist ideology in much greater detail. I'll be speaking on the topic of "Why Obama's Past is More Important Than His Future" at 9:00 a.m. on April 16, 2011 at the regular breakfast meeting of the Capistrano Valley Republican Women, Federated.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I thought I'd try my hand at the traditional get out the vote commerical. Here's my version. It features my thanks to all the folks who helped me get out the message of young Obama's commitment to Marxist ideology. In this video, I tip my hat to my father, Richard Drew, my co-author Michael Patrick Leahy, and published authors Michael Savage who wrote Tricke Up Poverty, Paul Kengor who wrote Dupes and Stanley Kurtz who just published Radical-In-Chief.
All three leaned hard on my observations and broke out new details consistent with my take that Obama was an ardent Marxist by the fall of 1980. I grateful that they gave thoughtful attention to my brief insight into the mind of President Obama.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I'm steadily trying to get out the word about young Obama's commitment to Marxist thought. I'm grateful to the folks at the Glen Meaken show for giving me some air time this morning. Check it out here.
I was honored to be interviewed this morning by Dr. Paul Kengor. (Kengor was the guest host for the Glen Meakem radio program in Western Pennsylvania.) Kengor is a professor at Grove City College and the executive director of the College's Center for Vision and Values.
As you may know, Kengor is a regular featured columnist at Townhall.com, a web-based publication primarily dedicated to conservative politics. I know him, however, from his most known best selling book, "God and Ronald Reagan." Kengor is currently finishing a major work on Ronald Reagan’s role in his administration’s effort to undermine the Soviet Union.
On the radio show, I indicated that I knew President Obama when he was still a student at Occidental College. I graduated from Occidental College in 1979 and I was the founder of the Democratic Socialist Alliance. When I knew Obama, he was definitely a Marxist Leninist looking forward to an immenent revolution.
In my view, Obama’s attraction to this radical ideology as a young college student helps explain his absolute determination as President to pass the “progressive” agenda of the liberal left. While I painfully transformed into a church going, Ronald Reagan conservative, President Obama has never described a similar political evolution - away from socialist thinking - for himself.
You can listen to the whole radio show by clicking here.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I’m been driving around this week with a burning question in my mind: Why would President Obama support a Ground Zero Mosque (GZM) when it is opposed by 2/3rds of the American people? Given the unpopularity of this mosque, it is as if the driver of the Democrat party’s new limo has just steered it into a junk yard crushing machine.
I think the simplest answer is that Obama was being loyal to his Muslim-American base...not to African-Americans...not to his Democrat party...and not to the American people. I have found some supporting evidence for this thesis in an article in Politico on August 15, 2010 in which Carol E. Lee writes that an undisclosed administration official says this was “purely” Obama's decision. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41077.html In Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that he is intent to assure Muslims that he will stand with them during the ultimate crisis. Apparently, Obama’s brain decided that moment has arrived.
What is missing from all the reporting on this issue is what an incredibly stupid thing this was for Obama to do in terms of electoral politics. Obama has ignited a firestorm of controversy that can only do damage to his party’s chances in November 2010 and to his own chances in November 2012. Already, Rasmussen shows Republicans opening up a 12-point lead in the generic polling results. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/generic_congressional_ballot
Obama’s job approval rating, according to Gallup, is at an all time low of 42%. On a scale of one to ten for political stupidity, Obama’s endorsement of the GZM is a ten. It is the equivalent of running toward a burning car wreck and then squeezing yourself into the trunk.
Since I knew President Obama while he was an extremist, Marxist sophomore at Occidental College, I think I have an unusual insight to share regarding this politically inept decision. Based on my face-to-face talks with the young Obama, I’m among those who do not see Obama as an intellectual genius. I’ve never gone along with those who think they can find evidence of a high IQ in Obama’s election as the editor of the Harvard Law Review, or his role as an adjunct at the University of Chicago Law School, or his success in winning office. Since I never bought into the inflated view of Obama’s intellectual skills, I was not surprised by his dependence on the teleprompter. I do, however, think I know why he has not released his undergraduate transcripts from Occidental College or Columbia University: His charismatic reputation for genius would not survive the harsh reality of his ordinary grades.
Accordingly, I’m not convinced that Obama’s endorsement of the GZM was an example of a political genius playing chess while we are all playing checkers. Instead, I see Obama’s recklessness as more similar to a funny, stupid criminal story where the bank robber submits his demand for cash on the back of his own business card. I think the stress of his job is getting to him. Under stress, Obama’s thinking has become cloudy, impulsive and irrational. Reviewing this last week, even Obama may now understand that he cannot drive and should not have the keys.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
As a political scientist, I’ve always thought of Obama as a Muslim if only because I tend to categorize people by the cultural influences which impact them as children. Early influences, for example, help us predict later political party affiliations.
Surprisingly, Pew reports that the number of Americans who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim has jumped from 12% in early 2009 to 18% in 2010. Similarly, Pew reports a decline in the number of respondents who identify Obama as a Christian – 34% today compared to 48% in March 2009 and 51% during the Presidential campaign in October 2008. As usual, there is a less decisive group floating out there – adding up to a plurality of 43% - who respond that they do not know what is Obama’s religion. These undecided respondents are up from 34% in 2009.
I’m certain that if Pew telephoned me, I would have been one of the folks who said Obama was a Muslim and who would not have been given the time to fully explain what I mean.
First, I know that Obama’s step-father, Lolo Soetoro, was a practicing Muslim. According to freely available press accounts, Soetoro took little Obama with him to the mosque to pray and enrolled little Obama in school as a Muslim. Second, I know that Obama grew up in a predominantly Muslim country, Indonesia. Third, when I met the young Obama - while he was a sophomore at Occidental College - I can report that his closest friends were the Muslim students on campus, in particular, an older Pakistani student named Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Hasan visited Obama while he was a student at Columbia and attended Obama’s wedding to Michelle in 1992, unlike the African-Americans at Occidental who now claim they were close friends with the young Obama.
As for Obama’s more contemporary connections to Islam, I pay the most attention to his words in his book, Audacity of Hope, where Obama calls into question the divinity of Christ. This is, in my view, a bright dividing line between being a Christian believer and being a Muslim adherent. I also know that Rev. Wright is a former Muslim and maintains close ties to the Muslim community. All of this information gives me confidence that Obama’s world view, his basic mental architecture, has more links to Islam than Christianity.
Nevertheless, I’m sure the media will spin the results of Pew’s poll as evidence of racism or religious intolerance or an effort to portray Obama as the “other.” My perspective, however, gives me an advantage over mainstream journalists who are puzzled about how Obama could be so completely foolish as to endorse the Ground Zero Mosque. In my view, he is simply defending his base, a base of Muslim adherents to whom Obama has shown considerable loyalty ever since he was a little child.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
It looks like Rep. Brad Sherman (D) stepped into a mighty buzzsaw when he claimed he did not have any knowledge of the U.S. Justice Department's handling of the New Black Panther party's polling place intimidation case. These townhall meetings just are not working out for Democrats.
Right now, I'm a resident of Orange County, CA. Nevertheless, I grew up in the northern part of Los Angeles County. I trully identify with the concerns of Rep. Sherman's constituents. For personal reasons, I was struck by the attached YouTube video - newly released - of Sherman's constituents reacting to his comments that he did not know anything about this highly inflammatory mistake. You can hear the crowd erupt with anger.
I feel their pain. I know that area. My parents were raised in Glendale. I was born in Behrens Memorial Hospital in Glendale. I know the people in this video like they are my own relatives.
As you can see, they are largely white. They are extremely well-informed. They also have a vivid sense of justice and fairness. (They are not racists as the mainstream media would like you to believe.) They are people who think everyone should be treated fairly. In their view, the idea that the U.S. Justice Department would not protect them against New Black Panther racists - like King Samir Shabazz - is just repugnant and completely unacceptable.
Rep. Brad Sherman won his seat back in November 1996. At the time, it was one of the most expensive House races in U.S. history. His comments in this video demonstrate he has lost touch with the people in his district and that he deserves to be retired - immediately. It was silly of a Harvard Law School graduate like Rep. Sherman to pretend that he didn't know what was up regarding the lack of punishment dished out to the New Black Panther party by the Obama administration.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I am kind of proud to report that I got a call from Dinesh D'Souza inquiring about this photograph the young Obama. I explained that I found it while I was skimming the Occidental College alumni magazine (Summer 2010). At the same time, I also went through the class notes and found that Hasan Chandoo has been in touch with my old girlfriend Caroline Grauman-Boss and her friend Susan (Keselenko) Coll over the years.
I expect that all additional information regarding the lasting social ties between young Obama and his Occidental College friends will give additional credibility to my statements that I knew the young Obama and can affirm that he was a Marxist socialist in 1980-1981. As I have reported elsewhere, Obama and I used to be part of a strong, committed group of revolutionaries. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that I aged out of that obnoxious ideology in my mid-20s.
Also, this photo illustrates other themes I've communicated regarding the young Obama including the fact that I never saw him with a girl and that he was strikingly effeminate at the time. The larger point, of course, is that the picture of himself that he created in Dreams from My Father is very different from the real Obama that I knew during the 1980-1981 school year.
UPDATE #1: Jerome Corsi has published a new article featuring my first impression of the young Obama. People ask me about my first impression and I tell them the truth.
UPDATE #2: Ironically, Michelle Robinson - the future first lady - apparently had her own doubts about the young Obama. She asked her brother Craig Robinson to check out Barack. Here is a great passage from Christopher Andersen's book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage:
Right after the game, Craig called Michelle with his verdict. "Your boy is straight," he told her, "and he can ball." (p. 126.)
Obviously, I was not the only person in young Obama's life who had questions about his sexual identity.
UPDATE #3: Jerome Corsi has another new article regarding Obama's time in Chicago which suggests that Obama hid his gay life to become president.
UPDATE #4: Rachel Maddow at MSNBC has launched an attack seeking to ridicule my first impression of young Obama.
I imagine Maddow does not have the nerve or the guts to air my complete and unedited first impression of the young Obama. Nevertheless, I am hoping this little bit of national television exposure will cause more people to look up my take on young Obama and judge its accuracy for themselves.
UPDATE #5: I met Barack Obama while he was a student at Occidental College. I have shared elsewhere that my first impression of him is that he was gay. (I was also one of the people that David Garrow interviewed for his new presidential biography, Rising Star.)
Consequently, I’m not surprised to learn that President Obama wrote that he “considered gayness” when he was younger. I think the meaning of the phrase is quite clear. Obama found men attractive enough that he seriously considered spending his entire life in a relationship with another man.
To heterosexuals, I think it sounds odd that President Obama writes that he prefers women simply because those relationships are more of a challenge. Objectively, I think it is much easier to get along with women than men. Men have a lot more testosterone which makes them quite ornery. I think, for most heterosexuals, the idea of having sex with either men or women is not decided on the basis of the comparative workload.
That being said, twin studies reveal that about half the folks who identify as gay as teenagers end up being straight when they grow up. For example, one study followed approximately 10,800 adolescents 16-22 years old. Among the 16 year-old males who had exclusively SSA, 61% had opposite-sex attraction at age 17. For same-sex attracted females, 81% changed to opposite attraction in just one year. The same study compared sexual attraction at ages 17-22 and found that 75% of adolescent males with SSA at age 17 had opposite-sex attraction at age 22.
It looks to me like President Obama may well fall into that category of young men who have SSA but then end up with opposite-sex attraction as adults. John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist. He applies his skills as a grant writing consultant in the Southern California area.
I’m excited I stumbled over Richard Wolffe’s article, “When Barry Became Barack,” Newsweek, March 31, 2008. This piece covers the period around when I first met the young Barack Obama, during his sophomore year at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
My review of this article is particularly relevant right now because of Glenn Beck’s assertion – earlier this month - that “social justice” is basically a code word for Marxist socialist ideology, even when it is used in a church setting. Understanding the role of “social justice” as a code word for something a lot more sinister certainly helps us make better sense of the new information released in Wolffe’s article.
Wolffe points out, for example, that young Obama immediately dove in to the social circles of the “progressive” students. He writes: “Barry Obama met Eric Moore fresh on arrival from Hawaii at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The two roamed in the same circles, gravitating toward friends who considered themselves "progressive," including many with international backgrounds.” As a 1979 graduate of Occidental College, I was part of that same progressive/international network of friends and activists.
Wolffe writes that Obama honed his sense of right and wrong during these years at Occidental. In particular, Wolffe cites one of my old colleauges, Occidental College political theory professor Roger Boesche. Boesche says Obama "…hung out with the young men and women who were most serious about issues of social justice." Prof. Roger Boesche report he taught Obama two political-science courses and knew him as Barry at the time. (I knew him as Barry too.)
What’s missing from this story is that the “social justice” young men and women were, in fact, simply left-wing socialists. They found a hero in Professor Boesche because he made complex texts easier to understand and because he encouraged them to fight even though they would be inevitably ground up in the gears of history. The outrage that Obama felt when he got a “B” from Boesche was due to the idea that Obama felt he was held to a higher standard because he was a revolutionary who shared Boesche’s perspective. Obama felt he was held to a higher standard because he was one of the student in greatest ideological agreement with what Professor Boesche was teaching at that time.
In one instance, Obama politely confronted his professor over lunch at a local sandwich shop called The Cooler. "He'd gotten a grade he was disappointed in," Boesche recalls. "I told him he was really smart, but he wasn't working hard enough." Other students might have backed off at that point. But not Obama. He politely told Boesche he should have gotten a better grade. Even today, Obama recalls the demeaning mark. He told journalist David Mendell, author of a recent book called "Obama, From Promise to Power," that he "was pissed" about it because he thought he was being graded "on a different curve." Boesche still insists he gave him the grade he deserved.
Later, I taught with Boesche while he was a visiting professor in the political science department at Williams College. Boesche was still a socialist by 1989 and was still an ardent advocate of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Boesche was proud, in a paper he wrote, that he had gotten a message from Rawls basically confirming Rawls’ socialist perspective. All of this, of course, should just do more to confirm the reliability of my impression that the young Barack Obama was already an ardent socialist Marxist revolutionary when I met him in the fall of 1980.
Intellectually, we should gain a fresh and realistic perspective on the true nature (and depth) of Barack Obama’s ideology when we combine Beck’s understanding of social justice, with Boesche’s comments on Obama’s social justice friendships, and my comments that Obama was undoubtedly a Marxist revolutionary between 1980-1981.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
As a student of charismatic leadership, my antenna lit up when I saw all the chatter during the 2008 Presidential campaign regarding Barack Obama’s brilliance and genius. Since I’ve gotten to know some real geniuses, I think I’m in a good position to access his intellectual capacity. Based on my experience, I can report that Barack Obama is a non-genius.
How do I know? Well, for one reason, one of my brothers is a genius. He’s tested out in elementary school with an IQ over 140. In high school, my brother figured out how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. (This was back in the days before there were on-line cheat sheets and YouTube videos explaining how to do it.) See, http://www.videojug.com/interview/how-to-solve-a-rubiks-cube-in-under-a-minute#first-layer
I have also taught at the nation’s number one liberal arts college, Williams in MA. In that job, I had the opportunity to teach some of our nation’s most talented between 1986 and 1989. I also served, briefly, as an admissions counselor at Cornell in the early 1980s where I got to interview applicants and compare what I saw face-to-face with their SAT test scores. In other words, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting “true men of genius.”
Based on reasonable standards, I can safely assert President Obama’s mental capacity is not in that category.
Nevertheless, it is tempting for those seeking to promote his charismatic image to interpret his current behavior as if he were, in fact, a genius. From this biased perspective, Obama has a secret, long-term plan that is going to work out for him and all of us at the same time. His challenges today are due to the extremely poor mistakes made by others in the past and the sheer impossibility of doing anything productive under the constraints established by the U.S. Constitution. If you choose to believe that Obama is a genius, then his failures must be due to exogenous factors.
If you see Obama as a non-genius, however, you become more sensitive to a different storyline, a storyline that makes more sense given President Obama’s actual history. To be a little blunt, assuming that Obama is not so bright helps explain a lot of mysterious stuff that makes no sense if he were truly a genius including:
Obama’s over dependence on his teleprompter.
Obama’s boring performances in his now discontinued press conferences.
Obama's factual errors during his confrontation with Republicans at their retreat.
Obama’s indecisiveness and general slowness in figuring out how to respond to his commanders’ requests for additional troops in Afghanistan.
Obama’s try and fail approach to winning the Olympic Games for Chicago, his useless trip to China, and his fruitless visit to Copenhagen on behalf of the cause of anthropomorphic global warming.
Obama’s unwillingness to contribute an article to the Harvard Law Review while he served as its first African-American president.
Obama’s reluctance to compete for a tenure track job at the University of Chicago Law School and the fact that he never submitted articles to peer-reviewed law journals.
In addition, the theme that Obama is no genius also makes it much easier to absorb new information regarding Obama’s past achievements and associations, including the possibility that Obama’s first book Dreams of My Father reflects the ideas and writing style of his Hyde Park neighbor, Bill Ayers. See, http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/09/andersen_book_blows_ayers_cove.html
It also raises the frightening possibility that Obama truly believed the silly liberation theology taught by Rev. Wright. Obama’s non-genius status would certainly help explain why he got married in Rev. Wright’s church and why Obama thought so little about raising his children in that bizarre, hateful environment.
As a non-genius, I think it is safe to say Obama faces the same challenges as most of us. He does not process information quickly…it is not so easy for him to retain information once he learns it…and it is difficult for him to focus - in a long and sustained fashion - on complex issues. All of this suggests that Obama is likely to spend a lot of his time as President with his family enjoying expensive, but pointless vacations. It suggests, he is unlikely to respond to the demands of political reality by becoming a Clinton style centrist. It also calls attention to the startling possibility that the mainstream media is covering up for President Obama’s intellectual weaknesses the same way they covered up for FDR’s physical disability and marital affairs.
Most worrisome, I think Obama compensates for his limited intellectual abilities with a strong reliance on ideology, with emotional appeals to fairness, and with a dogged determination to stick to the simple, leftwing perspective he learned from his mother, Stanley.
As a glorious leader, President Obama will always fall short of our normal expectations. Those who voted for him believing he was a talented intellectual, a genius of epic standards, are right to feel betrayed. Those of us seeking to protect our country from the temporary power of Obama’s charisma are wise to see him as he is…and not as his supporters pretend him to be.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I'm predicting that my face to face observations regarding young Barack Obama's Marxist ideology will be of historical interest in the 2012 presidential campaign. In the meantime, I'm doing my part for opposition researchers by collecting what I can off the Internet and YouTube and posting this material here. I'm grateful that Rick Tomei pulled together the audio and video to make this more interesting to follow.
My main point, as always, is that my connection to Barack Obama was powerful and intense. I got a chance to watch the young Marxist socialist Obama in action...fighting for his belief that a socialist revolution was coming to the U.S.A. I still think Obama owes us all an explanation for how, if at all, his views changed over time.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I'm becoming a fan of Michael Savage. I found a new YouTube video that plays Savage discussing my comments on the Marxist ideology of the young President Obama. These comments were recorded earlier when I was a guest on the Steve Malzberg talk radio show in New York City and Washington, D.C.
Savage has a very fine mind and he appears to be completely up-to-speed on the radical political theory that was a strong part of my educational experience at both Occidental College and Cornell University.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
As you may know, I got hit with my 15 minutes of fame last week. The comments I've been making regarding young Barack Obama's commitment to Marxist socialist thought have finally leaked into the larger sphere of general knowledge. Below, I've added a YouTube video series of my comments as a guest on Breitbart TV's show, The B-Cast.
It has been a lot harder to get this story into the mainstream media than I thought. I'm guessing that my ties to Obama were so fragile and his sophomore era Marxism so innocent that the media didn't think it was worth investigating. Now, however, Obama's record speaks for itself and people are anxious to know whether or not he will tack to the center the way Bill Clinton did. My prediction is that he won't. As a devote of socialism, I think Obama's conscience will not allow him to give up his destructive idea of redistributing the wealth.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
I was recently interviewed by the folks at Breitbart TV's "The B-Cast" on the topic of young Barack Obama's commitment to Marxist ideology.
Today, I found the embed code for the first part of that interview so you can see it yourself and - I expect - install it on your own blog site for your own readers and viewers. I'm trying to get this story into the mainstream media. My best idea, for now, is to ask for your assistance in alerting print, radio and television reporters/pundits to my story.
In retrospect, I wish I had been more concise. I'm not ready for prime time. My dream is someone will edit this down to a 2-3 minute piece - legally - that can be easily retransmitted on the Internet. Nevertheless, I'm grateful I got an opportunity to share what I know about the "red diaper" ideology of young Barack Obama.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
As you may know, my fifteen minutes of fame kicked in this week. Award-winning journalist, Ronald Kessler ran a story in Newsmax about me and my observations of the young Barack Obama's radical socialist perspective during his days at Occidental College in Los Angeles. One of the interesting things about this experience has been tracking how the information leaked out and which, if any, channels of communication worked the best.
One of my biggest surprises was the role that YouTube played in getting this message out. Ironically, the biggest impact - so far - has been the interview I did with Breitbart TV's "The B-Cast."
What is most curious to me, however, is that I came to the attention of the B-Cast staff through contacts who knew me from You Tube. Part of the problem is that I never got many hits on the You Tube videos I did in the past, so I assumed that it wasn't a well-regarded channel of information, at least for conservatives. I'm rethinking that assumption right now. At any rate, please subscribe to my You Tube channel. Now that I know people are looking at it, I'll take it more seriously and use it as a tool for getting around the mainstream media.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
The good news is the Obama administration has helped at least three people get new jobs, one each in VA, NJ, and now MA...
On a more serious note, it is clear that Scott Brown's triumphant entry into Washington, D.C. symbolized the collapse of one of the most powerful Presidential terms in U.S. history. Very rarely does an energetic new President come to office in complete control of both houses of Congress. Brown's startling victory, however, marks the end of the Obama revolution.
The Supreme Court also timed things perfectly driving a nail in the Obama administration's Marxist socialist fantasies. It's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, overruled two precedents: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a 1990 decision that upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, a 2003 decision that upheld the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that restricted campaign spending by corporations and unions.
Moreover, the 2002 law, usually called McCain-Feingold, banned the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections.
The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applied to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.”
This decision is important from a theoretical perspective because the Supreme Court's rulings have a massive impact on the way we play the political game. This assertion, by the way, is controversial among traditional Marxists who underestimate the power of the state itself to regulate and control human behavior. The Supreme Court decision is welcome news for everyone who feared the growth of big government at the expense of the private sector. This move will give non-government organizations the resources they need to protect markets (and themselves) from undue political influence. I can always pick another corporation or insurance company. It's not so easy to find a new government.
In the domestic terrorism front, I think this concern was another issue raised by the Scott Brown campaign. Most of us think that it is fair to treat our enemy as enemies...and not as citizens in civilian court. Increasingly, Obama's divergent point of view is why a plurality of us would already prefer to vote for "someone else" to be President in 2012.
It's a pleasure to live in a country with freedom of speech. :) Personally, I was following the election results on Twitter and later on talk radio. Nevertheless, I figured out it was over for Coakley when Michael Barone said on FOX that turn out was high in the neighborhoods expected to go for Scott Brown. I'm grateful non-government institutions can now fight back against the goverment and against the big companies that own left wing media outlets like MSNBC or ABC or CBS or NBC.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
One of the most annoying things about Janet Napolitano was her belief that guys like me are among the top security threats to our nation because of our conservative views, Constitutional perspective, and commitment to various "single issue" causes. Now, however, it looks like the predictions that Obama's approach to terrorism would make us safer have all been proven wrong.
In this regard, I think it is entirely fair, and important, to point out that the recent terrorist attacks during the first year of the Obama administration can all be traced to its overly optimistic trust of devout Muslims. This is the common theme that runs through accounts of the Ft. Hood shooter, the panty bomber and the CIA base attack. As far as I can tell, participants in the Obama administration are so committed to their politically correct point of view that they don't understand that religious books have real world consequences.
Unfortunately for the Democrat party, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - the 23-year-old Nigerian panty bomber - was brought to the attention of the Obama administration by British authorities prior to his attack.
This fact alone undermines the theory that Obama's genius and superior governing skills would keep us safe.
For me, increased national security starts with a proper understanding of the nature of the threat we face from radical Islam. The thesis of Dore Gold's excellent book - Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism - is that Wahabi Islam has always been a dangerous religious movement - even to other Islamic adherents. The violence of Wahabi Islamic thought predates the establishment of Israel.
Accordingly, it is extremely important for the Obama administration to adjust its risk profiles to take this into accout. Pretending that Islamic terrorism is the product of loneliness or mental illness or discrimination is going to get a lot more Americans killed. The recent uptick in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil shows the Obama administration needs to go back to whatever was working so well during the last six years of the Bush administration.
The news, of course, is not all bad. The practical elements of the Obama administration are already tightening up procedures regarding travellers from Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, which are considered “state sponsors of terrorism” as well as citizens from Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen. These travellers will be subject to specialized intensive physical scrutiny.
Once again, conservatives are winning the battle of ideas. This is the same "profiling" program that I've argued for for years. I don't think all those searches of me and my luggage this year while I was visiting Northern California or Pennsylvania or Tennessee were making us any safer.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
