For Good? Moody's Investor Services Down Grades Occidental College Debt in Middle of Capital Campaign

Thanks to an article in the Wall Street Journal, I recently learned that I'm not the only white guy who gave up on giving money to Occidental College. According to the WSJ, the school - which is in the middle of a capital campaign - is choking so hard that Moody's Investor Services just down grade its debt from stable to negative. The timing of this announcement couldn't be worse. No rational donor wants to throw good money after bad. There are details on the cringe worthy "Oxy Campaign For Good" on the school's website.

According the the Occidental College spin, the school's financial failures are its punishment for not being nicer to wealthy white families who - perhaps illegally - were willing to pay for their otherwise ineligible children to attend the school. This, of course, is a joke. The school admits tons of black and Latino kids who wouldn't have been eligible to attend the school back when I was a student with extremely high test scores and a number of high school track records too.

In reality, Occidental College has ticked off potential white donors and white alums like me by embracing anti-white bigotry, socialist professors, and identity politics. Moreover, it ruined the prestige of the school by lowering its standards in order to make the school less white.

I remember how its first black president, John Slaughter, told a group of alumni with white faces that he looked forward - essentially - to a future where there were fewer white faces around. I was offended. I still think Slaughter  was a sick jerk. He was completely unqualified to serve as a college president. He had no experience as a fundraiser or as a liberal arts college administrator. Under his feckless leadership, support for students shot up so high and so quick that the Board of Directors had to draw down the endowment to keep the school going.

I complained to him in writing once and he ended up calling me. He denied having said he wanted to see fewer white faces around even though his comments had been printed in the Los Angeles Times. I complained, as I remember, about affirmative action and he said it was clear I had a personal beef with the college. Duh. He was especially incensed when I complained about how admission standards at Occidental College had been dropped to allow for more non-whites on campus. His response, as I recall, was quite odd. "Are you suggesting these students aren't qualified to be here?" This was freaky, in part, because my concern is not whether or not the students were qualified, but whether they were the best of the best. To be sure, I have to give Slaughter credit for calling me back. Subsequent presidents of this declining school haven't done even that...

Since then, Occidental College has been a leader in rolling over to please leftist students and professors with everything from denying guys due process to fight sexual assault and giving in to the demands of black students who took over the administrative building. The article in the Wall Street Journal is reprinted below, after the break. There are a number of really twisted people on the faculty including Lisa Wade, a leader in the fight against toxic masculinity. Or, to be more correct, just masculinity itself. As has been reported by The College Fix, Lisa Wade rejects the notion of "toxic masculinity," saying it is time to recognize that "it is masculinity itself that has become the problem."

Heroes of the school include ethical lightweights like leftist journalist Steve Coll '80 who - as far as I can tell - left his wife Susan for an intern working at his non-profit organization. (I used to be friends with Steve and Susan.) The husband of one of my Occidental College friends, Joe

The capital campaign, of course, is being led by president Jonathan Veitch who distinguished himself as among the nation's most groveling academic leaders who allowed students to occupy his office, terrify his staff, and get away with a number of absurd identity based policy changes. 

I have a couple of hot takes on this....

Occidental College has been a victim of politically correct nonsense for a number of years. It reduced standards to allow more black and Latinos to attend. The negative consequence of this reduction in standards is that subsequent alumni are both less bright and less wealthy than earlier alumni.

Occidental College leaders like John Slaughter, the first black Oxy president, went out of their way to discourage whites from teaching at the school or sending their children there as students. The problem in Slaughter's view was basically that the school was too white.

The school has gone off the deep end in hiring socialist/Communist faculty members who despise whites in principle and who certainly have no respect for those who have acquired any large amount of wealth. Such people, to these socialist/Communist faculty members, are their enemies...not their donors.

I attended at talk at Oxy in 2012 where I overheard Eric Newhall, quoted in the WSJ article, bragging about how much better Oxy was now that it had fewer white people on the faculty. He didn't realize I was a young white guy who was pissed off at the discrimination the school practiced against young white conservative scholars. He looked shocked that a white guy would be upset at a system where he and his relatives got screwed just because of their race.

I wouldn't give a dime to these people. If affirmative action isn't evil, nothing is evil.

I got a request from the school asking me, as an alum, to give to their capital campaign. I've considered the school my enemy for years. I wish I had read this article before I filled out the questionnaire. If they are a bad bet for Moody's Investor Services, then they are a bad bet for me too.

Hot on Quora: What Was Barack Obama's GPA in College?

I met Barack Obama and got to know him while he was a student at Occidental College. My memories of young Obama have appeared in a number of historical books including David Garrow’s Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. This is a 1,460 page pre-presidential biography published by HarperCollins in May 2017.

At the time I met the young Obama, I was a graduate student at Cornell University, doing my first work as a teaching assistant in political science. My sense of him at the time is that he was of average intelligence. I don’t remember him making any particularly insightful comments when we spoke. I think it is safe to say that he was most likely a solid B student.

To be fair, the Barack Obama I met in 1980–1981 was more interested in parties, cocaine and radical politics than his academic record. I think it is only common sense to assert that the only reason his Occidental College GPA has not been released is that it would have been bad news for him.

I’m writing this to counter-act some of the extreme Barack Obama sycophantic comments suggesting he is some sort of genius. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no record of him being particularly talented at math, statistics, or any of the hard sciences. He served as the editor of the law review at Harvard, but didn’t bother to produce any articles of his own for it.


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

No More Knockout Games: My Counter Demands to Black Liberation Collective

I noticed the activists behind the Black Liberation Collective (BLC) have issued a set of three national-level demands, demands they want our various colleges and universities to comply with in the near future. Given the publicity associated with these demands, I thought it might be a good idea for those of us who would be harmed by these extraordinary demands to provide our response and our own set of counter demands. 

Reviewing my own counter demands, I think it is fair to say that I believe we have a right to demand more from the black community to address its own grievous failings before we bend over backwards to meet the protester's demands. In particular, I think we need to demand immediate changes in dysfunctional black culture, including its fascination with the so-called Knockout Game as described in the YouTube video below.

Reviewing the actual demands of the BLC, I see they have included the wish list generated by the Oxy United protesters at Occidental College. I will ignore the Occidental College specific demands since I have already dealt with them in an earlier post. Instead, I will list the national-level demands below, provide my own response, along with counter demand that should provoke an opportunity for self-reflection and legitimate debate.

1) WE DEMAND at the minimum, Black students and Black faculty to be reflected by the national percentage of Black folk in the country.

As a political scientist, I have thought about this issue for a long time and frankly it never made sense to me that black students or black faculty should be represented according to the national percentage of black folk in the country. Ultimately, this demand is unrealistic and unfair for everyone else because it fails to take into account the ways in which black under performance in the academic world is caused by dysfunctional black culture. For example, I think that it is more reasonable that we should expect the proportion of black students and black faculty to represent the percentage of black folks who grow up in strong, stable, two-parent families. As long as the black community accepts dysfunctional lifestyles, it is unrealistic to expect black achievement to come any where near to the levels seen in Asian or white communities. 

Reasonable Counter Demand #1: Black folk must work harder and achieve the same standards set for the rest of us. It is not that hard to obey the police, abstain from drugs/alcohol, and avoid having children while you are still a teen or single. It is not too much to expect greater personal responsibility from black folk including a strong commitment to marriage, parenting and family. In the meantime, we should not punish the children of people who are living saner and healthier lives.

2) WE DEMAND free tuition for Black and indigenous students.

This demand seems like a total waste of time and money to me. After all, it is easy to get a free education on the Internet. In my experience, you can pick up just about any skill you want by watching YouTube videos. Moreover, we have free public libraries which provide even the poorest among us with virtually unlimited resources including free access to computers. I don't see the big deal about making education free. If you want to learn about American Government, I will give you a free syllabus and my own lecture notes. Since black and indigenous students already have access to free education, I am not in the mood to give of my money fund some leftist professor to give a way a wasteful, more expensive version of education. 

Reasonable Counter Demand #2: Pay reparations to all the white and Asian students who have been harmed by affirmative action. Due to the injustice of affirmative action, white and Asian students have gone to lower quality schools, absorbed unfair debt levels, and received instruction from inferior faculty members. We need to address the profound injustice of affirmative action by demanding that those who have benefited from it the most devote a significant portion of their incomes to make amends for the damage they have done to poor white and poor Asian students who have been the true victims of institutional discrimination.

3) WE DEMAND a divestment from prisons and an investment in communities.

All these prisons are saving us money by keeping dangerous, unsafe people off the streets. It makes more sense to me to dramatically increase the penalties for crime. If the penalties are high enough, then we would see less crime -- as is the case in places like Singapore. 

In an ideal world, those who cause the most crime should be required to pay the most to suppress it. In particular, we should make life miserable for unwed, single mothers. We should make an example of them so that no one would even consider becoming a single mother in the first place. It is not that hard to use birth control or to abstain from sex until you can handle the responsibilities of being a parent. We need to ask black folk to invest in their own communities by not making the birth control mistakes that cause poverty, criminal behavior, or child abuse and neglect. As the victims of the Knockout Game will tell you, it is no fun to be the victim of black criminals who lack empathy for the people they harm. 

Reasonable Counter Demand #3: We demand that the black community exercise greater self-control, discipline and responsibility. Accordingly, we demand that the black community refocus its efforts on self-improvement and changing its own violent, insensitive and dysfunctional culture.

When the Knockout Game ceases to be cool in black neighborhoods, then maybe I will be willing to think about the rest of the BLC's demands with a little more sympathy. 

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

The Big Yawn: Oxy Goes Halfway to Meet Demands of Slumber Party Protesters

Students block President Jonathan Veitch from his own office on the 

Occidental College campus.

It looks like President Jonathan Veitch and the Occidental College Board of Trustees have met the student protesters halfway. As I count them, they agreed to meet at least five of the protester's 14 demands.
about

1. Resignation - No.
2. Chief Diversity Officer Promotion - Yes.
3. Chief Diversity Office Budget Increase - Yes.
4. More Diversity and Equity Board Funding - No.
5. Black Studies Program - No.
6. Increase Tenured Black Faculty - No.
7. Funding for Harambee - Yes.
8. Mandatory Training for Staff - Yes.
9. Demilitarization - No.
10. Removal of LAPD - No.
11. Intercultural Affairs Maintenance - Yes.
12. Elimination of First Year Education Program - No.
13. Physician of Color - No.
14. Coalition @Oxy for Diversity and Equity Demands - No.

If you score this differently, please add your comments in the space below.

What Veitch does not understand is the anti-white hostility embedded in this protest. The BLM protesters will not give up even though they got some of what they wanted, because what they want fundamentally is to eliminate white liberals from positions of power. I suspect this will come as a disappointing shock to Veitch and the rest of his administration.

The larger issue remains: The shortage of intellectual diversity at Occidental College. We will not have a real, vibrant, influential intellectual community at Occidental College until at least half the staff and faculty are conservatives. Luckily, conservatives do not worry about the race or gender of their ideological adherents.

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

Fighting Back: Dartmouth College Republicans Complain About Discrimination

I saw today that the Dartmouth College Republicans issued an open letter to the president and trustees of Dartmouth College. As a former Williams College political science professor, I experienced the same sort of hostility and unfair treatment indicated in this open letter. My sense is that conservative students and professors are the targets of profound discrimination in much of the academic world. This letter is worth reading, in full: 

It is with great sadness and the utmost disappointment that we find ourselves having to write this letter. As the Dartmouth College Republicans, we often feel discriminated against by the administration and unwelcome on this campus. As conservative students, we have often felt marginalized in this community. In light of an especially toxic campus environment, a seriously concerning incident has come to our attention: at a recent public event held on the evening of Monday, November 16, Vice Provost Inge-Lise Ameer stated, “There’s a whole conservative world out there that’s not very nice.” Furthermore, students at that meeting repeatedly violated Dartmouth’s Principle of Community by referring to conservatives by slurs such as “f***ing racists,” which Ameer did little to stop. 

Unfortunately, her recent comments and actions are only the latest manifestation of a campus culture that dismisses conservative voices. We are now at the point where the vast majority of conservative students on campus do not feel comfortable expressing their views. Even self identification as a conservative can invite serious backlash. Many of us have been called bigoted, racist, and homophobic — among other epithets — for simply stating our opinions. Thus, it is especially concerning that a senior administrator would casually encourage a culture of prejudice against conservatives on this campus. 

At the same public event, Vice Provost Ameer also stated, “If you’re feeling unsafe and you’re not feeling like you are getting responded to then contact me directly and we will deal with it because that is not right.” We feel unsafe, and we feel that we are not being responded to. The same resources made available to the Black Lives Matter protesters, including regular meetings with senior administrators, should be made available to conservative students on campus. An open and polite dialogue is essential to any college campus.

It is difficult enough to be a conservative on any college campus, and it is simply unacceptable that any administrator would reinforce such a hostile climate. We urge Vice Provost Ameer to condemn the actions and words of protesters and to send an open and public apology to all of campus, retracting her previous statements on conservatives and reaffirming the need to respect conservative students and their opinions.

 The intellectual influence and credibility of our liberal arts colleges is being reduced to nothing because of the open hostility to conservatives and conservative thought expressed by so many staff, faculty and students at places like Dartmouth and Occidental College. Given the mistreatment of conservatives on college campuses, I think it is time to fight back, establish new institutions, or move education to a fresh, on-line model that will allow for a higher level of freedom of speech.

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

Up Dates: How About Some Free Speech? My Response to Oxy Protesters' Demands

Oxy sociology professor Lisa Wade
claimed that it was horrifying 
to see a booklet on how to confront
a liberal professor. No
conservatives welcome here.

Since students at Occidental College seldom, if ever, hear from a conservative political science professor, I
thought it would be a public service to respond to their demands. I'll do so from my independent perspective. This will be, I expect, a useful example of uncomfortable learning.

Demand #1 Immediate removal of president Veitch.

This demands appear to be completely feckless. Veitch has the support of the Board of Trustees. He is not going anywhere. By any measure he has outperformed the previous affirmative action presidents including a hopelessly incompetent female president and a rude, divisive black president. Veitch could have every protester removed from the campus and dismissed from the school and I don't think any of us would think the less of him. When student protester's over-the-top demands lose the support of even staunch liberals, I think it is fair to say they are done.

Demand #2 Promotion of the Chief Diversity Officer to Vice President level.

Yawn. What is a chief diversity officer anyways? It is generally a weak, symbolic figure who has little purpose except to give die-hard liberals the sense they are accomplishing something. The whole role is a waste of money that adds nothing of value to the educational process. What might make sense, however, is to appoint an Intellectual Diversity Officer (IDO). They would investigate charges of liberal bias among faculty members including Caroline Heldman and Lisa Wade. The IDO would be responsible for protecting freedom of speech on campus, making sure that conservative students and faculty were not subject to discrimination in any manner including hiring practices. Ideologically, the faculty should reflect the basic political divides in the nation. At least half the faculty members, for example, should be Republican. I can't think of anything that would more dramatically improve the quality of education at Oxy than hiring and promoting the most competent conservatives to all available jobs on campus.

Demand #3 Increase the budget of the CDO office by 50%.

The problem with this demand is what do you cut and who do you harm in the process. The protesters never tell us how to pay for this. Maybe Veitch could take a $50,000 pay cut to fund the CDO? Better yet, make the protester's pay for this if they want it so much. Each of them could pay an extra $500 in their tuition bill. If they aren't willing to pay for this out of their own pockets, then it is probably a waste of money for all students to pay for it.

Demand #4 $60,000 allocated to DEB to fund programming and provide resources for black and other marginalized students.

The Diversity & Equity Board is an official student-led branch of the Associated Students of Occidental College. It is supposedly focused on empowerment and improved conditions for structurally marginalized groups. To an outside observer like me, however, it looks like a slush fund for a small group of liberal students to spend as they please. Really, it is more efficient for them to spend their own money. I might support this if an equal amount was given to conservative students on campus. Since the major problem at Oxy is a lack of intellectual diversity, I think $60,000 would go a long way in righting the ideological balance on campus. This fund would pay for visits of prominent, articulate conservatives such as Suzanne Venker.

Demand #5 Creation of a fully funded and staffed Black Studies program, a demand that has not been met for over 40 years.

This looks like another, wasteful, adventure in identity politics. It is difficult for me to understand what sort of job you get after you graduate as a black studies major. In my experience, these Black Study programs end up being a way to get unqualified black professors on campus. The problem is everyone knows that they are unqualified so that sort of defeats the point of have more examples of black academics on campus. Overtime, I'm sure the black family will strengthen and more black families will produce scholars worthy of teaching at Occidental College. In the meantime, however, it seems silly and counter productive to artificially increase the number of black faculty on campus by creating a new, black only niche occupation.

Demand #6 Increase percentage of tenured faculty of color by 20% for the 2017-2018 school years, and by 100% over the next 5 years.

As long as black culture devalues fatherhood and disciplined education, we should not expect it to produce a greater number of black academics, certainly not enough who would be capable of holding their own at places like Occidental College. Oxy is already less prestigious and less elite than when I attended it. At that time, weaker female professors were replacing better qualified male professors. I don't think the school is doing itself any favors by adding unqualified or less qualified faculty members simply because they are black. It is feckless to blame racism for issues which are almost entirely due to structural weaknesses in black culture and the consequences of black identity politics.

Demand #7 Provide funding for Harambee, the student group for black men which has not received funding in 5 years. This seems like a waste of money. Plenty of black men would do better if they attended schools that were a correct match with their level of preparation. Thanks to affirmative action, too many of them end up at places were they are guaranteed to have lower GPA's, fail and drop out. The problems they face are a by-product of affirmative action. Get rid of the special treatment and the black men who remain will be more than able to hold their own.

Demand #8 Institute mandatory training for all college employees, especially Residential Education, Student Affairs, and Campus Safety, that provides tools to properly assist people from marginalized backgrounds. Again, this just seems silly. What exactly are these special "tools." If someone could explain to me what special tools need to be used with people from marginalized backgrounds, then I might be in favor of this. Otherwise, it looks like another waste of time and money.

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

Occidental College President Jonathan Veitch Under Attack from Black Student Alliance and Coalition at Oxy for Diversity and Equity

Black student protesters at Occidental College are complaining about how the school mistreats and neglects them. Things heated up enough that on Tuesday of this week they staged a sit-in at an administration building on the Eagle Rock campus. They want the resignation of the school's president Jonathan Veitch.

Their demands include “an increase in faculty in staff of color, a black studies program, more funding for students of color to do more programming and bring more speakers” to the school, “and so we want that by Friday," said Mika Cribbs, vice president of the Black Student Alliance, which organized the protest along with the Coalition at Oxy for Diversity and Equity. 

Personally, I don't care for Veitch. He is a classic leftist. He ticked me off when he failed to respond to my complaints that I was abused by left-wing professor, Peter Dreier, who went off on me during a visit I made to the campus during the last presidential campaign. 

Ironically, I have been treated nicely by one of the most radical voices at Oxy, political science professor Caroline Heldman. I even spoke to one of her political science classes back in 2011. She has been among those most critical of Veitch in the past, particularly in regard to his efforts to reduce rapes among the students at Occidental College. For inexplicable reasons, my contacts with other political scientists at Occidental College have been frosty at best. 

Veitch has been in hot water for awhile among his liberal peers for his apparent failure to crack down on campus rapists. For a full list of the things Veitch did which look questionable to the protesting students, check out the image below. You can enlarge it by clicking on it. 

Occidental College was not on my radar screen at all today until I got this obsequious letter from the chair of the Occidental College Board of Trustees. It reads:

Dear John,

I sent the following message to the campus community this afternoon that I wanted to share with you.

Sincerely,

ChrisCalkins '67

Chair, Occidental College Board of Trustees

Dear Oxy Students, Staff, Faculty and Alumni, 

We live in a society that is divided by issues of racial injustice and other inequities. I deeply regret that Occidental is not immune from those problems. Despite our best intentions and collective commitments to creating a safe and welcoming environment, Occidental remains a microcosm of that society. 

We must, and will, do better. We recognize the personal pain of these experiences, and we support action to address issues of racism and discrimination in a meaningful way. Leading the way in diversity has been at the core of the College’s mission for many years, and it will continue to drive our actions for more to come. While we are listening to community members’ demands, it is our responsibility to act in the best interest of the College. We stand in full support of President Veitch and have no intention of changing the leadership of the College. 

Our community has flourished in a multitude of ways under President Veitch’s leadership, including working through some very challenging issues. We know that the only way that timely solutions will occur is under Jonathan’s leadership. The Board of Trustees is in a very good position to appreciate what the president does with his time. From the very beginning, Jonathan has focused on creating a more diverse and inclusive institution. He has been tireless in raising money for scholarships; hiring a diverse faculty and staff; and furthering the mission of the College. He has our full support. We believe that the only way forward is to focus on the meaningful work we share — making Occidental a more diverse, welcoming and inclusive institution.  

Sincerely, Chris Calkins

Chair, Occidental College Board of Trustees

There is something quite pleasant in watching the left devour itself. I'll keep a watch on this issue. My prediction is that the school will cave to the most absurd demands of the student protesters without any concern at all for how those demands impact the interest of white students and white professors. If the black protesters start acting out with violence against white/conservative students on campus, I will revisit this issue. 

If any of the conservative students on campus need assistance in getting out their message, then I would be glad to help with that too. Now days, you can do a lot with a blog and a Twitter account. It is particularly helpful is conservative students capture extremist moments on camera. This would be a good time, for example, to pretend to be a student radical, say extreme things, and see how the faculty and staff react. 

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

God Grant Them Many Years: Congratulations to Charles and Bernadette Johnson

I just want to make a quick announcement that one of my favorite writers, Charles Johnson, got married to his sweetheart, Bernadette, at a ceremony in Alaska on June 7, 2013. Here is a photo of this happy event. (I think that is the pastor standing behind them.)


Mr. and Mrs. Charles Johnson married at a ceremony
at Eklutna Lake in Alaska on June 7, 2013.

Charles is probably most famous as the author of a new book on Calvin Coolidge called Why Coolidge Matters. I met him while he was a contributor at Breitbart. I have been honored to serve as a source for work he has done on unravelling the reality of the young Marxist Obama.
I am particularly grateful to him for his patient research and his conclusion that I am telling the truth about what I saw and heard from the young Obama in the 1980s. Even if I was a guy trying to beat a traffic ticket, I would still be grateful for a judge like Charles.

By the way, Charles will be speaking at the David Horowitz Freedom Center on June 19, 2003 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM in Los Angeles. Here is the link. If you are in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, I urge you to come out and hear what Charles has to say at this event. Also, congratulate him and his new bride.

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

White Like Me: Thoughts on Young Obama's Prom Photos

TIME published pictures from Barack Obama's prom night in 1979. For me, these photos are more evidence of something I have thought for a long time - young Obama seemed like a white guy.

Greg Orme, Kelli Allman, Barack Obama and
Megan Hughes at Allman’s parents’ house in Honolulu.

Despite the Obama mythology, these new photos show that the young Obama was dating a white girl named Megan Hughes and hanging out with other white people including his basketball teammate Greg Orme and fellow student Kellie Allman. It was Kelli Allman (née McCormack) who provided these new photos to Time. She is pictured second from the left.

One of the most puzzling things to me about contemporary politics is the way so many people seem to think that Barack Obama is a black man. As one of the folks who got to know him while he was at Occidental College, I can report that I thought of Obama as an average white guy in terms of his IQ and his cultural inheritance. This, of course, should not be so surprising since Obama was raised by his white mother and his white grandparents nearly his entire life.

The young Obama that I knew was mainly interested in hanging out with white guys and white girls (like me and my radical girlfriend) or with his radical Muslim friends. I interacted with young Obama on various occasions between 1980-1981 and I can report that I never saw him hanging out with black students. Never.

Obama, of course, has done a lot of work to create a politically and socially advantageous black image for himself. In his autobiography, for example, I have called attention to how Obama converted my white college era girlfriend into a big black woman.

This ruse needs to end. The young Obama I knew was nothing like the young black people I knew at Occidental College. He did not come from an underprivileged background. He did not have any of the hostility to white people that I sometimes saw among blacks at Occidental College. All the reports we have so far indicate that young Obama was dating white women, hanging out with his white roommate - Phil Boerner - at Columbia, and generally living a white lifestyle imbued with radical, socialist ideology.

I remain amazed that a guy as white as me managed to game the affirmative action system all the way into the White House. I expect future generations, however, will see through this ruse and render judgments that reflect the actual evidence of Obama's life including these new photos.

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

How I Confronted Obama Biographer David Maraniss

I pushed the envelope of citizen journalism a little further this week by introducing myself to Pulitzer-prize winning journalist David Maraniss. According to Maraniss, his research for Barack Obama: The Story took him to Hawaii, Indonesia and Kenya. Unfortunately, he did not have the time to Google search me or review any of the five books, multiple blog posts, YouTube videos or hundreds of websites that feature my take on young Obama’s ideological extremism.

Ironically, Maraniss got awfully close to confirming the details of my 1980 Christmas break debate with young Obama, a debate that reveals just how radical Obama was as a college student. Maraniss reports young Obama was in the San Francisco area at precisely the time when I indicated I first met and debated him. Maraniss, in fact, talked at length with my college-era Marxist girlfriend – Caroline Boss - at whose home the debate took place. Maraniss goes so far as to report that Caroline was part of the composite character “Regina” in Dreams from My Father.

I managed to converse with Maraniss during his recent visit to my alma mater, Occidental College, on October 29, 2012. My wife and I arrived at Occidental’s Thorne Hall early and picked out seats near the front. I learned Maraniss sees young Obama as a largely apolitical figure generally more interested in personal growth than raw political power. In Maraniss’s view, young Obama was largely untouched by the radicalism of either my ex-girlfriend or of his Pakistani roommate, Hassan Chandoo– the older student who admitted to his youthful Marxism in David Remnick’s The Bridge. Maraniss sees no evidence that young Obama was interested in pursuing elected office. For Maraniss, Obama’s lust for power only kicks in just prior to Obama’s application to Harvard Law School. Maraniss’s portrait of young Obama, of course, is absolutely inconsistent with my face-to-face observation that young Obama was 100% committed to preparing for a Communist revolution in the United States and was actively grooming himself to play a leadership role in that highly anticipated, potentially violent conflict.

Maraniss called for questions and I stood up. Speaking into a microphone, I dropped my well-rehearsed bombshell before an audience of about 200 listeners: “Mr. Maraniss, my name is John Drew. I’m a former professor and a former Marxist.” This opening line got a laugh.

“For several years now,” I continued, “I have been very public about my time with Barack Obama at Occidental, where he and I and my girlfriend were all fellow Marxists. A number of conservative authors have asked me about this and published my account in bestselling books. You’ve interviewed my girlfriend and others in our radical circles, but not me. I’d love to talk with you. Would you be open to that? I’m not looking to sell my story or for increased name recognition. I just want to share the truth.”

Maraniss’s response was curt. “Of course,” he said, “ I’m open to talk with anyone.” He shut up and immediately moved on to the next question. Nevertheless, I could see I was on his mind since Maraniss mentioned me by name two more times during his question and answer session. The good news is that he was nice enough to assert that he was not sure of my motivations. The bad news is that he seemed quite certain that everyone else who repeats, or depends, on my testimony -- including Jack Cashill, Paul Kengor, Stanley Kurtz and the editors of American Thinker -- is largely motivated by intractable racism.

While we failed to record video of the question and answer session, Tricia did capture my face-to-face encounter with Maraniss later on. See, http://youtu.be/r4sYJFguGpo

Crouched by the book table, I asked: “How did you find out Caroline was Regina?”

“Didn’t hear it from the president,” he said.

Maraniss seemed to be a bit of a perfectionist when it came to signing our dog-eared copy of Barack Obama: The Story. He graciously wrote: “To John and Tricia, All the Best, David Maraniss.”

I asked: “Do you want to stay in touch?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ll give you my e-mail address.”

I asked: “Did you know I existed?”

“After the book came out,” he said.

While I do not know yet if I have a new friend in the field of elite journalism, I think the fact that Maraniss says he never knew about my debate with young Obama until after his book came out indicates that there is something broken in America culture. Apparently, I live in a country where ordinary citizens need to write, research, record -- and perhaps even stage --the news, a country where informants need to go out of their way to share the truth to the preeminent gatekeepers of the mainstream media.

TRANSCRIPT

John Drew: It’s Drew…John and…John and Tricia Drew. How did you find out Caroline was Regina?

David Maraniss: Didn’t hear it from the president. John and Tricia?

John Drew: John and Tricia.

Tricia Drew: T-R-I-C-I-A.

John Drew: I was shocked when I read that…because I…I knew it was…

Tricia Drew: Thank you, sir.

John Drew: Do you want to stay in touch?

David Maraniss: Yeah, I’ll give you my e-mail address.

John Drew: I’m…I’ve written about six articles in American Thinker…Breitbart. Did you know I existed?

David Maraniss: After the book came out… American Thinker…Jack Cashill are not my favorite people. But, I…

Tricia Drew: Thank you, we’ll appreciate that time.

David Maraniss: What you’re talking about and what he’s talking about are two very different things. You’re talking about your relationship which is, for you know, is fact based--as far as you’re concerned. They’re talking about conspiracy theories which there’s just…you know…there’s no factual way to prove these things.

John Drew: If you read my article, you’ll see I actually was…I think was the first person to confront his faith in a Communist revolution in the U.S. …I swear as God is my witness…I think I changed his opinion…I’d place his political interest closer to Occidental.

David Maraniss: Thank you.

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/

New Photos From Occidental Years Show Real Obama

The New Yorker blog features new photos that verify my take on what our 44th president acted and looked like as a sophomore at Occidental College. Readers will note the real Obama, the young revolutionary extremist with a soft spot for Islam, that I got to know as a participant in Occidental’s radical student politics.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/barack-obama-at-occidental-college-photographs.html#

Curiously, the photos show Obama wearing a band on his left ring finger that WND alleges to read “there is no God but Allah.” 

http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obamas-ring-there-is-no-god-but-allah/

The photo I find to be most historically significant is the one that shows details from of the anti-apartheid rally of February 18, 1981, the rally that debuted Obama’s famous first skit in Obama’s Dreams from My Father. In contrast to Obama’s story, the banner above the event proclaims the somewhat more complex cause of “Affirmative Action & Divestiture NOW.” The photo features many of the real life figures who would become composite characters in Obama’s autobiography. These include my white ex-girlfriend, Caroline Boss, the radical student leader who improbably lent her grandmother’s name - and much of her scintillating personality - to the big-boned, black “Regina” character.

For the record, I view these photos from the perspective of an accident victim looking at a long ago car wreck. Caroline and I had parted ways just weeks before this rally. As I recall, the split was painful enough to cause us to temporarily adopt the roles of imaginary divorce lawyers, lawyers who combed through our conflicting feelings and amicably laid out the details of what became our eventual, imperfect separation.

For many years, young Obama was simply a footnote in my own intellectual autobiography. He was an early witness to the process in which I abandoned my expectation of a Communist revolution, dropped my old Occidental College friends, and eventually became a Republican business owner. In contrast, Obama held tight to his Occidental College friends and their causes.

“Decades later,” Margot Mifflin writes in response to these photos, “Obama would spur a new generation of students into political action, forging a connection between sixties radicals and media-savvy millennials.” Mifflin, of course, is only telling part of the story. She leaves out the part where at least one of Obama’s friends was not so pleased by the impact of affirmative action and never quite forgot what it was like to sacrifice everything he had for scholarly achievement only to learn, at the end of the process: “Sorry, you’re white.”

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

Dr. Drew Reacts to Article on Young Obama's Radical Oxy Professors

I was pleased to read this new article regarding the radicalism of the professors who were part of young Obama's education at Occidental College in the early 1980s. Charles Johnson combed through the on-campus publications and isolated some great examples of the ideological extremism that was considered normal at the school during the 1980-1981 school year when my path crossed that of the young Obama.

As the teaser notes, "Larry T. Caldwell, the president's foreign policy mentor at Occidental, argued the same policy of 'reconciling' with the USSR that the administration applies today with the Muslim Brotherhood."

One of the ironies in my life, of course, is that when I was a radical student at Occidental College, I considered most of these professors to be sell outs who were not extremist enough including Prof. Lare and Prof. Caldwell. As a political science professor at Williams College in MA, I taught in the political science department and I can verify that both Egan and Boesche were socialists at least during the early and mid-1980s when I knew them the best. By the way, I did speak at Occidental College last year regarding my take on young Obama.

All in all, I think my confrontation of young Obama's Marxist socialist views must have come as something of a shock, given the uniformity of revolutionary thought at Occidental College.

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

Gaydar Gap: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Attacks Dr. Drew's First Impression of Young Obama

As I said, whenever I am asked what I first thought about Barack Obama I tell the truth: I thought he was gay. Apparently, my take on young Obama's metrosexual appearance was worthy of being attacked last week on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.



Maddow is apparently seeking to make me look like some kind of a nut simply because I have been honest about my first impression of young Obama. She and I both have Ph.D.'s in political science. I would think that she would give me some credit for being an honest and truthful person. I would also like to point out that David Maraniss, in his new book Barack Obama: The Story, verified that both young Obama and young Chandoo were in the San Francisco area at exactly then I indicated they were up there visiting with me and my ex-girlfriend.

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

Dr. Drew Appears in "Barry's Bud" a Brand New Simply America Documentary Film

I have been waiting to get my story out in a professional quality video. Here is the first successful effort from the folks at Simply America. They spent about three hours working with me and produce about five minutes of the best stuff on their new mini documentary. As I review this tape, I am reminded that Barack Obasma has never shared his conversion story, the story that explains how he stopped being a Marxist socialist.



My conversion story is already out there. As such, I am happy to do whatever it takes to keep this series of documentary films rolling along. You can help too by donating $20 at the Simply America website.

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.

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



John Drew with Caroline Boss
in June 1981.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

John Drew and Caroline Boss
in June 1981.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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