Dr. Drew to Speak at Fundraiser for Republican Candidate John Webb (R-45CD)

Laguna Hills, CA – John Webb’s campaign for Congress will host a special event at the Laguna Hills Community Center on February 23rd for a speaking engagement featuring Dr. John Drew and Republican candidate for Congress, John Webb.

Along with officially endorsing John Webb, Dr. Drew will speak on the topic of, “Why Barack Obama’s Past is More Important than His Future.” Dr. Drew is a political scientist who has shared his face-to-face observations of young Barack Obama’s ideology in articles published in American Thinker and David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine. In attendance will be supporters of John Webb’s campaign for the 45th Congressional District and individuals who are seeking a true Conservative, not a politician tied to the interests in Washington.

“As a resident of Orange County for over 40 years, Marine Corps Veteran, and a job creator as a corporate execute and small business owner I understand the issues that impact my community,” said Congressional candidate John Webb. “I’m committed to listening to the concerns of the citizens and creating policy that pulls back bureaucracy and cuts spending.”

The event is exclusive with limited seating; a donation to John Webb for Congress is required to RSVP. The highlights will include:

• John Webb discussing his Campaign for Congress and issues platform;

• Dr. John Drew speaking about Barack Obama’s friends and political ideology while Obama was a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles;

• Open mic for questions from guests and attendees.

“I’m happy to endorse John Webb. He is a Marine, a former California Highway Patrolman and a successful businessman who will bring new leadership to Orange County,” said Dr. John Drew. “I fully support John as a constitutional conservative who will help defeat Barack Obama and take back our country.”

For more information, please visit http://www.johnwebb2012.net/.

About John Webb for Congress (R-45CD)

John Webb is a Republican running for Congress in Orange County’s 45th Congressional District. John is a husband, father, small business owner, former corporate executive, former California Highway Patrolman, Veteran, and resident of Orange County, CA for over 40 years.

As a Conservative with a strong sense in the U.S. Constitution, John is a leader who believes that implementing the core principals of America - Less Taxes, Smaller Government and More Freedom - will bring this great country back to prosperity and growth. More information on John and his campaign can be found at www.johnwebb2012.net.

About John C. Drew, Ph.D.

Dr. John C. Drew is a former Marxist Socialist who met Barack Obama - and knew many of his closest friends, favorite professors and political allies - at Occidental College in the early 1980s. He is among a handful of people in the world who not only knew the young Obama but is also willing to go on the record about what they knew of his ideology.

Dr. Drew, now a Republican, earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University and won the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association. Dr. Drew is an author, trainer, and consultant in the field of non-profit grant writing, fund raising and program evaluation. More information on Dr. John Drew can be found at http://www.johndrew25.blogspot.com/.

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

Dr. Drew's Take on Young Obama Featured in Fox Nation: Brief Comments in Response to Liberal Attackers

I thought I should share with you the news that my story on meeting young, Marxist Obama has finally made it to the pages of Fox Nation.  In the picture below, I'm speaking on "Why Barack Obama's Past Is More Important Than His Future" at the San Clemente Republican Women's Federated meeting on December 14, 2011.

The most prominent liberal response comes from an unnamed blogger, posting at No More Mister Nice Blog.  For a less thoughtful attack, see this piece at News Corpse.

It looks like the best the left can do is argue that I did not see Obama frequently enough to get an accurate view of his ideological beliefs as a sophomore at Occidental College.  My view, however, is that I have been vindicated by the subsequent Obama literature.  After all, a lot of liberals attacked my story on young Obama's ideological extremism in 2008.  Today, however, the Obama literature has moved much closer to my take on young Obama as a Marxist socialist than the technocratic take offered by James Kloppenberg in Reading Obama.

I replied to "Steve" at No More Mister Nice Blog with these comments:

I noticed your article discussing my take on young Obama's ideology was gaining traction on the Internet. I thought it would be a good idea for you to be aware of my responses to the serious charges you level in your article.

See, Dr. Drew Responds to Oh For Goodness Sake Blogger.

In addition, I think it is important to get out the story of my own conversion out of Marxist socialist thought. See, Dr. Drew's Conservative Conversion Story

All in all, I find it difficult to understand why reasonable people don't accept my story after David Remnick published The Bridge. It seems perfectly clear to me that the Obama literature has moved in the direction I indicated was correct instead of the direction suggested by Prof. Kloppenberg in his book, Reading Obama.

My take on young Obama has also been supported by substantial research done by Stanley Kurtz in his book, Radical-In-Chief and by Jack Cashill's Deconstructing Obama. Given the large number of publications that are consistent with my take on young Obama's ideological extremism, I would expect bloggers like you to confront the evidence and not engage in abusive ad hominem attacks. Please feel free to print this in your blog if it is helpful to you and your readers.

The end of the story was priceless since "Steve" wrote back only to say: "I have nothing to say to anyone who uses "research" and "Jack Cashill" in the same sentence. Don't bother me again. You're an idiot."

All in all, I think Obama is in trouble. I don't think it is plausible to suggest I was mistaken about young Obama's extremist ideology.
 
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Drew's True Confessions: The Conversion Story of a Repentant Ex-Marxist

I grew up poor and I thought it was unfair for me to be held back simply because of the mistakes of my parents. It drove me nuts, for example, to think that kids less intelligent, hard-working, and moral than me enjoyed vacations in Europe while I lived in a home with raw sewage in the backyard. I thought Marxist socialism would give young people in similar situations a more equal opportunity to enjoy the good things in life.

In retrospect, however, I didn't have anyone in my life to explain compound interest, or how to write a business plan, or how to apply computer technology to the most interesting questions. I think if my family had been part of a contemporary Christian church, then I would have had my questions answered and I would have made better decisions.

I got a track scholarship to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles. All the folks around me at Oxy seemed to think the best thing on earth that you could do with your life was to become a college professor. So I went with the program. I got a scholarship to attend graduate school where I got to study with the some of the best professors in the nation in American government and public policy.

My commitment to Marxist socialist thought, however, gradually came to an end by the summer of 1982 when I began to notice that there was a larger spiritual world which did not fit the materialistic atheist models of modern social science. It was a world of intuition, coincidence, and syncronicity which Marxism saw as only an illusion used to lubricate the workings of capitalist exploitation. I also figured out that my empathy for others was not a weakness...it was an extremely useful tool for generating guesses about how the world really worked.

As I became more spiritual I also started to have an unusual amount of success intellectually and academically. My thinking, writing, and observations knit together and I started to attract positive attention with my research on the causes and timing of welfare programs in the U.S.

In my case, I remember where I was the exact moment I realized I no longer believed in the ideals of Communism: I was walking through the basement of McGraw Hall at Cornell University in September 1983. I had just finished an argument with my radical thesis advisor. As I recall I began to believe that the problems associated with child abuse and neglect might be easily fixed through the use of European-style visiting nurse program. As best I can recall, my thesis advisor saw child abuse as a larger problem caused by the necessity to invest in the reproduction of social capital under conditions in which children were mistakenly seen as elements of private property as part of the larger cultural and legal structures which maintain the reproduction of oppressive class conflict. The solution to child abuse, in his model, would involve paying attention to much greater issues involving the distribution of power and wealth in a modern industrialized society. (Or something like that...) Whatever the details of that argument, I remember the encounter left me thinking he was ideologically blinded and alarmingly out-of-touch with reality.

In my research, I had inadvertantly discovered a bizarre failing in modern political science. I was able to show that much of what we consider our modern America - schools, parks, Boy Scout and Girl Scout programs, and aid for families with dependent children - was largely a consequence of the earlier effort to enforce child labor laws. I know this sounds completely obvious...but the social science development literature of the 1960s and 1970s had been written without any reference to the role of child labor law enforcement as a key step in the modernization process.

Based on my historical research, I disconfirmed the Marxist hypothesis that welfare programs arose out of class struggle. My research showed they arose as an unintended consequence of the completely independent prior decision to stop child labor.

I ended up teaching at Williams College in MA, the nation's top rated liberal arts college. I won an award from the American Political Science Association for my thesis. It is now published in book form.

Today, I'm married. I'm proud that I attend a Baptist Church that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. I have my own management consulting business. Right at this moment, I'm struggling to get up to speed on this new social networking technology...and I'm excited that it provides a way to get around the mainstream media.
 
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Even Republicans Rejected Info About Obama's Past

Young Obama in 1981 during
his first year at Columbia University.

What would you do if you knew the top Democrat running for president was lying about his past?

That is the question I was faced with in 2008. I had met the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College, and I knew that his commitment to socialism was deep, genuine and long-standing.

I had been a leader of the Marxist students at Occidental College myself starting in 1976 when I founded the precursor of the Democrat Socialist Alliance on campus. The young Obama I knew was a Marxist socialist who would have been quite comfortable with Communist party members like his Hawaii mentor Frank Marshall Davis, retired domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, or active socialist politicians like Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer.

The Obama I knew was nothing like the life-long, pragmatic centrist that he was pretending to be in the 2008 presidential campaign. When I talked politics with the young Obama, he expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. – completely divorced from the profit motive – which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution. In this context, I saw my report on young Obama as a key piece of evidence suggesting a profound continuity in his belief system.

Although I was surprised by Barack Obama’s insistence on his mainstream ideological credentials, I was shocked that my attempts to spread the news about young Obama’s Marxism failed to gain any media traction during the 2008 presidential campaign with reporters, activists, or campaign staffs.

Once I saw the significance of my face-to-face observations on the young Obama, I went out of my way to get my story on record with the Orange County Register. I tried to contact, among others, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the folks behind the Swift Boat ads, and the McCain campaign.

I thought I would get a phone call back from Fox News - someone, somewhere – and I still do not understand why no one seemed to catch on to the urgency of the situation. I understand I did not have audio tape of young Obama. I did not have any photos or home movies. Nevertheless, I was extremely active in the leftist politics and counter cultural milieu of Occidental College in the 1970s.

As a younger man, I had earned a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell which, I would think, gave me some credibility in measuring young Obama’s ideological convictions. I quickly saw other people who had known the young Obama were featured in various news articles. It seemed to me I should have been just another interview for any journalist, producer or campaign consultant interested in checking out my story and testing it against the facts.

In frustration, I was also posting what I knew on The Caucus Blog site at the New York Times. My expectation was someone from the Times would call me and follow-up on the leads I was sending out. Here is a sample of what I was doing in October 2008 to get the word out about Obama’s Marxist ideology.
I even thought of scheduling my own press conference on the campus of Occidental College through their campus Republican club. Internally, I was conflicted by the urgency of what I knew and the sense it was best for the story to break out in a manner supportive of the McCain campaign.

What shocked me about my experience in the summer of 2008 is that I thought my background as a Williams College political science professor, as a small business owner, and as a visible presence in the Orange County community would allow my message to immediately go to the very top of the McCain campaign. I thought my story would be welcomed by Fox News.

Since then, things have slowly gotten better. My story on the young Marxist Obama has appeared in Michael Savage’s Trickle-Up Poverty, Paul Kengor’s Dupes, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief and Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama.

Nevertheless, I think there is something broken in our media and campaign system. I do not think most independents or conservatives understand, or fully appreciate, the tremendous advantages the left derives from having the mainstream media serve as the fully paid, completely sympathetic, Dan Rather-level opposition research team of the Democrat party. It is a system that methodically ignores damaging information about flawed candidates like Sen. John Edwards and Rep. Anthony Weiner while routinely elevating minor errors among Republicans to the status of Watergate investigations.

If Republicans are going to win in 2012, I think they need to make some changes so that they are friendlier to the whistle-blowers bringing them bad news about the Obama administration. Personally, I would like to see Republicans create new ways to collect negative news stories on liberals by 1) including web pages requesting opposition research from leakers, 2) establishing guidelines for leakers that help them give campaign decision makers the confidence to pursue appropriate leads, and 3) instituting feedback mechanisms so leakers have some minimal assurance that they have been heard by top campaign managers and that their information has been discarded for technical or strategic reasons and not simply because it was overlooked by a careless staff member.

I think recognition of this problem should be the first step in taking systematic action to prevent flawed Democrat candidates from winning office. In the meantime, I predict we will see more examples of media failure as the left dominates the muckraking journalism profession while the right seems too dependent on a small handful of seemingly obscure, over-worked journalists and – as my case illustrates – unconnected and often baffled citizen activists.

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

Augustine 25 Remembers: Face to Face with the Young Barack Obama

As you may know, the girls at Occidental College liked to dress up young men and take their pictures. There are some famous pictures of the young Barack Obama while he was at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA floating on the internet. Posted above, I have the rough equivalent from my own spell at this small liberal arts college. Personally, I was one of the founders of the anti-apartheid group that Obama mentions in his book, Dreams of My Father.

From what Obama writes, I guess I had the unusual opportunity to meet the young Barack Obama at a turning point in his life. According to his book, Dreams of My Father, Obama got one of the early signs of his interest (and ability) in public speaking during his participation in an anti-apartheid rally at Occidental College in Los Angeles in the fall of 1980.

I had graduated from Occidental College in 1979.

I met him later that same year in late December 1980. At the time, I was in my second year of graduate school at Cornell. I was visiting a girlfriend who was still attending Occidental College who introduced me to him and his friend Hassan.

My most vivid memory of my time visiting with Obama was the way he strongly argued a rather simple-minded version of Marxist theory. I remember he was passionate about his point of view. As I remember, he was articulating the same Marxist theory taught by various professors at Occidental College. Based on my more detailed studies at Cornell, I remember I made a strong argument that his Marxist ideas were not in line with contemporary reality - particularly the practical experience of Western Europe.

What is significant to me now, in retrospect, was the way he conceded to my argument. At the time, I remember that this was an early victory in my life...the ability to make a powerful, fact-based argument that changed minds. In retrospect, I don't know if he was just trying to restore peace...my gut feeling is that I persuaded him - at the very least - that his education at Occidental College was not really up-to-date or terribly valuable.

Ironically, he ended up leaving Occidental College and transfering to Columbia University in 1981.

I can identify with those "intellectuals" who report that Obama is easy to talk to and seems to take advice well. I think I was one of the first to see this behavior in action...at least according to the timeline presented about his intellectual development in Dreams of My Father.

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