Obama's 'Missing Link'

American Thinker ^ | December 10, 2010 | Paul Kengor

[neverdem]

Like many political Americans, right or left or center, I'm still grappling with what President Obama did this week.  I'm trying to get a handle on what it means not so much for the country and the economy, but rather for Barack Obama.

On Monday evening came the remarkable announcement by Obama that he had compromised with Republicans on a "framework" to extend the Bush tax cuts.  My take on that action was that Obama was motivated entirely by politics and not at all by ideology.

That take was quickly reinforced on Tuesday, when Obama, almost chastising his angry left-wing base for not understanding political realities, analogized Republicans to "hostage-takers," holding Obama and America and its poor and proletariat ransom to tax cuts for the bloody rich.  The president bemoaned his moral dilemma, forced as he was to "negotiate" with Republicans, who kneel before what Obama described as "their Holy Grail": "tax cuts for the wealthy."  It was a stunning metaphor, and rather offensive: That cup overfloweth, apparently, with the real presence of the blood of the workers, which Republicans and their loyal factory bosses and greedy landlords slurp up from the fruits of the assembly line.

"These tax cuts for the wealthy -- " said a visibly bitter Obama " -- this is, seems to be, their central economic doctrine."

Of course, it is not the Republicans' "central economic doctrine."  One of the worst mistakes you can make in politics or in life or in war is to misdiagnose your adversary by allowing emotion to supersede logic.

But here's the crucial point on Obama's assessment: it was clear that this wasn't the standard class-warfare claptrap we typically get from Democrats.  This wasn't mere political rhetoric to toss to the unions to make them happy at the expense of those with more money.  No, Barack Obama uttered these words with such conviction and such contempt that you could tell it was from the heart.  It came off not as Democrat demagoguery, but as reflective of the class-based worldview that I suspect is the core Barack Obama.

It made me think of Frank Marshall Davis and other Marxists in Obama's past -- and of a man named Dr. John Drew.

"I see myself as a missing link between Barack Obama's exposure to communism with Frank Marshall Davis and his later exposure to Bill Ayers and Alice Palmer in Chicago," Drew told me.

Drew's words -- of which these are just the tip of the iceberg -- are immensely important.  To consider them, first consider this quick recap on Davis:

Frank Marshall Davis was Barack Obama's mentor in Hawaii in the 1970s, right up until Obama left for college at Occidental.  As I've shown at length in articles and a book, Davis was also a communist -- in fact, an actual Communist Party member.  In Dupes, I show this over the course of about sixty pages with help from numerous sources.  Among them there is a 1957 U.S. Senate report, titled "Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States," which described Davis as "an indentified member of the Communist Party."  Most illuminating, I found and have reprinted about a dozen pages from Davis's declassified 600-page FBI file, including one (on page 507 of my book) that lists Davis's actual Communist Party number: 47544.  (Click here to view some of these documents.)

So Frank Marshall Davis was a communist, and it's clear that he influenced Obama's thinking.  But how much, exactly?  That's where John Drew comes in.

Drew contacted me last year after reading an article I had written on Davis and Obama for American Thinker.  Drew had some significant experiences to share, and he e-mailed me just before I turned in my final manuscript.  I concluded that he was legitimate (no question) and recorded his testimony at length.

Drew was a contemporary of Obama at Occidental College and a Marxist himself.  In fact, Drew was a well-known campus communist when Obama was introduced to him as "one of us."  "Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met in the fall of 1980," said Drew, going on the record.

Drew is certainly cognizant of the gravity of his statement.  "I know it's incendiary to say this," he adds, but Obama "was basically a Marxist-Leninist."  He noted how Obama, in Dreams from My Father, stated that when he got to college, he attended "socialist conferences" and "hung out" with Marxist professors.  But what Obama did not explain or clarify, says Dr. Drew, is that Obama "was in 100 percent, total agreement with these Marxist professors."

I asked Drew where, precisely, he believes Obama stands today.  Of course, Drew no longer knows Obama, and his main goal in reaching out to me was to clarify where Obama stood at Occidental, which is information that cannot be ignored.  That said, he did tell me this: "There are a lot of brands of Marxism.  That was one of the key ingredients of my argument with the young Barack Obama.  I see evidence of [a] continuing commitment to Marxist ideology every time President Obama traces the furor of the public to underlying economic conditions and inevitable changes taking place in society. In the Marxist model, the economy is the driving force behind change in the other spheres of society."

Drew shared those thoughts with me last spring. More recently, however, we had an even more illuminating conversation when I had the opportunity to interview Drew while I was guest-hosting the Glen Meakem Program, a terrific radio-talk show broadcast from Pittsburgh.  Here are edited excerpts of what Drew told me on the air on October 16, 2010:

Drew: As far as I can tell, I'm the only person in Obama's extended circle of friends who is willing to speak out and verify that he was a Marxist-Leninist in his sophomore year of college from 1980 to 1981.  I met him because I graduated from Occidental College in 1979, and I was back at Occidental visiting a girlfriend.

Kengor: Was Occidental known for radical-left politics?  Would that have been an attraction to Obama?

Drew: It was considered the Moscow of southern California when I was there.  There were a lot of Marxist professors, many of whom I got to know pretty well. ... What I know absolutely for sure -- and this is where I really sought you out and I really wanted to be helpful in terms of the historic record -- was to verify that Barack Obama was definitely a Marxist and that it was very unusual for a sophomore at Occidental to be as radical or as ideologically attuned as young Barack Obama was.

Kengor: You said that Obama was introduced to you at Occidental College as a Marxist?  Because you were one [a Marxist] at that point?

Drew: Yeah, that's embarrassing for me, but I studied Marxist economics when I was at the University of Sussex in England.  I had a junior-year scholarship over there and I did my senior honors thesis on Marxist economics when I was at Occidental College.  And I also founded [the] Democratic Student Socialist Alliance, you know, under a different name, in 1976.

Kengor: John, now you had told me before, and I'm reading from my own book here, "Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met him in the fall of 1980.  [Quotation from above continued.]"

Drew: Yeah, that's exactly right.  Obama believed, at the time I met him -- this was probably around Christmastime in 1980 -- because, you know, I had flown out during Christmas break from Cornell, where I was doing my graduate work.  Young Obama was looking forward to an imminent social revolution -- literally a movement where the working classes would overthrow the ruling class and institute a kind of socialist utopia in the United States.  I mean, that's how extreme his views were his sophomore year of college.

Kengor: And you would know this because you were a comrade, so to speak.

Drew: Yeah, I was a comrade, but I was kind of more what Michael Savage called the "Frankfurt School" of Marxism at the time.  I was, you know, I felt like I was doing Obama a favor by pointing out that the Marxist revolution that he and [our friends] were hoping for was really kind of a pipe dream, and that there was nothing in European history or the history of developed nations that would make that sort of fantasy -- you know, Frank Marshall Davis fantasy of revolution -- come true.

Kengor: So you had a realistic sense that even though you liked these ideas, it [Marxist revolution] really couldn't happen or really wouldn't even work.

Drew: Right. I was ... still a card-carrying Marxist, but I was kind of a more advanced, East Coast, Cornell University Marxist, I think, at the time.

Kengor: But Obama thought it was practical -- he thought you could make this happen in America?

Drew: Oh yeah, and he kind of thought I was, you know, a little reactionary --

Kengor: -- that you were conservative compared to him!

Drew: Yeah, like I was kind of insensitive to the needs of the coming revolution.  So that's why I said [Obama] was full-bore, 100% into that simpleminded Marxist, revolutionary mental framework.

Kengor: I know people are listening right now who want me to address this -- and especially people who are Obama supporters.  To be fair, I mean, look at where you were then and now where you are today.

Drew: Well, yeah, now I'm a Ronald Reagan, churchgoing, Baptist conservative ...

Kengor: But now, okay, so what about Obama?  Where do you think he is today?  And to the people who are listening and are angry that we're even having this conversation, [I want to tell them this]: Look, you don't want us to talk about this because you don't like what it says about Obama's past, but we have to know this stuff about our presidents.  We have to know where they came from.  You can't leave this out of biographies. ...

But what do you think it says about him today, Dr. Drew?

Drew: I can definitely kick down some doors here intellectually by nailing down that he had a very consistent ideology, probably from the time that he was [in Hawaii] until he was there with Alice Palmer and Bill Ayers in Chicago.  I think his current behavior demonstrates that he does still have these ideological convictions.  Whenever he talks about taxing the richest two percent, I think even though he knows that will harm the economy -- to him, that redistribution of wealth is still extremely important.  And I think the problem here is that he never studied political science or economics the way I did.  He just went straight to law school.

Kengor: No real-world experience.

Drew: Right. He never had any real business experience, never had a payroll to meet, and I think he still is locked in a very dangerous mindset where I think if he didn't fight to redistribute the wealth, he would feel guilty -- as if he were violating a John Rawls' Theory of Justice ideology.

Kengor: And that's what people need to understand.  That's why all of this matters.  That's why the background is so crucial -- Frank Marshall Davis, what happened at Occidental, goes straight to Columbia from Occidental, the Bill Ayers affiliation, no real-world experience -- this matters.  You need to know this in your presidents. ...

On whether or not [Obama] believes in some form of Marxism today, you had told me for my book, "There are a lot of brands of Marxism. That was one of the key ingredients in my argument with Obama. I see evidence of a continuing commitment to Marxist ideology every time President Obama traces the furor of the public to underlying economic conditions and inevitable changes taking place in society."

So it's not that he's right now trying to abolish all private property, but you're saying he has a certain -- he still holds to certain tenets of a Marxist worldview.

Drew: Yeah, I think whenever he talks about people clinging to their guns and their religion due to economic stress, that's just the standard Marxist argument.  In fact, that's the argument of alienation and class-consciousness that [Marxists believe that people] hold to, the superficial religious and cultural ideals of the capitalist culture.  [Marxists believe that people hold to that] instead of paying attention to the root economic changes, which are supposedly controlling their thoughts and their behavior.  So he's still using the Marxist mental architecture in the way he talks about things, and I really think he's surrounded by people that share that mental architecture.

Those are excerpts from my interview with Dr. Drew in October.  You can click here to listen to the interview.  Moreover, Drew followed up with a short article (click here), noting his frustration over the media's refusal to even call him about Obama.

Clearly, these are important things that at least should be part of the conversation in trying to understand what our president believes and where he came from.  Any historian or biographer knows: You don't ignore mentors.  To the contrary, you start with the mentors.

And yet, to my knowledge, only a handful of people have interviewed John Drew or bothered with his story, including even the biggies in conservative talk radio.  (Michael Savage is an exception.  Also, on the web, Trevor Loudon and Scott Baker have shared his story.)

In 2007-2008, our press failed to do its job in vetting this candidate for the presidency.  Our liberal "journalists" willfully covered their eyes and ears.  And now they'll blast people like me for daring to even bother to investigate and consider these questions.  (Actually, they don't blast; they ignore.)  And we went encounter the likes of Dr. John Drew and carefully walk through his experiences, they'll dismiss us, as they are dismissing Drew himself.

That's a mistake.  Drew has a lot to teach us about a critical missing piece in the puzzle of Barack Obama's early life and political-ideological development.  This information would seem rather relevant, given that this is the man now running the mightiest economic engine in the history of humanity.

For the occupant of that position, I personally prefer someone who doesn't have remnants of a Marxist worldview influencing his thoughts and actions.  Unfortunately, I believe we saw some of those remnants on display in Obama's words earlier this week, and not for the first -- or last -- time.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

[MHGinTN]

No mystery: the media is far left leaning, willing sycophantic servants to the ‘death to the Republic’ scum, and the majority of the electorate are so dumbed down that they are programmed in their behavior by that same media scum.

[DefeatCorruption]

The American culture has been so diluted and bastardized, I really don’t think they would have paid attention even if he was vetted. The information was out there for those who wanted it, the masses chose to ignore it.

*******************************************************
Amen to that. All the info WAS out there.

[DefeatCorruption]

This is extraordinary.

I invite the FBI agents monitoring FR to read this article carefully- if you’ve not already. Then ask yourself, what did you vow to protect in your oath?

******************************************************
This is discouraging. The FBI needs to monitor FR to find out what’s going on? If this government did it’s job right, Obama wouldn’t be in the White House today.

[little jeremiah]

The American culture has been so diluted and bastardized, I really don’t think they would have paid attention even if he was vetted. The information was out there for those who wanted it, the masses chose to ignore it.

*******************************************************
Amen to that. All the info WAS out there.

---

I humbly disagree. The MSM was nothing other than a propaganda machine for 0bastard, and none of the so-called “conservative” people delved much into any of this. The hardcore leftists would have voted for the fiend no matter what, but I assert that he would never have won the election, nor been a candidate, if even 25% of what is known about him was talked about in the MSM.

The MSM is wholely leftist. The masses did not actually choose to ignore it, they just didn’t know about or try to delve deeply by reading FR or Atlas Shrugged or other conservative investigative websites.

The MSM is as evil as the Dem party - in fact it is nothing but the media/propaganda arm of the Dem party. And the “conservative” media? Feh, they don’t touch the real dirt on 0bastard, so they’re part of the problem.

[mojitojoe]

There are several threads on FR regarding John Drew and his statements. What I always thought was odd is that surely many people knew him yet when he went public with this, not a single person came forward to call him a liar. Why? My guess.....Because he wasn’t lying and they figured it would be better to let the media ignore it and hope that not many people saw it.
Hannity or Beck have not interviewed him yet.... YET. Hopefully they will do so closer to 2012.

[mojitojoe]

he got to where his is today because at the core our citizens are sick.
______________

This is true, BUT, keep in mind, our media is now like the old media in the Soviet Union. Not all people have cable news. They only see what is on ABC, CBS, NBC or their local newspaper. Therefore, many know nothing about this Marxist, nothing at all. The MSM made sure of that. Had the MSM not covered up everything about him, he would not be in the WH today. I am certain of that.

[DefeatCorruption]

I repeat, information on Obama was out there. I did my research when he first came on the scene....didn’t know a thing about him, but I made it a point to learn more. While everyone around me was literally swooning over “the one”, I tried to tell them what I was learning, but they were convinced he would save them all. YES, the MSM is a leftist machine, but like my mother used to tell me, if everyone jumps off a cliff, does that mean you will too? I saw his evil manipulations early on and anyone using operating brain power would have learned this too.

[wastedyears]

Found it

[UCANSEE2]

Hopefully they will do so closer to 2012.

Oh, you mean if he's still alive by then.

[bvw]

This retelling of dynamic of the arc of Drew's life and that of Obama's, and the great appeal of Marxism to college kids, as reported here and elsewhere and seen with my own eyes worldwide have inspired a birth of a ponder in my mind. There is something very disconcerting to those coming of age (adulthood) in our modern era, worldwide, that is stroked and comforted by Marxism. Obama seems to be close to or at the pinnacle (within mankind) of that discomfort because of his life, and with the opportunities presented him -- via his Mom, via his Grand-dad Dunham, via Frank Davis and all the Marxists he met thereafter -- he thus has become like what in far-eastern cultures is called a God of a thing, an avatar, similar to what Carl Jung calls an archtype. A unique character that aggregates all the forces related to some intrinsic of human being.

What I am interesting in, this ponder, is what is that dense set, compact manifold, of psychic, sociological and psychological forces underlying this coming of age dynamic are? Cultural estrangement, a broken family (and broken village), reactionary psychological detachment, and a deconstructionist spite are all part of it, clearly, but I can not easily make out the rest of it.

I do not think it is the "goth" transition -- that of the end or "killing" of childhood innocence as represented in various idioms in the goth culture, it's something deeper. One that can sustain longer in life, one that explains why so many of the idiot sophomore Marxists in dorms remain locked into that deluded ideology til late in life.

[americanophile]

"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."

- James Monroe

[Kenny Bunk]

......he thus has become like what in far-eastern cultures is called a God of a thing, an avatar, similar to what Carl Jung calls an archetype. A unique character that aggregates all the forces related to some intrinsic of human being.

Thanks. Now waddawedo?

[combat_boots]

Outstanding post.

[bvw]

Identify the causes of sickness, then have a better chance at a cure. I suspect part of the cure is restoring a respect for honesty, but I don’t know how to bring that about, and I don’t quite see how the intuited cure “pride in honesty, shame in dishonesty” relates to the nexus of sociological causes underlying the election, idolization and support for the symptom, Obama.

I also trust that if men in this generation fail to takes steps to a cure, that G-d will indeed inject massive doses of respect for honesty and the dignity of the individual soul into the system. And it could be that process will not be pretty or happy, but G-d will cure.

[bvw]

Thanks!

One effect is that Obama doesn’t have to do anything in office, all the golfing, vacationing and shopping only adds to his stature as an demi-God. Note how ‘his’ accomplishments were not to him at all, they were due to those Czars chosen for him, and approved as fellow-travelers by him, and by legislative scumazoids like Reid and Pelosi. He never “read the bill”, he walks out of meetings, has no attention or real direction to give. Everyone under him is vamping, or toadying

[fishtank]

Thanks for the ping!

[To Hell With Poverty]

Easy...it’s self-loathing. That’s why enlightened self-interest remains a foreign concept to them.

[little jeremiah]

Not everyone has internet. Not everyone is savvy about the fact that the media is less truthful or trustworthy than Pravda under the Soviets. Not everyone is born fully wise and conservative. Some people are young, just figuring things out after being indoctrinated in school and colleges. Sure, people are responsible for being ignorant, but the media is vastly complicit in this. Takes two to tango.

[lonestar]

This interview is interesting but shouldn't be that surprising.

Who's surprised by the obvious?

[neverdem]

If you have 78 minutes to spare watch Paul Kengor at the Heritage Foundation on C-Span, "Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century." It's linked in comment# 1. It was very good!

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FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list. Anyone can post any unposted link as they see fit. Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, < b>FReepmail< /b> me if you want on or off my list.