Posted on 10/19/2009 5:20:48 AM PDT by kellynla
Looking for evidence of Obama's past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him.
Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983. In 2008, Root says of Obama, "I don't know a single person at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me.
I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever! Nobody recalls him. I'm not exaggerating, I'm not kidding." Root adds that he was also, like Obama, "Class of '83 political science, pre-law" and says, "You don't get more exact or closer than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him.
At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me.
No one ever heard of Barack! And five years ago, nobody even knew who he was. The guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange?
It's very strange." Obama's photograph does not appear in the school's yearbook and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia, provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Allyn_Root#column-one
NOTE: Root graduated as Valedictorian from his high school, Thornton-Donovan School, then graduated from Columbia University in 1983 as a Political Science major (in the same class as President Barack Obama WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN IN)
I know who Zeb is and he was as big a loser as Jimmuh. I don’t like the guy and every time I hear him speak, he says something stupid.
The joke about his daughter, is Joe Scarborogh’s sidekick. She just babbles on about nothing and looks unconfident. I don’t know maybe that is the role she has to play.
Demure.
I don’t think she is stupid, just plays one and she is very attractive. From what I understand she does radio very well and knows her subjects.
She is also pretty scrappy if she gets ticked off.
Occidental
Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental
Robert McCrary, now general manager of a contract sewing company
Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who’s now a Boston banker (roommate)
Paul Carpenter, now a Los Angeles lawyer (roommate)
Vinai Thummalapally (Hyderabad, India.
Mohammed Hasan Chandoo (Pakistani)
Wahid Hamid (Pakistani)
Andrew Roth
Jon K. Mitchell, who later played bass for country-swing band Asleep at the Wheel
Sohale Siddiqi (met in LA & shared apt in NYC with BHO)
Phil Boerner (and said he transferred to Columbia & had apt with BHO)
Old friends recall Obama’s years in LA, NY
May 15, 2008
New York
Sohale Siddiqi
By ADAM GOLDMAN and ROBERT TANNER
Associated Press Writers
NEW YORK —
The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog’s head.
This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city’s derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the bum, who approached him menacingly.
Until his skinny, Ivy League-educated friend - Barack Obama - intervened.
He “stepped right in between. ... He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. `Hey, hey, hey.’ And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking,” Siddiqi recalls.
There was a time before Obama wore tailored suits - when his wardrobe consisted of $5 military-surplus khakis and used leather jackets, and he walked the streets of Manhattan for lack of bus fare. It was a time well before the political arena beckoned, when his friends thought he might become a writer or a lawyer, but certainly not the first black man with a real chance to become president of the United States.
Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then in New York at Columbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” talks about this time, but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as “Sadik” - “a short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party.
Obama’s campaign wouldn’t identify “Sadik,” but The Associated Press located him in Seattle, where he raises money for a community theater.
Together, the recollections of Siddiqi and other friends and acquaintances from Obama’s college years paint a portrait of the candidate as a young man.
They remember a good student with a sharp mind and unshakable integrity, a young man who already had a passion for the underprivileged. Some described the young Obama’s personality as confident to the point of arrogance, a criticism that would emerge decades later, during the campaign.
Not everyone who knew Obama in those years is eager to talk.
Some explained that they feared inadvertently hurting Obama’s campaign. Among his friends were Siddiqi and two other Pakistanis, all of them from Karachi; several of those interviewed said the Pakistanis were reluctant to talk for fear of stoking rumors that Obama is a Muslim.
“Obama in the eyes of some right wingers is basically Muslim until proved innocent,” says Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental who is now a journalism professor at New York’s Lehman College. “It’s partly the Muslim factor by association and partly the fear of something being twisted.”
The young man Mifflin remembers was “an unpretentious, down to earth, solidly middle-class guy who seemed somewhat more sophisticated than the average college student. He was slightly reserved and deliberate in a way that I sometimes thought betrayed an uncertainty.”
But another former Oxy classmate, Robert McCrary, now general manager of a contract sewing company, saw him differently: “He definitely had a cocky, sometimes arrogant way about him. ... He was not open to others.”
Of course, he was only 18 when he arrived at the small liberal arts college nicknamed “Oxy.” His freshman roommates were Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who’s now a Boston banker, and Paul Carpenter, now a Los Angeles lawyer.
Carpenter recalled Obama as “a good bodysurfer” who had “a funky red car, a Fiat,” and who also played intramurals - flag football, tennis and water polo. “He was an athletic guy. He was gifted in that regard,” said Carpenter. He also remembered Obama being “super bright. He could get through the course work in a fraction of the time it took me.”
Obama had an international circle of friends - “a real eclectic sort of group,” says Vinai Thummalapally, who himself came from Hyderabad, India.
As a freshman, he quickly became friends with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis. There were others, Thummalapally recalls: a French student and both black and white Americans, including Jon K. Mitchell, who later played bass for country-swing band Asleep at the Wheel (Mitchell remembers that Obama wore puka shell necklaces all the time, though they were not in style, and that “we let it slide because he spent a lot of time growing up in Hawaii.”)
The friends got together often to watch basketball games - they were Lakers fans - and eat the southern Indian food that Thummalapally cooked with his cousin.
There was serious talk, too. Obama had concerns about U.S. foreign policy - including the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran under Jimmy Carter, and American support of the Contras in Latin America.
Thummalapally lived with Obama the summer of 1980. The two ran together daily, three miles in the early morning, often chatting about their dreams. Thummalapally wanted to start a business back home; Obama talked about helping people.
“I want to get into public service,” he recalls Obama saying. “I want to write and help people who are disadvantaged.”
In 1981, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia. In between, he traveled to Pakistan - a trip that enhanced his foreign policy qualifications, he maintained in a private speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last month. Obama spent “about three weeks” in Pakistan, traveling with Hamid and staying in Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary.
“He was clearly shocked by the economic disparity he saw in Pakistan. He couldn’t get over the sight of rural peasants bowing to the wealthy landowners they worked for as they passed,” says Margot Mifflin, who makes a brief appearance in Obama’s memoir.
When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi - a friend of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama’s idealism - he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor.
“At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously,” Siddiqi said. “I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He’d give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating.”
Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man.
“We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay,” said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique.
The Obama campaign declined to discuss Obama’s time at Columbia and his friendships in general. It won’t, for example, release his transcript or name his friends. It did, however, list five locations where Obama lived during his four years here: three on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn - one in Park Slope, the other in Brooklyn Heights. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge.
“We didn’t have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application,” Siddiqi said.
Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama “wanted no part of it. He put down the truth.”
The apartment was “a slum of a place” in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable existence. We were slumming it.” What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps.
While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples.
But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.
In his memoir and in interviews, Obama has said he got serious and buckled down in New York. “I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,” he said in a 2005 Columbia alumni magazine interview. He told biographer David Mendell: “For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot.”
In his memoir, Obama recalls fasting on Sunday; Siddiqi says Obama was a follower of comedian-activist Dick Gregory’s vegetarian diet. “I think self-deprivation was his schtick, denying himself pleasure, good food and all of that.”
But it wasn’t exactly an ascetic life. There was plenty of time for reading (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul) and listening to music (Van Morrison, the Ohio Players, Bob Dylan). The two, along with others, went out for nights on the town. “He wasn’t entirely a hermit,” Siddiqi said.
Siddiqi said his female friends thought Obama was “a hunk.”
“We were always competing,” he said. “You know how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn’t out-compete him in picking up girls, that’s for sure.”
Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi’s mother, who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate - he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but “he was really patient. I’m surprised he suffered me.”
Finally, their relationship started to fray. “I was partying all the time. I was disrupting his studies,” Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.
In July 1985, after spending two years as a writer for a business newsletter and as a coordinator at City College in Harlem for an environmental and consumer advocacy group, Obama left New York for Chicago - where he found a job, a wife and, eventually, a political career.
Andrew Roth knew Obama at Occidental and in New York. He speaks bluntly: “The thought, believe me, never crossed my mind that he would be our first black president.”
And yet, here he is, on the brink of the Democratic nomination. And he’s gotten there with the help of some of those friends from so long ago.
Neither Hamid nor Chandoo would be interviewed for this story; Hamid is now a top executive at Pepsico in New York, and Chandoo is a self-employed financial consultant in the New York area.
Both have each contributed the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign, and records indicate each has joined an Asian-American council that supports his run for president. Both also are listed on Obama’s campaign Web site as being among his top fundraisers, each bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions from their networks of friends.
Both also attended Obama’s wedding in 1992, according to published reports and other friends.
Thummalapally has stayed in contact with Obama, too, visiting him in New York, attending his wedding in 1992 and joining him in Springfield, Ill., for the Feb. 10, 2007, announcement of Obama’s run for the White House.
President of a CD and DVD manufacturing company in Colorado Springs, Colo., Thummalapally also is listed as a top fundraiser on the campaign Web site.
Siddiqi has not kept in touch. His has been a difficult road; years after his time with Obama, Siddiqi says, he became addicted to cocaine and lost his business.
But when he needed help during his recovery, Obama - the roommate he drove away with his partying, the man he always suspected of looking down at him - gave him a job reference.
So yes, he’s an Obama man, too. Witness the message on his answering machine:
“My name is Hal Siddiqi, and I approve of this message. Vote for peace, vote for hope, vote for change, and vote for Obama.”
Associated Press writers Deborah Hastings in New York, Justin Pritchard in Los Angeles, Gene Johnson in Seattle, and AP researchers Judith Ausuebel and Barbara Sambriski contributed to this story.
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004417706_apyoungobama2ndldwritethru.html
Whether your Pres_ _ent hung out with SEIU radicals back then or not, he certainly seeks their advice now, as he has related to his kneepad sycophancy in speeches, even naming the SEIU bigs he consults. Are we to believe SEIU has grown less radical int he intervening decades? Yeah, right ...
That is correct. Isn’t it sweet they hooked up in CA, then again in NY and became roommates.
Ask Columbia. The records have not been made public, as you well know.
_______________
Why not?
also on Margot Mifflin and Mohammed Hasan Chandoo (Occidental):
Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental who is now a journalism professor at New York’s Lehman College.
Dated the Chandoo brother (assuming the one who went to Occidental)
~~~~~~~~~~
Fox News Story on Obama’s Relationship with Chandoo Brothers and Trip to Pakistan
In this video Chandoo apparently declined to permit his face to be shown (blurred out).
http://www.mikefrancesa.com/wordpress/?p=1201
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2359747/posts?q=1&;page=301
The Lebanese guy, who'd served in the Syrian army, and was still smarting from the ‘67 war in the early ‘70s, before the ‘73 war. Or the Korean guy, Won (him I remember, because he worked full time where I worked summers).
Here we go - read from 200 to 400 or so. There’s interesting discussion and photos.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2359747/posts?q=1&;page=201
President Barack Obama says he will end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ military policy.
AP via Breitbart ^ | Oct 10, 2009 | N/A
Many valedictorians are. The one from my high school class certainly was. Probably still is. He had a full ride scholarship, was brilliant, but partied so much he lost the scholarship after one year. Don't really know what happened to him after that. But I did recently locate someone with the same, and it's not that common a name, living in what appears from the overheads to be a great big, and very new, house.
Patrick Gaspard, 39
Vice President for Politics and Legislation, 1199SEIU
Patrick Gaspard says political activism is a Haitian birthright.
Gaspard’s involvement with 1199, regarded as one of the most powerful unions in the state, dates back to 1988 and Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid. The next year he worked closely with the union to elect David Dinkins, the first black mayor in the city’s history. More campaigns followed: in 1999, Gaspard was working as Council member Margarita Lopez’s chief of staff when Amadou Diallo was shot and killed by police officers in the Bronx. The union was one of the central organizers of the civil disobedience that followed, and 1199 President Dennis Rivera and then-Political Director Bill Lynch asked Gaspard to coordinate those efforts. A position in the political department followed.
Now he is concentrating on 1199’s national campaign to help the Democrats take the House and Senate. Gaspard sees the potential for change – but only if there is agitation. That, he says, is where he comes in.
What is the most important thing you have accomplished so far?
“Raising two children of color in America.”
Two years from now, what do you want to have done?
“That’s the easiest question I’ve ever been asked – I want to begin to repair the imbalance in the Supreme Court by electing a Democratic President.”
Also while at Occidental:
Obama joined the Students for Economic Democracy (SED), a radical socialist “cousin” organization to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), of which the Weather Underground was an off-shoot. As a matter of fact, Obama’s first public speech was at an event sponsored by the Students for Economic Democracy. This fringe group was chaired by the radical Tom Hayden in the late 70’s and early ‘80’s.
At Occidental College, Obama plays basketball and continues taking drugs. He becomes friends with Pakistani Muslims Mohammed Hasan Chandoo (perhaps spelled Chandio) and Wahid Hamid, and Indian Vinai Thummalapally. At Occidental College Obama indulges in alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. He becomes interested in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
While at Occidental Obama is mentored by an openly gay professor, Lawrence Goldyn, who has a strong influence on Obama’s acceptance of gays. Fellow student Thummalapally lives with Obama in the summer of 1980. Obama’s freshman year roommate at Occidental is Imad Husain, a Pakistani.
Obama’s friends at Occidental tend to be the more politically active blacks, foreign students, Chicanos, Marxist professors, structural feminists, and punk-rock performance poets. Obama is rebuked on one occasion for calling another black student, who wasn’t “black enough,” an “Uncle Tom.” One female student criticizes Obama with the remark, “You always think it’s about you.”
At Occidental, Obama meets a professor of politics who is a CIA expert on the Soviet Union and an associate of Zbigniew Brzezinski (who would later be the National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter — and then to Obama).
http://www.theobamafile.com/ObamaEducation.htm
Also from post #243 — 1984 strike when Local 1199 almost tore itself up, had it not been for the Communist Party
~~~~~~~~~~~
Steve Kramer, executive vice president of Service Employees Union [[Local 1199]], spoke of the Communist Party’s role in building and maintaining his union.
Recounting 1199’s “’’disastrous”’’ 1984 strike and internal strife in which “’’the union almost tore itself up’’,” Kramer said that but for the party’s efforts, “’’1199 would have been a small union’’” Today, with nearly 300,000 members, it is the world’s largest union local.
When the Commu
No, I don't know of any party they've hosted for him, but they certainly are proud he's an alum, the protests of alums like me nontwithstanding.
There are other ways besides a party to show your pride, like features in the alumni magazine, notes in recruiting materials, and the like.
Privacy laws and, most likely, poor grades. I have a hunch that he just barely graduated. I would put money on the proposition that he had the lowest college GPA of any president in recent years.
Whatever Colombia College is. How come no one can find anyone who attended it with Obama?
All too true. I was astonished when I started teaching here at the extent to which students these days expect to be spoon-fed and coddled. If you don't oblige, they endlessly complain about you. Thankfully, I only have to teach for half the year and am free to do research full time the other half.:)
Yeah I agree completely.
If the guy was a 1600 SAT, 4.0 in college, and ripped the LSAT, the certificates would be on the wall of Bob Gibbs briefing room instead of in a “lockbox”.
Of course SCM had generated a full dossier on Joe the plumber Wurzelbacher within 48 hours of his famous encounter with Baraq.....
COLUMBIA -
Mark Momjian
——of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a classmate at Columbia with President-Elect Obama worked with activist in Pennsylvania. Roger Strauch from San Francisco who together with his wife Dr. Julie Kulhanjian, both of whom have many philanthropic endeavors in Armenia to assist those in need. Also, joining the leadership on the West Coast was Dr. Roger Ohannesian of the Armenia Eye Care Project.
http://www.armenianamericansforobama.com/
HARVARD:
Julius Genachowski, a classmate of Obama in law school who was former chief of council to the FCC, has been selected as one of the leaders of a group that will work on technology, innovation, and government reform for the administration, including net neutrality.
The Harvard Law School alumus has often been named as one of the top candidates for FCC chairman under the Obama administration.
Genachowski is credited with recommending that Obama use the power of the internet to organize support and is an advisor on the Obama-Biden Transition Project Advisory Board.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
His former classmate Brad Berenson told the programme that Obama never took sides, but rather was a negotiator even then and it helped him to build his unflappable reputation, which may take him to the White House.
http://www.obamalawschool.com/
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