Replies

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/obamas_missing_link_1.html

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.