Obama, a College Marxist?

Until now, precious little information has come to light about President Obama’s youthful political views. That may change as disclosures by former political science professor Dr. John C. Drew eventually surface in the mainstream press.

During an evening he spent with Obama in late 1980, Drew, a former Marxist-turned-conservative-Republican, recalled during an interview on Breitbart TV’s “The B-cast” that the young Obama was not only a passionate Marxist, but a Marxist-Leninist, devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system in America.

The meeting occurred in late December, 1980 when Drew, a 1979 Occidental College graduate in his second year of Cornell University grad school, visited his girlfriend, still an Occidental student, who shared a political theory class with Obama.

Drew recalled that Obama, then a college sophomore, showed up in a BMW with his closest friend Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, and “we all went out to dinner, partied and drank, smoked cigarettes—and we did what young Marxists do—we basically argued politics.”

Before the get-together, his then-girlfriend described Obama as “one of us.” What she meant by that was that “he was on our team . . . a blood brother . . .a fellow revolutionary,” said Drew.

As a serious Marxist revolutionary himself in those days, Drew said that as soon as he met young Barack, he realized that this radical college sophomore wasn’t just “dabbling in Marxism . . . he was a Marxist-Leninist dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

Drew says on his website (www.anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com) that his “most vivid memory of Obama was the way he strongly argued a rather simple-minded version of Marxist theory,” while he (Drew) had moved on to a more pessimistic graduate school view that true revolution would never happen in this country.

Drew’s meeting with the young Obama occurred shortly after he experienced his first taste of campus notoriety when publicly speaking out on the anti-apartheid issue and co-founding the anti-apartheid group that is mentioned in Dreams of My Father.

During their meeting, Drew recalls that Obama believed that “America was definitely the enemy, and American elites were the enemy, and whatever America was doing was definitely wrong and bad. He thought that perhaps the Soviet Union was misunderstood, and it was doing a better job for its people than most people realized,” Drew noted in a Newsmax interview.

Although Drew did his senior honors thesis at Occidental on Marxist Economics, his doctoral research at Cornell in 1984 triggered a move to the political right when he realized the fallacy of the Marxist class struggle argument.

However, when Drew crossed the ideological divide from Marxist to conservative Republican, it may have made his academic career a bit more challenging.

As an assistant political science professor at Williams College from 1986 – 1989, Drew was one of three registered Republicans on the faculty. Armed with his newly adopted belief system, Drew says he complained to the powers-that-be about the school’s affirmative action policies that favored less qualified African-American faculty candidates over white candidates, saying that these policies “took away the honor of being a Williams College professor.”

Now a grant-writing consultant in Laguna Niguel, California, Drew says that his meeting with Obama some 30 years ago provided useful evidence of why he was able to win the trust and support of people like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Alice Palmer. He believes that Obama “never surrendered that tough, Marxist socialist ideology I saw in him as a sophomore at Occidental College.”

When Drew is asked why he took so long to go public with this story, he is quick to explain that although he tried to get the story out during the presidential campaign in 2008, no one in the media would touch it.

In fact, Drew says he was frustrated when he couldn’t get this information out during campaign season, since candidate Obama “was making it sound like people thought he was a socialist because he didn’t share his toys in kindergarten, but I thought he was a socialist because I’d seen him argue from a hard Marxist point of view.”

Obama’s career path was entirely predictable, according to Drew, who says the first logical career move for a revolutionary right out of college is to become a labor organizer or a community organizer. The second step is to become a college professor.

During his stint as a University of Chicago adjunct professor, Obama “was basically promoting the socialist revolution, saying that our Constitution promotes negative liberties but not the positive liberties of a society that advocates wealth distribution.”

Drew’s encounter with the future president nearly 30 years ago sheds some light on the young Obama’s political ideology, one of the many aspects of his life that has not undergone any serious scrutiny by the mainstream press. Drew regards his “15 minutes of fame” that began with a Newsmax interview in February, 2010 as an “opportunity to share what I know about the ‘red diaper’ ideology of the young Barack Obama.”

Saying that he would still be teaching in Massachusetts were it not for the liberal Democrats that control Williams College, Drew says he was pleased that Scott Brown was recently elected as the state’s newest senator, adding that his election “marks the end of the Obama revolution.”

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.