Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. John C. Drew, a political scientist who tried, without success, to alert the media and the John McCain campaign back in 2008 that young Occidental sophomore Obama had been a Marxist socialist looking forward to an inevitable Communist revolution. Since then, Drew’s take on young Obama’s ideological extremism has been featured in books including Michael Savage’s Trickle Up Poverty, Paul Kengor’s Dupes, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief, Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama and most recently in Paul Kengor’s newest book, The Communist – Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. Dr. Drew has contributed at least four articles regarding young Obama’s ideological extremism to American Thinker and has posted articles at Breitbart.com and PJMedia. Key elements of Dr. Drew’s story have been verified by liberal authors including David Remnick in The Bridge and most recently David Maraniss in Barack Obama: The Story.
FP: Dr. John C. Drew, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Let’s begin with you sharing how you met the young Barack Obama.
Drew: Thanks Jamie.
I met him through my girlfriend, Caroline Boss. She had taken two political science classes with young Obama at Occidental College – one in the spring of 1980 and one in the fall of 1980. She was the co-president of the Democrat Socialist Alliance at Occidental College and wanted to introduce young Obama to me over Christmas break 1980 as “one of us.” By that time, I was in my second year of graduate school at Cornell University where I was working on my Ph.D. in political science.
FP: What was the young Obama like ideologically?
Drew: The young Obama was a garden variety Marxist-Leninist. He and Boss and his sophomore year roommate, Hasan Chandoo, believed that social forces where creating an inevitable Communist revolution in the U.S. and that it was important to have a highly trained elite of educated leaders guide this revolutionary process and oversee it once the revolution took place. Remember, this was at the height of the Cold War in 1980. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president and the USSR was still our mortal enemy. In a lot of ways, the young Obama was more radical than me because by that Christmas break I had stopped believing in the possibility of a Communist revolution and no longer believed a pure Communist economic and social system – one without private property or profits – was possible anymore.
FP: What did Obama say that made you think he was a Marxist?
Drew: I only remember bits and fragments of the actual conversation. I remember that Obama reacted negatively to my suggestion that it was wrong to ever expect a Communist revolution in the U.S. given the experience of Western Europe. I definitely remember him taking about the need to prepare ourselves and the people for the coming Communist revolution. I remember that he was particularly good at arguing the perspective of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial revolutionary thought. I had read Fanon, but his writing was not authoritative to me the way it seemed to be for Boss and Obama.
FP: Tell us why this is significant today.
Drew: I think it is significant, in part, because it helps demonstrate the impact that Frank Marshall Davis had on young Obama. It was very unusual for such a young student at Occidental College to be such an intense believer in Marxist ideology. It turns out Obama last met with Davis only about four months prior to Obama first meeting with me.
The really crucial issue, however, is that Obama does not seem to have a conversion story which explains how he quit being a Marxist. In the experience of me and others, being a Marxist is sort of like being in a religious cult. It ends up controlling what you do with your life, the friends you choose, the mentors you pick and the careers that make sense to you. I have a fairly detailed conversion story. I remember the exact moment when I first realized I was no longer a Marxist. Obama, however, does not seem to have a conversion story in his autobiography.
FP: What do you expect to accomplish by sharing this story?
Drew: I think that if I had gotten my story out earlier in 2008 that it might have been enough to keep Obama from becoming president. The McCain campaign and the mainstream media, however, did nothing to pick up my story. I want to leverage the communication channels available to me now to make sure that the Romney campaign understands the strength of the case regarding young Obama’s ideological extremism. There are a lot of Ph.D.s now – Savage, Kurtz, Cashill, Kengor and me – who are making a very convincing argument that Obama has been lying to the American people about the strength and intensity of his Marxist ideology. If the folks running the Romney campaign have not been reading these books, they really need to.
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