The young Obama I knew...

Over at American Thinker, Dr. John Drew has a fascinating column about his time at Occidental College where he says he met a young "Marxist socialist" sophomore named Barack Obama.

As the campus leader of the Marxist students at Occidental, Drew says the young revolutionary he knew in college looked nothing like Barack Obama, circa 2008:

What would you do if you knew that the top Democrat running for president was lying about his past?

That is the question I was faced with in 2008.  I had met the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College, and I knew that his commitment to socialism was deep, genuine, and longstanding.  See my earlier article on American Thinker.

I had been a leader of the Marxist students at Occidental College myself, starting in 1976 when I founded the precursor of the Democrat Socialist Alliance on campus.  The young Obama I knew was a Marxist socialist who would

have been quite comfortable with Communist party members like his Hawaii mentor Frank Marshall Davis, retired domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, or active socialist politicians like Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer.

The Obama I knew was nothing like the lifelong pragmatic centrist that he was pretending to be in the 2008 presidential campaign.  When I talked politics with the young Obama, he expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. -- completely divorced from the profit motive -- which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution.  In this context, I saw my report on young Obama as a key piece of evidence suggesting a profound continuity in his belief system.

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