Laguna Niguel-based, nonprofit-grant-writing consultant John C. Drew's tale of meeting an apparently borderline-Commie college student has been lighting up the Interwebs for years, from Conservative American to Rapture Ready.
It's happening again following American Thinker last month posting yet another Drew column on his encounters with the young Barack Obama. Video of the story for the reading-challenged is also popping up everywhere–'cause the classics never die!
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“My first meeting with young Barack Obama raised strong feelings and left me with a positive first impression,” Drew begins his piece. “At the time, I felt I'd persuaded a young man anticipating a Marxist-Leninist revolution to appreciate the more practical alternative of conventional politics as a channel for his socialist views.”
Drew explains he was “an angry Marxist” as an Occidental College undergraduate–founding the campus Political Awareness Fellowship, a Marxist-Socialist group. He left Oxy to study Marxist economics at England's University of Sussex, then returned to rejoin the group he founded in searching “for ways to embarrass the administration,” helping “students to see
the evil of the U.S. capitalist system” and mobilizing “people in
preparation for the coming revolution.”
A former girlfriend convinced then-23-year-old Drew to meet a sophomore student who was in her European Political Thought class, 19-year-old Barry Obama. They gathered together near Palo Alto a couple of days after Christmas 1980 with a fourth member of the party, Obama's friend Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Despite being a wealthy 21-year-old Pakistani student, Chandoo was also “one of them”–a Marxist.
Later, at a restaurant, they discussed Ronald Reagan's election and El Salvador and Latin America . . . and Drew went on to have three more friendly, follow-up chats with the young man who would be president and . . . Christ, I can't go on.
I, too, recall those days, and how national and world events shaped my young mind. I minored in political science, and I vividly recall yelling, “Marxist” after local Assemblyman (now Congressman) David Dreier dropped into one of my classes and asked for a show of hands of Republicans and Democrats. Strange days, indeed.
Drew describes how sickened his Marxist prayer circle was by world events, what a true believer Obama was and how proud the grad student was that he demonstrated teaching ability by convincing the future president to take a more practical political road to our looming Socialist future.
But, the thing is, Drew grew up. Life changed him. He is no longer a Marxist, but as a darling of the Andrew Breitbart crowd, he's unwilling to assume the same about his one-time friend. It'd be like assuming someone who writes for a pinko Communist leftist alt.-media rag has changed his views since he was 19.
Ah, but one can't buck the narrative that Obama saved American capitalism from the brink of doom with billions and billions in bailouts and stimuli–so that he could really bring it to its knees with government health care.
My, those Marxists are sneaky bastards.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.