Obama in New York

My previous post inspired me to spend a short while looking into a few of the mysteries surrounding Barack Obama's New York years. Alas, researching these areas is not easy, since Googling quickly takes one into right-wing realms where it is commonly assumed that Obama belonged, and belongs, to an imaginary socialist (or even Illuminati) conspiracy. One must proceed with some caution. Viewing such sites is like dumpster diving: A bin of trash can hide the occasional goody.

Here's what I found.

It is an odd fact that only two people claim to recall Barack Obama at Columbia: Professor Michael Baron, who taught a seminar on politics, and Michael Wolf, another seminar attendee who later went on to head MTV. That class is the only one that Obama provably attended. No other Columbia student -- and many have been interviewed -- can recall seeing him. By contrast, the news media have tracked down quite a few people who recall going to school with young Barry in Indonesia.

Although Obama will not make his records available, we know that he was not graduated with honors. Nevertheless, he somehow got into Harvard. Libertarian Party VP Wayne Allyn Root says that he (Root) received a B+ average from Columbia in this same period yet was told not to bother applying to any ivy-league grad schools. How likely is it that Obama could have bettered Mr. Root's B+ GPA without receiving honors of any sort?

Root never met, saw or heard of Barack Obama, even though they both shared the same major at the same college at the same time. Obama is not in the year book. Nobody can find his senior year thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament.

From the NYT:

Mr. Obama arrived in New York in August 1981, at age 20, from Occidental College in Los Angeles. According to his memoir, he passed his first night in an alley near 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, unable to get into his apartment. The next morning, he bathed at a hydrant alongside a homeless man.

Yet he had spent that summer on an expensive jaunt to foreign climes.

He writes that “it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well,” where the graffiti was both racist and anti-Semitic.

I can agree about the conjoining of racial and class issues. But one detail here strikes me as unbelievable: The graffiti. Obama and I are pretty much of the same generation. I don't recall ever seeing racist graffiti at UCLA during my inglorious period of attendance there. Neither did I see such graffiti before that period or at any time afterward. I got into the habit of using the UCLA libraries during high school, and the habit has never left me. Moreover, I've never seen racial graffiti at any other university, major or minor -- and I've visited many.

(Back in the 1970s, one UCLA library stall did offer a familiar message: "JOHN 3:19 IN THE BIBLE!" Beneath it, someone else wrote: "Sorry, can't make it. Can I pencil you in for 4:30 in the dictionary? -- John.")

Was the graffiti situation much different at Columbia? Frankly, I doubt it.

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block.

So white people were literally shitting on poor Barry. Nevertheless, he managed to be graduated from both Columbia and Harvard, despite a mostly unserious attitude toward academia and a GPA that he now seems oddly reticent to discuss. Frankly, I would have given a lot for the privilege of being "oppressed" the way Barack Obama has been oppressed.

This right-wing blogger posits a conspiracy:

Perhaps Obama, as an activist at Columbia, was a little like a football player on scholarship. He is not ever seen in class, because he is not ever in class. It is generally understood, at least among the staff, that he has other things to be doing. And it might even be that someone else is doing his homework.

In other words, he might have been an intern/catamite/etc in some parallel, opaque world of activist politics. The goal is to have a capable young man for a couple of years who will do all kinds of odd jobs for you, while in exchange receiving a Columbia degree.

This conspiracy theory is, on its face, foolish. There never has been and never will be an "activist" power bloc capable of rigging university records in this fashion. But I can think of a Certain Intelligence Agency which might have been able to do the trick. Scroll down a couple of posts for more about that possibility.