Barack Obama, left, is running for president. His childhood friend Keith Kakugawa, right, is homeless.
Posted on 09/13/2008 3:36:16 PM PDT by pjsbro
In his best-selling autobiography, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., writes movingly about his high school best friend, whom he calls "Ray."
Ray's real name is Keith Kakugawa. And Kakugawa's life could not have veered more starkly from that of his old friend, the presidential candidate.
Kakugawa is currently homeless in Los Angeles, sleeping in the beat-up Mazda of his friend Jason Myles. He has been in and out of prison for the past few decades, mostly on charges related to cocaine possession and dealing.
"To be honest with you, to survive, I've moved" drugs, Kakugawa says.
His relationship with Obama was like that of brothers
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Birds of a feather.....
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
STOP! This is unfair.
I can no longer distinguish ABC from Scrappleface.
Barack Obama, left, is running for president. His childhood friend Keith Kakugawa, right, is homeless.
he phoned Obama once and was Put off and avoided from then on....Obama’s compassion for others is a LIE.
he phoned Obama once and was Put off and avoided from then on....Obama’s compassion for others is a LIE.
Negative stories about the messiah? Kakugawa get under that bus!
Barack Obama [left] and Keith Kakugawa
Bet they are both similar , in that they are both sexist pigs.
These truths need to be in national campaign ads and out on the Internet for one and all to see.
MSM Crap. Leave the guy alone. Who knows if any of this is true anyway?
Odd , isn't it two people just got arrested in Pennsylvania with bags of Heroin in Obama bags. More pals of Obama? Drugs for Votes? in PA?
Hussein has/had a friend?
Who knew.
Stupid, pointless story.
I think the circumstances of any “put off” should be considered. If his friend had become a druggie enmeshed in a life of crime, I could understand not wanting to get sucked in and used for money, etc, to enable the friend’s self-destruction. BUT, if 0bama had the means he could have helped his friend get into rehab or something, but only if the friend was willing.
Let’s just not get carried away on this one. If we are going to bash 0bama for having criminal associates, we cannot also bash him for avoiding criminal associates. Just my two cents for whatever it’s worth.
Is it stupid? Maybe not.
“According to the Obama campaign, Kakugawa explicitly raised the possibility that he could make up false stories about Obama, implying he would do so if the campaign did not give him money.
That allegation infuriated Kakugawa, prompting him to speak to the Tribune after repeatedly refusing to do so.
“You must understand, I am not an extortionist,” he said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he is living out of a car with an acquaintance after being released from a California prison on March 10. “Listen, I’m homeless. . . . I ask everyone I know for money.”
Kakugawa wouldn’t discuss his school days with Obama other than to say he considered the senator “a brother” and “wouldn’t do a damn thing to ever hurt his campaign.”
He added, “Do I know things about him that aren’t out there already? Yes, probably. But I don’t think they are the kind of things that should be out there.”
http://www.vagazette.com/chi-0703250330mar25,0,6238949.story
You can’t give a cocaine addict money. This guy sounds like a true loser.
The cautionary point to me is, that friend after friend after friend of Obama turns out to be true trash, or terrorists, or hatred filled radicals and revolutionaries. Even his pastor is a black separatist filled with hatred for the white race.
If people vote this man in, they will deserve everything they get. He will destroy America if he can.
...unless Ray is making noise that he might be willing to share some unflattering stories from his buddy days. This sounds more like a pre-emptive strike to discredit Ray in case he decides to talk.
Kakugawa knows things about Obama we do not know yet, let him talk some.
In the name of fairness, this "old buddy" is beyond help of money, in case you've never known the type. If this was a Republican candidate, I'd call bullsh*t if the MSM tried holding him "heartless" because a bum buddy from childhood continued to self-destruct. I do the same when it's a Democrat, even Obama. There are other more relevant things to criticize in the man.
exactly let Kakugawa talk! Spill your guts Kakugawa !
You know another friend of Obama’s is in prison now, Rezko.
What' only black people get into drug problems?
I agree. Not much of a story here other than the tragic choices of a lost soul.
I remember his rant about the rich not doing enough to help others and think of his pitiful charitable giving and his brother. That speaks much more loudly than this story.
Best friend and brother both homeless...Hmmmmmm.
Well said.
Don’t be silly. Black people only get into drugs because society limits their options. White people get into drugs because they’re trash.
In my opinion, this is the best post on the thread. Where are the mainstream "normal" friends? I think many of us probably have old friends who went down wrong paths, but ALL of them? Doesn't Michelle have friends who, over the course of their marriage, would have also become 0bama's friends?
By the end of next week, all those investigators in Alaska will have cobbled together a bunch of garbage about Sarah Palin. Her 3rd grade teacher worried about her "non-scientific beliefs"; the boy who was her first date in high school voted against her for governor -- why?!?! The mailman recalls delivering lots of right-wing literature to her house, like American Spectator and the NRA newsletter.
This seems about on par.
The point I got from it is that people should breed within their own culture. It may seem enlightening and exotic to date someone from a different country or from a different side of the tracks, but the damage left can be tragic.
The release of this old friend’s history looks familiar - the ole “Sluts and Nuts” strategy torn from the Clinton playbook.
Obama’s troubled blast from past: Gets call from high school pal fresh from prison
Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - March 25, 2007
Author: Jackie Calmes, Wall Street Journal
Sen. Barack Obama had just come off the Senate floor last Thursday, rushing to get to New Hampshire for a weekend of campaigning, when his office patched through a call to his cell phone. On the other end was a long-lost high school friend, Keith Kakugawa , calling from a pay phone in a rundown part of Los Angeles. Kakugawa was homeless and fresh from a California state prison facility after a third drug-related conviction.
The unexpected call marked the surprising re-emergence of a friend from Obama’s past, one of the most compelling characters in Obama’s best-selling memoir of his struggle with his racial identity. In Dreams From My Father, Obama described Kakugawa — half black and half Japanese and native Hawaiian — as an older-brother figure to Obama at their mostly white Honolulu high school. The two bonded, Obama wrote, ‘’due in no small part to the fact that together we made up almost half of Punahou’s black high school population,’’ in a student body of about 1,700. Obama called Kakugawa ‘’Ray’’ in the book to protect his privacy.
With the voluble Kakugawa leading the way, the two teenagers played basketball and went to parties with the few other blacks around. Through Obama’s freshman and sophomore years, the two were mutual sounding boards. While most whites at the high school remember ‘’Barry’’ Obama as a carefree, popular student with a megawatt smile, Obama opened up more to Kakugawa about his absent father back in Africa, life with his white mother and grandparents, and their school’s, as well as Hawaii’s, dearth of black role models.
‘’He was going through a tough time,’’ recalls Kakugawa , now 47. ‘’He’d open up, or I’d drag it out of him. I was probably the only one who didn’t always see him smiling.’’
Kakugawa , who excelled at track and football, graduated in 1977 and left for the mainland with college scholarships. He quickly married, had two sons, finished college and divorced. Kakugawa says he held a string of jobs and used cocaine. He has been convicted three times for possession and sale of drugs since the late 1990s, according to Los Angeles County Superior Court records. He says he has spent much of the last six years in and out prison.
PAL HASN’T READ BOOK HE’S IN
Both men say they lost touch once Kakugawa , two years older than the 45-year-old Obama, left Hawaii for the mainland. Kakugawa says he knew little of Obama’s rise over the years. When he heard from someone about the death in 1992 of Obama’s grandfather, who was popular with the high school teens, he also heard that Obama was a lawyer in Chicago. Kakugawa says he hasn’t read Obama’s book, though someone told him several years ago that he was in it. About a year ago, he learned Obama might run for president.
Reporters began digging through Obama’s life, using his autobiography as a road map. They descended on Punahou School, and some began tracing the real names of friends Obama disguised with pseudonyms in his book. On March 10, while Obama was crossing Iowa in a minibus attending rallies of thousands of supporters, Kakugawa was released from his minimum-security prison in California and rode a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles.
Kakugawa was destitute and homeless. At a Los Angeles social service agency he met a past acquaintance, an aspiring rap-music writer and performer, Jason Myles, who works as ‘’Bobby Bang.’’ He moved into the rapper’s car — a battered, dulled-silver 1989 Mazda 626 with nearly 156,000 miles on the odometer. At night, they park on a street blocks from Skid Row and recline the front seats to sleep.
Reminiscing in an interview about his youth with Obama, Kakugawa acknowledged his current troubles, but added: ‘’I don’t want anything said or done that will hurt his presidential campaign.’’ In a follow-up e-mail sent from a downtown social service agency called WorkSource, Kakugawa wrote: ‘’Please dont [sic] put Sen. Obama in a bad light 4 knowing me.’’
Last Thursday, Kakugawa called Obama’s Senate office from a pay phone on an L.A. street corner and eventually reached Obama, who said he’d just left the Senate floor.
‘’He was utterly amazed,’’ Kakugawa says. ‘’I told him how proud I am of him.’’ Kakugawa says he didn’t want to talk about his problems; Obama indicated he knew. ‘’I’m really sorry,’’ the senator said, according to Kakugawa . ‘’How bad is it for you?’’
Kakugawa said he was struggling and needed help. Later, he summarized the exchange as ‘’short, sweet and to the point. He really acted like he didn’t have a lot of time to spend with me.’’ Obama said he had to get to New Hampshire for a weekend of campaigning, according to Kakugawa , and cautioned him against talking to reporters.
Obama declined to be interviewed about the conversation but said in an earlier interview that he recently became aware that Kakugawa had ‘’serious issues.’’
ASKED FOR MONEY, DENIED
At Obama’s suggestion, Kakugawa says, he called Devorah Adler, a campaign researcher who maintains contacts with Obama family and friends who might get press inquiries, to advise them and act as a go-between. Tensions rose when Kakugawa asked for some money to be wired to him via Western Union, according to both him and Adler. Adler brought in senior adviser Robert Gibbs, and together they phoned Kakugawa last Saturday.
The advisers suggested Kakugawa get help from social service agencies and that the Obama office would help with that. But he would not get money, Gibbs said.
The exchange left Kakugawa upset. ‘’Everybody’s just abandoned me,’’ he says.
‘’Obviously [Sen. Obama] feels badly that Keith , 30 years later, has fallen on hard times,’’ says Gibbs, the Obama campaign aide. ‘’There’s a sadness to this, a distinct human sadness to this story.’’
Why should he be expected to, when he can't spare 2¢ for his own brother, George?
I am not worried about Sarah’s past, that girl has what it takes, and she has family and friends who love her, that is who she is. And as far as I know , none of her pals are in prison.
I’m not either, but nor can I in good conscience hold Obama, even tangentially, responsible for some guy he knew in high school who’s hit the skids. As Finny says, there are more relevant issues at hand.
And Obama's treating him the same as he treats his brother.
“I agree. Not much of a story here other than the tragic choices of a lost soul.”
Yes, it’s like this guy and Obama are two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, running over the same old ground.
I want to know, what have they found?
“I want to know, what have they found?”
______________________________
I think this guy found the tragedy that comes from poor decisions.
Obama found a career as a projector screen for the far left. A man who is an enigma to all but those who created him.
Too elitist to help his friend or his brother George. But at least this friend can “move” drugs his way.
Bwahahah. That's rich Barry. Considering the Drive By Media is doing all it can to slime Palin.
Keith's lucky he hasn't been pushed in front of a bus .
He can’t spare $50 a month to help hie half-brother in Kenya who lives on a dollar a month.
Yeah, that was really off the mark. I can say, however, that being black and asian is a different story. Seriously, the asian community, as a rule, typically rejects mixed race children out of hand. It is especially pronounced in Japanese culture where the children of mixed race couples are uniformly rejected and often abandoned (at least in Japan). Don’t know how the Japanese community in Hawaii deals with this—I suppose they are more Americanized and less prone to ostracism.
That said, I found the story to be somewhat sad. Not that I feel sorry for the guy, per se, but I can’t imagine any of you Freepers really being opposed to the notion of Compassion. Unlike Obama, at least this guy isn’t trying to turn his failures into political selling points. The fact that he’s upfront about asking for money is, frankly, a lot more honest than Obama’s modus operandi.
As for any dirt he has, Obama would have been what, 17 when they parted ways? I don’t see anything worth prying into that wouldn’t come back to bite us. Obama has done enough (or rather, done nothing good) as an adult to fuel outrage that he’s gotten as far as he has. Leave “Ray” alone and pray that God’s mercy shines on him one day.
“I think this guy found the tragedy that comes from poor decisions.
Obama found a career as a projector screen for the far left. A man who is an enigma to all but those who created him.”
Wow. That’s really quite a good description. I only hope that it’s true, that Obama is just a blank screen and not a veil hiding something much more sinister.
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