I was skimming the new Occidental College magazine (Summer 2010) and saw they found a new photo of the young Obama. I also went through the class notes and found that Hasan Chandoo has been in touch with my old girlfriend Caroline Grauman-Boss and her friend Susan (Keselenko) Coll over the years.
I expect that this will give additional credibility to my statements that I knew the young Obama and can affirm that he was a Marxist socialist in 1980-1981. Obama and I used to be part of a strong, committed group of revolutionaries. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that I aged out of that obnoxious ideology in my mid-20s.
Also, this photo illustrates other themes I've communicated regarding the young Obama including the fact that I never saw him with a girl and that he was strikingly effeminent at the time. The larger point, of course, is that the picture of himself that he created in Dreams from My Father is very different from the real Obama that I knew during the 1980-1981 school year.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.