He most likely got into Occidental merely by graduating from a exclusive private HI high school and playing the foreign student card. It probably wasn't until Columbia that Frank Davis began pulling strings. I simply don't believe zero was groomed for anything before Columbia.
http://saturdaybriefing.outrigger.com/chairman_briefing/school-choice-helped-launch-barack-obama%e2%80%99s-success/
Okay, I checked the website. First of all, it’s a drooling, trembling and fawning obeisance to 0bama. So therefore automatically in the “Propaganda” file. IOW, only believable if it can be verified independently with authentic documentation. Here are the quotes referencing Punahou and claimed scholarship. Oh, and considering he states as fact stuff that is known to be made up, I see no reason to accept his word about scholarship or anything else. Or the words of a couple of classmates who were no doubt coached etc. Sheesh.
Barack Obama’s links to Hawaii are many and deep. He was born August 4, 1961, at Kapi‘olani Medical Center in Honolulu. His father was a Kenyan who had come here to study at the University of Hawaii. His mother, Ann Dunham, was a Kansas-born U.H. student whose parents lived in Honolulu. After his parents’ 1963 divorce, he spent several years in Indonesia with his mother and new stepfather before returning to Hawaii in 1971 at age 10 to live with his maternal grandparents in Honolulu. He enrolled in Punahou School, a private K-12 institution near Waikiki, founded by missionaries in 1841.
I knew his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who sadly passed away just two days before the election. Madelyn was a vice president at the Bank of Hawaii. She was a very competent, accurate, and no-nonsense woman who handled several escrow closings on real estate transactions with which I was involved. No matter how complicated the deal was, I always knew that if Madelyn handled the escrow details, everything would be in order.
Madelyn’s boss was the bank’s CEO, Frank Manaut, who served with me as a trustee of Punahou School. It seems likely that Madelyn’s connection with Frank played a role in Barack’s enrollment at Punahou with a scholarship.
Zero and the Dunhams were closely associated with Frank Marshall Davis since Zero first came back to HI from Indonesia. If you don't see a connection between communist backing earlier than when he was in Columbia, there is no rationale for that other than bare nekkid opinion.