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Student of life, man of the world
Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - Sunday, November 9, 2008
Author: Abdon M. Pallasch, The Chicago Sun-Times

EXCERPT

Obama’s mom and Soetoro -Ng went back to Indonesia and Obama went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he led an anti-apartheid demonstration and wrestled with his white/black/Hawaiian identity. After two years, he transferred to Columbia University in New York.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/politics/chi-0703291042mar30-archive,0,1144101.story

Kenneth Sulzer, who lived in the same dormitory as Obama, remembered long discussions about politics, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a possible reinstitution of the draft. Obama was “relatively quiet. But when he spoke, his opinion was respected,” said Sulzer, now an attorney in Los Angeles.

The two took classes together and Sulzer was struck by the clarity and conciseness of Obama’s mind. “I would take down everything the professor said and dissect it 12 times,” Sulzer said. “Barry printed his notes. And it was very short. Probably just one long paragraph.”

Another classmate, Amiekoleh “Kim” Kimbrew of Los Angeles, recalled Obama striding across campus in flip-flops.

“He was very popular,” she said. “There were rumors that he was a Hawaiian prince. ... He was kind of flirty, but he wasn’t a player.”

Some took Obama’s professed radicalism as posturing. “I was impressed by the sharpness of Barry’s intellect and, like many, his effortless charm,” said classmate Mark Dery, a journalism professor at New York University. But “I also harbored an instinctual suspicion of his ... suave demeanor.”

Somewhere along the line Barry, the name of the boy from Waikiki, gave way to Barack, the name he inherited from his Kenyan father.

For the most part, Obama’s commitment to social activism was limited to coffeehouse talk. But near the end of his time at Occidental, he got caught up in protests against apartheid in South Africa, helping plan a large campus rally demanding that the college divest investments there.

He opened the rally in a bit of street theater, he recalls in his memoir, speaking for a couple of minutes until two white students in paramilitary dress dragged him away in midsentence. That cameo so impressed Rebecca Rivera, another rally participant, that she wondered why he hadn’t been more politically active on campus. She made a mental note at the time to “try to get him involved.”

Obama spent just two years at Occidental. He said in a recent interview that he had begun to weary of the parties and fretted about a lackadaisical approach to his studies. He grew more introspective and serious. His mother’s warnings were beginning to take hold.