Posted on 09/13/2008 4:13:04 PM PDT by pjsbro
What about his days at Columbia? As I recall the NYT asked this information without success.
I see an empty suit, and so it must be.
Obama is like one of those people in whom others always see lots of “potential” but who never actually do anything with their supposed talent.
((PING)) for later reading.
Local News
Advocate, The (Stamford-Norwalk, CT) - May 17, 2008
NEW YORK - The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog’s head.
This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city’s derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the bum, who approached him menacingly.
Until his skinny, Ivy League-educated friend - Barack Obama - intervened.
He “stepped right in between. . . . He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking,” Siddiqi recalls.
There was a time before Obama wore tailored suits - when his wardrobe consisted of $5 military-surplus khakis and used leather jackets, and he walked the streets of Manhattan for lack of bus fare. It was a time well before the political arena beckoned, when his friends thought he might become a writer or a lawyer, but certainly not the first black man with a real chance to become president of the United States.
Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then in New York at Columbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” talks about this time, but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as “Sadik” - “a short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party.
Obama’s campaign wouldn’t identify “Sadik,” but The Associated Press located him in Seattle, where he raises money for a community theater.
Together, the recollections of Siddiqi and other friends and acquaintances from Obama’s college years paint a portrait of the candidate as a young man.
They remember a good student with a sharp mind and unshakable integrity, a young man who already had a passion for the underprivileged. Some described the young Obama’s personality as confident to the point of arrogance, a criticism that would emerge decades later, during the campaign.
Not everyone who knew Obama in those years is eager to talk.
Some explained that they feared inadvertently hurting Obama’s campaign. Among his friends were Siddiqi and two other Pakistanis, all of them from Karachi; several of those interviewed said the Pakistanis were reluctant to talk for fear of stoking rumors that Obama is a Muslim.
“Obama in the eyes of some right-wingers is basically Muslim until proved innocent,” says Margot Mifflin , a friend from Occidental who is now a journalism professor at New York’s Lehman College. “It’s partly the Muslim factor by association and partly the fear of something being twisted.”
The young man Mifflin remembers was “an unpretentious, down to earth, solidly middle-class guy who seemed somewhat more sophisticated than the average college student. He was slightly reserved and deliberate in a way that I sometimes thought betrayed an uncertainty.”
But another former Oxy classmate, Robert McCrary, now general manager of a contract sewing company, saw him differently: “He definitely had a cocky, sometimes arrogant way about him. . . . He was not open to others.”
Of course, he was only 18 when he arrived at the small liberal arts college nicknamed “Oxy.” His freshman roommates were Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who’s now a Boston banker, and Paul Carpenter, now a Los Angeles lawyer.
Carpenter recalled Obama as “a good bodysurfer” who had “a funky red car, a Fiat,” and who also played intramurals - flag football, tennis and water polo. “He was an athletic guy. He was gifted in that regard,” Carpenter said. He also remembered Obama being “super bright. He could get through the course work in a fraction of the time it took me.”
Obama had an international circle of friends - “a real eclectic sort of group,” says Vinai Thummalapally, who himself came from Hyderabad, India.
As a freshman, he quickly became friends with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis. There were others, Thummalapally recalls: a French student and both black and white Americans, including Jon Mitchell, who later played bass for country-swing band Asleep at the Wheel (Mitchell remembers that Obama wore puka shell necklaces all the time, though they were not in style, and that “we let it slide because he spent a lot of time growing up in Hawaii.”)
The friends got together often to watch basketball games - they were Lakers fans - and eat the southern Indian food that Thummalapally cooked with his cousin.
There was serious talk, too. Obama had concerns about U.S. foreign policy - including the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran under Jimmy Carter and American support of the Contras in Latin America.
Thummalapally lived with Obama the summer of 1980. The two ran together daily, 3 miles in the early morning, often chatting about their dreams. Thummalapally wanted to start a business back home; Obama talked about helping people.
“I want to get into public service,” he recalls Obama saying. “I want to write and help people who are disadvantaged.”
In 1981, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia. In between, he traveled to Pakistan - a trip that enhanced his foreign policy qualifications, he maintained in a private speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last month. Obama spent “about three weeks” in Pakistan, traveling with Hamid and staying in Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary.
“He was clearly shocked by the economic disparity he saw in Pakistan. He couldn’t get over the sight of rural peasants bowing to the wealthy landowners they worked for as they passed,” says Margot Mifflin , who makes a brief appearance in Obama’s memoir.
When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi - a friend of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama’s idealism - he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor.
“At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously,” Siddiqi said. “I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He’d give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating.”
Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man.
“We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay,” said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique.
The Obama campaign declined to discuss Obama’s time at Columbia and his friendships in general. It won’t, for example, release his transcript or name his friends. It did, however, list five locations where Obama lived during his four years here: three on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn - one in Park Slope, the other in Brooklyn Heights. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge.
Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama “wanted no part of it. He put down the truth.”
The apartment was “a slum of a place” in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable existence. We were slumming it.” What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps.
While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples.
But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.
In his memoir and in interviews, Obama has said he got serious and buckled down in New York. “I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,” he said in a 2005 Columbia alumni magazine interview. He told biographer David Mendell: “For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot.”
There should be a public list of graduating seniors somewhere.
Margot Mifflin (Assistant Professor, English Department) wrote a cover story in The Believer (December 2005/January 2006) on the symbolism of tattoos in literature, from Melville and Hawthorne to Elmore Leonard and Shelley Jackson (”A Blank Human Canvas: The Literary Tattoo Leaps from the Page to Living Parchment”). She also completed a review for Salon.com of a new book about Calamity Jane, entitled The Woman and The Legend by James D. McLaird.
http://www.slate.com/id/2198198/
Obama: the Pepsi CandidateThe Democratic presidential nominee and the soft drink have strong affinities.
By James Ledbetter
Posted Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2008_July_24/ai_n27944642
PepsiAmericas Names Wahid Hamid to Board of Directors
Business Wire, July 24, 2008
MINNEAPOLIS — PepsiAmericas, Inc. (NYSE: PAS) today announced that Wahid Hamid was elected to the company’s board of directors, effective July 23, 2008.
In making the announcement, PepsiAmericas’ Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert C. Pohlad said, “The addition of Mr. Hamid to PepsiAmericas’ board ensures that our company will continue to benefit from a diversity of experiences and opinions.”
Mr. Hamid, 49, is Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy for PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP), which ranks among the world’s largest convenient food and beverage companies. Its businesses include Frito-Lay, Pepsi-Cola, Tropicana, Gatorade and Quaker Foods. Mr. Hamid is responsible for strategic initiatives including mergers and acquisitions. Before taking his current role, Mr. Hamid was Chief Financial Officer for PepsiCo Americas Foods, where he led the finance agenda for the sector and was responsible for accelerating key strategic initiatives. Prior to joining PepsiCo, Mr. Hamid spent 15 years with The Boston Consulting Group, in a variety of roles including leading their consumer goods and retail practices across Asia Pacific. Most recently, Mr. Hamid was Senior Vice President and Director.
“Wahid’s industry and financial expertise will be of great value to PepsiAmericas as we continue our growth strategy,” said Pohlad. “He is an accomplished strategist with a deep understanding of our business. We look forward to working with Wahid and to his contributions to the PepsiAmericas’ board.”
PepsiAmericas is the world’s second-largest manufacturer, seller and distributor of PepsiCo beverages with operations in 19 U.S. states; Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia; and the Caribbean. For more information on PepsiAmericas, please visit www.pepsiamericas.com. PepsiCo, Inc. (NYSE: PEP) beneficially owns approximately 44 percent equity interest in PepsiAmericas.
“Thanks, Im sure the media is right on top of it. ;)”
Oh, yeah. Doncha know it!
How long would McCain last if he had a list of associates like that? He would be crucified!
(Well, maybe not. Democrats love America haters, terrorists and thugs)
Yep, I was wondering when anyone was going to notice the unusual number of Muslim friends Obama cultivated in college, especially Pakistani ones.
I’m a little older, but I never met a Muslim until they bought the restaurant I was working in.
ALL Obama’s real friends seem to be foreign and Muslim.
That "note" was published a month before he became president of the Review.
"Politico asked months ago if Mr. Obama had ever written anything for the Harvard Law Review as a student. The Obama campaign responded narrowly, with a Clintonesque statement that "as the president of the Law Review, Obama didn't write articles, he edited and reviewed them." This month it turned out Mr. Obama had written an article -- but it was published a month before he became president."
fyi
Thanks for the correction.
Bump n’ping.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.