Before he ever met Bill Ayers he was on a straight path to leftist radicalism. One of his grandfather’s good friends was a (black) Marxist from Chicago, who had been “banished” to Hawaii because of hot water in Chicago. Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist, 1930s style.
Not withstanding that Obama, sr was able to receive education at the U of Hawaii and Harvard, Obama, jr grew up resenting the colonial rule of Kenya by Great Britain. [control over the black man]
Whoever guided him to [pacifist] Occidental College in California had to have had strong leftist leanings.
Etc etc.
The people teaching Obama were the contemporaries of Bill Ayers, the SDS, the Weather Underground.
Obama is the prime example of how well the teaching/indoctrination has worked.
Yes, he was definitely indoctrinated all along by his mother’s family’s friends (Davis, etc.) and no doubt her own circle in the Third World places where he lived.
But the thing that struck me when he first began to spout his leftist nonsense openly is how dated it sounded; in fact, even his alleged autobiographies, which even he admits were semi-fictional composites, sounded like they were written by somebody at least 15 years older.
He is not known to have participated in any regular campus left activities in his various schools, and he seems to have lived in a bubble of the earlier Third-World-Leninist mindset that was so popular when I was in college (I’m about the same age as Ayers). Perhaps, in fact, one of the things that made it hard for people to immediately identify him as the radical leftist that he is was the fact that his leftism was somewhat anachronistic.
That doesn’t mean it’s somehow quaint and less dangerous, though. In fact, if anything, it is more dangerous, more ruthless, and I think we’ll soon find out exactly how much so, as legitimate democratic resistance to his policies grows and he finds he has to seek some other way of imposing them.