Even though Barack Obama was elected president over a year ago, persistent reports are cropping up alleging that his biography is a bit, ah, invented.
Forget the flap about Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate, and whether a Republican member of Congress will request a copy of the long-form version. The new allegation, which has popped up on some conservative Web sites in the last few weeks, is this: Nobody remembers Obama when he was an undergraduate at Columbia University.
By
CNET/ November 6, 2009
One version that's been circulating goes as follows:
Even though Root made those comments in September 2008, they reappeared last month on adiscussion thread at FreeRepublic.com garnering nearly 500 comments, and they've beenmirrored on countless other blogs and message boards. Here at CBS News, we've had readers contacting us to ask what the truth really is.
There is some truth to the anonymous allegations. Remarkably few people seem to remember a student named Barack Obama; two possible reasons are that he transfered from Occidental College in Los Angeles as a junior (therefore missing freshman orientation and the related socializing), and that he lived off-campus in a densely populated urban environment.
And few is not the same as none. NBC News interviewed Obama's former professor, Michael Baron, who taught an eight-student honors seminar called American Foreign Policy. Baron said he never expected Obama, who wrote a long paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament (Baron says he no longer has a copy), to ascend to such political heights. "You wouldn't say, 'Oh, he's going to be secretary of state or president someday,'" Baron told the network.
In 2007, the New York Times tracked down Michael Wolf, a classmate of Obama's who went on to became president of MTV Networks. Wolf described Obama thusly: "He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant."
Another Times article said that nobody currently living at what was apparently Obama's off-campus apartment building remembers him today, but a "'B. Obama' was listed in telephone directories at 339 East 94th Street in the early 1980s."
The Associated Press published an interview in May 2008 with a fellow named Sohale Siddiqi ("Sadik"), who was Obama's marijuana-smoking off-campus roommate during his Columbia years. "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."
A three-page article written for a Columbia paper in 1983 by Obama, then a senior, also has surfaced. It argues for nuclear disarmament from a left-leaning perspective, concluding: "The old solutions of more weapons and again more weapons will no longer be accepted in a Europe that is already a powderkeg waiting to go off; and it is an invitation to work towards a peace that is genuine, lasting and non-nuclear."
And a January 2005 article -- just after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, and years before he announced his candidacy for the presidency -- was published in a Columbia magazine confirming he attended the school.
An editorial published in September 2008 in the Wall Street Journal, hardly an uncritical booster of then-candidate Obama, notes that he refused to release his Columbia transcript:
It's also noting here that Wayne Allen Root, who told Reason Magazine that he didn't remember Obama, acknowledged that Obama might have simply hung out with black students instead of white ones: "So if you track down a couple of black students, they'll probably know him." And, in fact, that seems to have been the case -- although Obama's roommate for at least part of the time was Pakistani.
Perhaps the reason why Obama has been reticent about his Columbia days -- his biography barely mentions them -- is simply that his grades and his experiences were middling. (This has, of course, provided fodder for bloggers wondering if racial preferences are responsible for his admission to Harvard Law School. Then again, Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.)
Let's not forget that Al Gore, despite his reputation for wonkishness, was a C student who did especially poorly in the natural sciences. Neither John Kerry nor George W. Bush were superior students; John McCain graduated near the bottom of his class. Our current president might simply not want to admit that, at least as an undergraduate, he was no different.
Declan McCullagh is a correspondent for CBSNews.com. He can be reached atdeclan@cbsnews.com and can be followed on Twitter as declanm. You can bookmark Declan's Taking Liberties site here, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.One version that's been circulating goes as follows:
Looking for evidence of Obama's past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him. [Libertarian Party VP candidate] Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983. In 2008, Root says of Obama, "I don't know a single person at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me." ... Obama's photograph does not appear in the school's yearbook and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia, provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia.
Even though Root made those comments in September 2008, they reappeared last month on adiscussion thread at FreeRepublic.com garnering nearly 500 comments, and they've beenmirrored on countless other blogs and message boards. Here at CBS News, we've had readers contacting us to ask what the truth really is.
There is some truth to the anonymous allegations. Remarkably few people seem to remember a student named Barack Obama; two possible reasons are that he transfered from Occidental College in Los Angeles as a junior (therefore missing freshman orientation and the related socializing), and that he lived off-campus in a densely populated urban environment.
And few is not the same as none. NBC News interviewed Obama's former professor, Michael Baron, who taught an eight-student honors seminar called American Foreign Policy. Baron said he never expected Obama, who wrote a long paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament (Baron says he no longer has a copy), to ascend to such political heights. "You wouldn't say, 'Oh, he's going to be secretary of state or president someday,'" Baron told the network.
In 2007, the New York Times tracked down Michael Wolf, a classmate of Obama's who went on to became president of MTV Networks. Wolf described Obama thusly: "He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant."
Another Times article said that nobody currently living at what was apparently Obama's off-campus apartment building remembers him today, but a "'B. Obama' was listed in telephone directories at 339 East 94th Street in the early 1980s."
The Associated Press published an interview in May 2008 with a fellow named Sohale Siddiqi ("Sadik"), who was Obama's marijuana-smoking off-campus roommate during his Columbia years. "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."
A three-page article written for a Columbia paper in 1983 by Obama, then a senior, also has surfaced. It argues for nuclear disarmament from a left-leaning perspective, concluding: "The old solutions of more weapons and again more weapons will no longer be accepted in a Europe that is already a powderkeg waiting to go off; and it is an invitation to work towards a peace that is genuine, lasting and non-nuclear."
And a January 2005 article -- just after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, and years before he announced his candidacy for the presidency -- was published in a Columbia magazine confirming he attended the school.
An editorial published in September 2008 in the Wall Street Journal, hardly an uncritical booster of then-candidate Obama, notes that he refused to release his Columbia transcript:
Such caginess is grist for speculation... Others speculate about ties to the Black Students Organization, though students active then don't seem to remember him. And on the far reaches of the Web can be found conspiracies about former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became the candidate's "guru and controller" while at Columbia in the early 1980s. Mr. Brzezinski laughs, and tells us he doesn't "remember meeting him." What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him.
It's also noting here that Wayne Allen Root, who told Reason Magazine that he didn't remember Obama, acknowledged that Obama might have simply hung out with black students instead of white ones: "So if you track down a couple of black students, they'll probably know him." And, in fact, that seems to have been the case -- although Obama's roommate for at least part of the time was Pakistani.
Perhaps the reason why Obama has been reticent about his Columbia days -- his biography barely mentions them -- is simply that his grades and his experiences were middling. (This has, of course, provided fodder for bloggers wondering if racial preferences are responsible for his admission to Harvard Law School. Then again, Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.)
Let's not forget that Al Gore, despite his reputation for wonkishness, was a C student who did especially poorly in the natural sciences. Neither John Kerry nor George W. Bush were superior students; John McCain graduated near the bottom of his class. Our current president might simply not want to admit that, at least as an undergraduate, he was no different.
Declan McCullagh is a correspondent for CBSNews.com. He can be reached atdeclan@cbsnews.com and can be followed on Twitter as declanm. You can bookmark Declan's Taking Liberties site here, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
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