Obama as an undergraduate

Last updated on: October 7, 2008 at 8:10 am by Gene Veith

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Obama as an undergraduate 2008-10-07T08:10:49-04:00 Gene Veith

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When Obama says that he was only 8 years old when Bill Ayers and his even scarier wife Bernadine Dohrn were active terrorists, he is calculating from the founding of the Weather Underground. But that group continued to exist decades later and did its greatest mayhem in the 1980s. Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia then. Ayers was also at Columbia at that time. Obama and his campaign will say nothing about his Columbia years, not even permitting his transcripts to be released. To clear up questions about his ties with members of the Weather Underground, it would help to know about his college days and what inspired him to go to Chicago to Saul Alinsky’s radical organization to work as a community organizer. Did he have radical ties at Columbia? From Ayers-Dohrn-Obama Tie Shouldn’t Be Dismissed:

Though the mainstream media has been curiously uninterested in Barack Obama’s undergraduate years, Obama spent two years at Occidental College developing into an activist and then transferred to Columbia University, graduating in 1983. Little more is known about Obama’s time at Columbia and he seems to avoid mentioning it as much as possible. . . . Obama has also turned down repeated requests to release his academic transcripts. What happened during his time at Columbia that caused Barack Obama to be so secretive and hold the school conspicuously at arm’s length? . . . .

The big question unasked by the media is if Barack Obama met Bill Ayers during the time both were in the Columbia University community at the same time that a splinter group of the Weathermen was still actively planting bombs. While the possibility has been suggested in blogs, there does not appear to be any record of any media directly asking Obama if he met Ayers in New York and if such a relationship spurred Obama to travel to Chicago to begin his career as a community organizer.

Barack Obama’s first known meetings with Bill Ayers would occur three years after Obama graduated from Columbia, in Chicago in 1987. Ayers was an activist in the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools. Community organizer Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project was a member of that Alliance.

Barack Obama was not eight, but a 24-year-old community organizer in Chicago at the time of the Weathermen’s last attacks, and 29 when many of the last remnants of the Underground in the offshoot May 19th Communist Organization were sentenced to prison in 1990. (Former Weatherman Elizabeth Ann Duke is still a fugitive and wanted by the FBI.)

BarackObama.com, the campaign’s official website, offers up a “fact check” that Obama was just eight years old when the Weathermen were active in 1969. The Obama campaign has tried to use the founding date of the Weathermen as a touchstone, claiming that the acts of the group were something that happened “40 years ago” when Obama was a child. Far closer to the truth is the December 6, 1990, sentencing date of Weathermen Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, when the last of the Weathermen were sentenced for their role in a string of bombings in the mid-1980s, including bombs that detonated at the National War College, the Washington Navy Yard Computing Center, the Washington Navy Yard Officers’ Club, New York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building, New York City’s South African Consulate, and the United States Capitol Building.

That the Obama campaign refuses to talk about these things and gets so indignant about anyone daring to bring it up just increases the suspicion. If Obama used to be a radical in these circles but has since tempered his views and no longer believes all that rhetoric about a socialist revolution, let him say so. But these are important charges and they deserve to be answered.

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