[Vision2020] Al Qaeda-linked Website Backs McCain as President

[Paul Rumelhart]

No Weatherman wrote:
> Paul:
>
> Looks like wikicu.com scrubbed their Obama page because it doesn't load for me.
>   

Here's the text.  It's working for me.  A web browser problem on your 
end, maybe?

 From http://www.wikicu.com/Barack_Obama:

Barack Obama CC '83 is a US Senator from Illinois and the Democratic 
party candidate for the 2008 presidential election.

Many Columbia students are audaciously hoping he'll win his primary and 
the national election. If he does, he will not only be the first 
partially black president, but the first attendee of Columbia College, 
and the first graduate of any Columbia school[1], to occupy the Oval 
Office. Obama is currently the first Columbia College alumnus to be 
nominated by a major modern party ticket, and the first CC alum to be a 
major party nominee since the Federalists nominated DeWitt Clinton in 1812.

Obama, however, tends to forget/ignore his Columbia affiliation, 
preferring to mention that he attended Harvard Law School. He has 
repeatedly turned down requests to be the Class Day speaker in recent 
years, as well as general requests to appear from the College Democrats. 
He did, however, note that Columbia was his alma mater while visiting 
during the ServiceNation Presidential Candidates Forum, and sent a 
letter to the attendees of the Class of 1983's 25th reunion gathering.

Columbia years

Obama transferred to CC from Occidental College which (poor place) is 
even more rarely mentioned by the young senator. At Occidental, Obama 
had been into partying and drugs. He hoped the move to New York, and 
Columbia, would put him on a more serious track.

Columbia at that time did not guarantee university housing for all 
students, so Obama lived off campus. He claims to have spent his first 
night sleeping in an alley near the corner of 109th and Amsterdam Avenue 
and washing with the homeless next to an open fire hydrant. He 
eventually moved into a walkup on E. 94th St., in East Harlem, where he 
would "chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about...the sound of gunfire 
at night".[2]

When he was on campus, he concentrated on academic work, spending most 
of his time in Butler Library "like a monk", and made few friends. He 
also took up jogging and "stopped getting high". The racist and 
anti-Semitic graffiti he sometimes encountered on bathroom walls on 
campus (how times never change!) helped him form his ideas about race 
and class. He wrote of "the almost mathematical precision with which 
America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of 
resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the 
streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well".[3]

Obama claims to have participated to some extent in anti-apartheid 
activities with the Black Students Organization, but no one is quite sure.

He majored in PoliSci, and claims to have concentrated in "International 
Relations," (now International Politics - this is a subfield of the 
PoliSci major and should not be confused with a "concentration," the 
Columbia term that substitutes for what most schools term a "minor"). 
Obama's professors and classmates, including former international 
politics professor Michael Baron and current MTV president Michael Wolf, 
confirm that he was a brilliant, standout student and that he was an 
active participant in seminars. Baron said he was one of the top one or 
two students in his class. Despite this, Obama continually declines 
requests to release his Columbia transcript.

Sources first differed on whether he wrote his senior thesis on Soviet 
nuclear disarmament[4] or the North-South debate on trade and the "new 
international economic order"[5]. Later, it emerged that he had not 
really written an official thesis at all: students were not required to 
do so at the time, and what counted as a "thesis" was really a long 
seminar paper. Obama wrote his for Prof. Baron's American Foreign Policy 
class. A search has been launched[6] for a copy of the paper, which was 
confirmed to have been on the topic of Soviet disarmament. Baron, 
Obama's de facto "thesis" advisor, is now retired to Florida, and claims 
to have lost his copy of the paper in a move some time ago.

It has been reported that Obama graduated without honors[7], but if the 
policies then were the same as they are today, he would not have been 
eligible for latin honors, because he spent only two years in the 
college. Obama hoped to become a community organizer, but could not find 
work as one, and joined a small consulting firm instead. In his memoir, 
he portrays this as a big corporate job, and claims it prompted fears he 
was becoming a sellout.

Later Columbia coincidences

In his primary fight to become the Democratic nominee, Obama has faced, 
among others, GS alum Mike Gravel. His Republican opponent would be John 
McCain, a former Class Day speaker whose daughter, Meghan McCain, was 
CC'07. In the general election, he is facing tickets with Wayne Allen 
Root, also CC'83, the Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee, and 
independent vice presidential candidate Matt Gonzalez CC'87.

References

   1. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both attended 
Columbia Law School, but neither graduated, as you only needed to pass 
the bar after 2 years of school to practice law. One Roosevelt dropped 
out after passing the bar, the other after being elected to the NY State 
Assembly. Dwight Eisenhower never attended Columbia, but rather served 
as a somewhat absentee President of the University while biding his time 
to run for the Presidency.
   2. 
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/where-obama-lived-in-1980s-new-york/
   3. Dreams from My Father, p. ?
   4. http://www.columbiaspectator.com/?q=node/28631
   5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04obama-t.html
   6. http://www.bwog.net/articles/obama_s_schoolwork_verily_a_mystery
   7. 
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/obamas-years-at-columbia-are-a-mystery/85015/