Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I know this has nothing to do with nothing and I'm sure it has come up in the past, but wanted to make a note of it. It is interesting that they highlight the college period of his life in the film, but in real life nobody recalls him ever being at school.
We will probably put Obama's college transcripts in the same file cabinet as Bill & Hillary's health records and Trump's taxes.
The stint at Columbia got dramatic treatment in the 2016 film Barry. As Matthew Cooper of Newsweek noted, the Netflix production “charts his college years in New York, when ‘Barry,’ as he was known, wrestled with his racial identity.” Still, there was a problem.
“I was at Columbia a year behind Obama,” Cooper explained, but “I never knew Obama.” As Cooper recalled, Clinton factotum George Stephanopoulos was a year ahead of Barry and didn’t know him either. Neither did many other Columbia students, including those in Barry’s own class.
...
“We were his classmates in the Columbia University undergraduate class of 1983,” wrote Judy Maltz in a March 15, 2013 article in the Israeli publication Haaretz. Maltz numbered close to 25 in the group of 1983 Columbia grads including lawyers, one doctor, several engineers, an architect, librarian, speech pathologist, financier and a journalist. The group also included two married couples who began dating at Columbia.
“But here’s the thing,” Maltz explained. “Not one of us remembers Barack Obama from our undergrad years, nor do we know anyone else who does.” Jamie Miller, a mother of five active in the Columbia alumni association, travels back to New York every five years to attend reunions. “I was in the marching band, I worked on the yearbook, and I was involved in student government, so I knew everyone,” explained Miller, “But I never saw him around.”
Matt Welch: So tell us what we should know about Barack Obama that we don't?
Wayne Allyn Root: I think the most dangerous thing you should know about Barack Obama is that I don't know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever!
...
Welch: Were you the exact same class?
Root: Class of '83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don't get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was.
Other guy: Did he even show up to the reunion?
Root: I don't know! I didn't know him. I don't think anybody knew him. But I know that the guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It's very strange.
At each of the 2 colleges I graduated from (about 12K and 25K), I would guess maybe a dozen people would remember me from each of them, at most. It's really easy to be anonymous in a large school.
“The pride we feel in counting President Obama as an alumnus involves much more than the recognition of his time as a student here many years ago. This is a relationship built on shared values and interests that is producing public spirited projects of enormous, even transformative, potential at Columbia,” said Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger. “The latest venture will capitalize on the University’s unsurpassed talent for assembling oral history and will, I am sure, create an invaluable resource for understanding an historic presidency.”
Sounds like the president of Columbia is in on this conspiracy as well. LOL.
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.”
Although Barack Obama may not have been particularly social or memorable during his years at Columbia, it isn’t true that “no one ever came forward from Obama’s past saying they knew him, attended school with him, was his friend, etc.” Those who have attested to having daily personal experience with him during his time at that school include:
Friend and roommate Sohale Siddiqi, whom the Associated Press located and interviewed in May 2008.
Roommate Phil Boerner, who provided his recollections of sharing a New York City apartment with classmate Barack Obama to the Columbia College Today alumni publication and the New York Times in early 2009.
Michael L. Baron, who taught the year-long honors seminar in American Foreign Policy that Barack Obama took during his senior year at Columbia and recalled in an NBC interview Obama’s “easily acing” the class and receiving an A for his senior paper on the topic of nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.
I know this has nothing to do with nothing and I'm sure it has come up in the past, but wanted to make a note of it. It is interesting that they highlight the college period of his life in the film, but in real life nobody recalls him ever being at school.
We will probably put Obama's college transcripts in the same file cabinet as Bill & Hillary's health records and Trump's taxes.
The stint at Columbia got dramatic treatment in the 2016 film Barry. As Matthew Cooper of Newsweek noted, the Netflix production “charts his college years in New York, when ‘Barry,’ as he was known, wrestled with his racial identity.” Still, there was a problem.
“I was at Columbia a year behind Obama,” Cooper explained, but “I never knew Obama.” As Cooper recalled, Clinton factotum George Stephanopoulos was a year ahead of Barry and didn’t know him either. Neither did many other Columbia students, including those in Barry’s own class.
...
“We were his classmates in the Columbia University undergraduate class of 1983,” wrote Judy Maltz in a March 15, 2013 article in the Israeli publication Haaretz. Maltz numbered close to 25 in the group of 1983 Columbia grads including lawyers, one doctor, several engineers, an architect, librarian, speech pathologist, financier and a journalist. The group also included two married couples who began dating at Columbia.
“But here’s the thing,” Maltz explained. “Not one of us remembers Barack Obama from our undergrad years, nor do we know anyone else who does.” Jamie Miller, a mother of five active in the Columbia alumni association, travels back to New York every five years to attend reunions. “I was in the marching band, I worked on the yearbook, and I was involved in student government, so I knew everyone,” explained Miller, “But I never saw him around.”
Matt Welch: So tell us what we should know about Barack Obama that we don't?
Wayne Allyn Root: I think the most dangerous thing you should know about Barack Obama is that I don't know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever!
...
Welch: Were you the exact same class?
Root: Class of '83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don't get more exact than that. Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he was.
Other guy: Did he even show up to the reunion?
Root: I don't know! I didn't know him. I don't think anybody knew him. But I know that the guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him. Is that not strange? It's very strange.
Also, nothing can found he wrote when he headed the Harvard Law School Review.
Also, nothing can found he wrote when he headed the Harvard Law School Review.
Editors of the Harvard Law Review don't typically publish articles in the Law Review. That's not their job.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
