A Dec. 12 NewsBusters “open thread” post credited to “NB Staff,” with the headline “Barack Obama’s College Roommate Claims Obama Was ‘Ardent’ ‘Marxist-Leninist’,” reads:
After President Obama’s free market “doesn’t work” and “has never worked” speech in Kansas last week, well-received by the media as Teddy Roosevelt-esque, Rush Limbaugh described Obama as channeling someone else, with Obama putting to the forefront “in no uncertain terms that he is a socialist, if not a Marxist.”
In fact, one of Obama’s peers from Occidental College, John Drew, described Obama as an “ardent” “Marxist-Leninist” who “was in 100 percent, total agreement with [his] Marxist professors.” Furthermore, Obama called those who didn’t agree that a communist revolution in the West was possible “reactionar[ies].”
NewsBusters is greatly overstating Drew’s relationship with Obama. As the Oh, For Goodness Sake blog points out, Drew graduated from Occidental the semester before Obama enrolled, so he was not a “peer” of Obama’s. And far from being Obama’s “college roommate” as the NewsBusters headline, Drew met Obama only twice at social occasions while coming back to Occidental to visit other friends.
(NewsBusters appears to have misread the source of this piece, at the far-right John Birch Society website The New American, which refers to Drew only as Obama’s “college mate,” which is also not true.)
How could Drew possibly know so much about Obama having only met him twice, at a time when there was no reason to think he would have been destined for the presidency? Perhaps NewsBusters can invent a plausible response.