Remembering Obama

Recollections of Obama’s Ex-Roommate

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:06:15 +0000

Barack Obama with a friend, Sohale Siddiqi, in the fall of 1981. (All photos courtesy of Phil Boerner)

SUBLET AVAILABLE: Three-room railroad flat, third floor, West 109th Street. Near Columbia University. Ideal for roommates who do not need privacy, reliable heat or steady hot water. Kitchen modest, but take out available, including New York bagels for only a quarter.

Such were the accommodations that greeted the future president, Barack Obama, when he moved to New York in 1981 to pursue his undergraduate studies at Columbia, according to the recollections of Phil Boerner, his roommate for a semester.

A young Phil Boerner, in a photo he says was taken by Barack Obama.

Both men were transfer students from Occidental College in Los Angeles, and as transfers were locked out of university housing at the time. Mr. Obama, 20, a junior, had spent two years at Occidental, where he had lived in the same dorm as Mr. Boerner.

Mr. Obama, who ultimately made Chicago, and now Washington, his home, enjoyed his New York years, Mr. Boerner recalls. Museums. Jogging in the park. Breakfasts at Tom’s on Broadway, not yet the celebrated hangout of Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza.

“I miss New York and the people in it,” he would write Mr. Boerner a few years after they graduated. “The subways, the feel of Manhattan streets, the view downtown from the Brooklyn Bridge.”

The building at 142 West 109th Street.

The apartment they shared, however, took some getting used to, Mr. Boerner recalled: 3E at 142 West 109th Street, a five-story building between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues.

Mr. Obama has recalled spending his first night in New York in an alley near the apartment, after arriving too late to be let in. The apartment had no interior doors, just archways, and Mr. Boerner had to walk through Mr. Obama’s room to reach his own. Hot water was scarce, and the two young men often showered at the Columbia gym.

“It had a bathtub but no shower, just one of those plastic shower things that works ineffectively,’’ said Mr. Boerner, who also recounted his experience with Mr. Obama in an essay he wrote this month for Columbia College Today, an alumni publication.

Mr. Boerner, who lives in California and is a registered Democrat, said he had kept his recollections to himself during the campaign, but thought he would share them now as his friend makes history.

A photo of Barack Obama, taken by Phil Boerner.

When they lived together, Mr. Boerner said he thought Mr. Obama wanted to be a writer, not a politician. Columbia recently tracked down, with the help of a graduate, one piece that Mr. Obama wrote in his senior year about two antiwar groups on campus for a now-defunct student periodical called “Sundial.’’ (See below.)

In it, he is already using phrases like “distorted national priorities” and “shifting America off the dead-end track,’’ which foreshadow messages of his later years.

“He’ll be a great president because of his intelligence and even more because of his good heart,’’ Mr. Boerner said.

New York was on the rebound when Mr. Obama arrived in New York. Ronald Reagan was president. Edward I. Koch was mayor and the city’s fiscal crisis had just started to abate.

Life for Columbia students could be hard, however. Mr. Boerner recalls Mr. Obama wrapping himself in a green sleeping bag (seen in this photo Mr. Boerner took) to keep warm when they studied at home. They listened to reggae. Bob Marley. Peter Tosh. Talked philosophy. Theories of justice and John Rawls. Mr. Boerner recalled Mr. Obama joking that he would rather be spending his time pondering Lou Rawls, the singer.

Some nights Mr. Obama would whip up some chicken curry, a dish he learned from a Pakistani friend. Other meals were at Tom’s.

“We would just go there for the breakfast special, two eggs over easy and toast,’’ said Mr. Boerner. “It was like $1.99, and we lived on a lot of bagels. They were, like, a quarter then, but they expanded in your stomach.’’

They also ventured out to Mr. Boerner’s family farm in the Catskills, where Mr. Obama helped with morning chores.

Though the two men stayed in touch, the housing arrangement ended that winter. Mr. Boerner thinks the leaseholder took the apartment back. Mr. Obama recalled in his memoir giving up the place “for lack of heat.’’

Barack Obama’s addresses as a student were listed in Columbia directories.

The 1982-83 student directory shows Mr. Obama living in his senior year at Apartment 6A of 339 East 94th Street. His letters to Mr. Boerner reflected the wistfulness of all expatriate New Yorkers.

“I am still amazed when I think of what we put up with there,” he wrote Mr. Boerner in October 1986. “Still, I think you’ll find you miss it once you’ve been gone awhile.”

New York Times

For Obama, Estranged in a Strange Land, Aloha Had Its Limits

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:55:03 +0000

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

Published: April 9, 2007

Reporters have been shuttling across the Pacific lately in search of the early chapters of Senator Barack Obama’s life story. Their guidebook is his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes his adolescence in Honolulu — where he was born and lived through high school, except for a few years in Indonesia — as a difficult time marked by drug use, disaffection and a painful search for identity.

The New York Times listed the ingredients of his young psyche as “racial confusion,” “feelings of alienation” and “disquietude.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that it was not just angst, but boiling angst.

Sounds oddly bleak, doesn’t it? Angst boils up in most people at some point in life, but if there were any place the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan could have fit in, wouldn’t it have been Hawaii? If there is a heaven, it probably looks a lot like Oahu, and the happy souls in it probably go around talking like our national spokesman for racial relaxation, Senator Obama.

So who was this brooding Barry, taking lessons in African-American swagger from a black high-school buddy, Ray, studying black nationalism and going to black parties on Army bases?

His struggle may seem strange in that setting, but the setting itself was strange. Hawaii, where I also grew up in the 1970’s, is famously mellow about race and ethnicity. It’s what you would expect from an ocean crossroads populated by Polynesians and early-20th-century plantation immigrants from across the globe. But tolerant is not the same as oblivious. Hawaii is acutely conscious of — you could say hung up on — racial, ethnic and cultural differences.

People in this motley state, less a melting pot than a tossed salad, invented a host of slang terms for themselves. A pidgin English field guide would list buk-buks, pakes, buddaheads, katonks, mokes, titas, popolos, yobos, blalahs, haoles and portagees. These labels can be affectionate or angry, though they are usually used neutrally or with just mild rudeness, often in the kinds of ethnic jokes that passed out of polite favor on the mainland long ago.

Hawaii’s fixation on social taxonomy is also seen in the local habit of linking identity to diploma. The first question locals ask one another is where they went to high school. Implicit in the answer are a lot of assumptions about ethnicity and class, whether the school is Punahou (elite white and Asian), Iolani (elite Japanese), Farrington (working-class Filipino and Samoan) or whatever.

There is, in this crowded paradise, a slot for everybody.

Or almost everybody.

For Mr. Obama, fitting in at Punahou could have been hard, given its reputation as a cliquish school dominated since missionary days by the rich white people who founded it. Mr. Obama, a scholarship student, wasn’t rich and didn’t look white.

Beyond that, his parents — University of Hawaii graduate students — and his Kansas grandparents, who helped raise him after his father returned to Africa, had no roots in the local culture. He lived in a state that, then as now, had a minuscule African-American population. He seems to have been surrounded by people who knew just enough about black America to be stupidly insensitive, and his family couldn’t help him.

“I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he wrote. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

In one sense, he wasn’t alone. Being black isn’t common in Hawaii, but being biracial is. There’s a Hawaiian word for it — hapa, or half — that traditionally refers to combinations of white with Hawaiian or Asian, though many use it for any racial blend. Being hapa is hardly cause for discrimination in mixed-up Hawaii, but it can be problematic. Dwelling on it can tie a person in knots. It can be disorienting to feel forced to choose between identities when you are both and neither. It can be infuriating to be stared at by people trying to puzzle out what you are.

Vexations like these, felt by growing numbers of multiracial Americans, have helped to spur a blossoming of hapa awareness on the mainland. People are trying out the idea of a hapa culture that is greater than the sum of its parts. There are hapa conferences, hapa college clubs and hapa Web sites. More and more people consider the pursuit of hapaness to be the answer to the paradox of bifurcation. Certainly, it is powerful evidence of the irrepressible yearning for identity. So is Mr. Obama’s story, his restless searching for a solace that Hawaii could not offer.

I asked him recently about that search. He described a long process of pulling together the parts of his life before finding a skin he could live in. The multitudes that he contains — Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, Harvard, Illinois — could have been arranged in infinite ways. But he settled in long ago as an African-American in Chicago, a professor turned politician in one of the most segregated cities in America.

The first thing he asked me was what high school I had gone to

New York Times

Origin of Obama’s run is on South Side

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:48:04 +0000

CHICAGO — In the 1980s, a handful of African-American community organizers worked on Chicago’s South Side. When veteran organizer Harold Lucas heard there was a new one, he figured he had better check him out.

Lucas weaved through hundreds of people who had gathered at the Lilydale First Baptist Church to pressure government officials to clean polluted local water. Lucas sidled up to the skinny kid with big ears who was poring over a clipboard.

Lucas didn’t say a word, but peered at the young man’s clipboard. On it he saw speakers’ names, stick-figure drawings, scripts of speeches and backup speakers and scripts in case people froze.

“He was literally orchestrating the meeting from a clipboard in the back of the room,” said Lucas, 65, who now runs a preservation tourism business in a historic downtown area called Bronzeville. “I said to myself: Either I don’t know nothing about community organizing, or this kid is brilliant.”

The kid was Barack Obama, a 24-year-old outsider from Hawaii who arrived in Chicago’s South Side in 1985 with a political science degree from Columbia University. Obama was there to run a small church-based group created to help those with no political voice pressure government to address dire poverty and pollution that defined a public housing project.

Obama has often said in speeches, and in his book, that he got more out of his three years in community organizing than the neighborhoods got out of him. Indeed, Obama’s victories on Chicago’s South Side were modest, but he has drawn heavily on what he learned as a community organizer to create, in some ways, a new kind of presidential campaign

His much-lauded and record-shattering fundraising operation ($600-million so far) relies heavily on tapping an expanse of small givers, a strategy often used by community groups to raise money. And his widespread national campaign is run by staff members who were trained in the ways of community outreach by the same Chicago organizers Obama worked for years ago.

Several Republicans, most notably vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, poked fun at Obama’s community organizing during the party’s national convention. Since then, Sen. John McCain’s campaign has questioned Obama’s ties to Chicago organizers and his work as an attorney for one of the nation’s largest, most successful (and sometimes controversial) community organizations, ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

But those who knew Obama during his organizing years say his experience on Chicago’s South Side helped him figure out what he wanted to do with his life, choosing public service over fiction writing. It led him to law school and down a path to the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

Creating influence

After graduating from Columbia, Obama couldn’t find an organizing job right away, so he worked as a researcher for a consulting house for a year in New York.

Obama wished he could have been a civil rights organizer, but he was nearly two decades too late. So he chased community organizing jobs.

Community organizing draws its roots from the labor union movement. What labor unions did for the workplace, community organizers aimed to do for neighborhoods. The idea is to gather people who don’t have access to power and money, and with sheer numbers create influence to attack problems as broad as poverty or as narrow as installing sewer hookups.

Obama’s mentors learned the methods of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago father of community organizing and well-known agitator from the 1930s through the 1970s. But Obama didn’t care for Alinsky’s more confrontational approach.

“Barack was willing to challenge power, but he was very reticent to use any personal confrontation,” said Jerry Kellman, who in 1985 was looking for someone to run a new community organization for him on the South Side. “Civility was and is very important to him.”

When Kellman got Obama’s resume, via a costly ad in the New York Times, he had already interviewed and rejected a number of applicants. He needed someone willing to work for next-to-nothing. (Starting salary was $10,000 a year with a $2,000 bonus for a car, although the salary would increase over time.) But he also needed someone whose idealism wouldn’t dissolve with a first, second or third setback.

“People burn out with frustration … especially people who had been very successful academically. Suddenly they’d meet something they couldn’t succeed at, and they’d not only fail, they’d unravel emotionally,” said Kellman, 58, who left community organizing to go to divinity school and now works as a counselor for Catholic churches on Chicago’s North Side.

At the time, Kellman was also looking to hire an African-American person.

Kellman’s group was comprised mostly of suburban white Catholic churches that had just started an offshoot called the Developing Communities Project, aimed at helping impoverished, and largely African-American, neighborhoods on the South Side. But Kellman and his colleagues were having trouble making connections with those churches.

Kellman flew to New York, a trip initially scheduled to visit his parents in Manhattan, and interviewed Obama face-to-face and offered him the job on the spot. Obama accepted.

Most of the South Side Chicago residents who first met Obama were struck by his youth.

“My first impression was: He was very young. Is he even going to be up to this task?” said Loretta Augustine-Herron, a Developing Communities Project board member whose own son was about the same age as Obama.

But Obama quickly won the board over.

“He seemed to be able to understand what we were up against. He listened. And some of the things he didn’t understand, he said he didn’t understand,” Augustine-Herron said. “We liked that.”

Relaying stories

Obama spent most of his time with church leaders and residents throughout the South Side, talking and interviewing them to discover their needs and “self-interests.” He was looking for a common thread, a topic he could get them to rally around and push for change.

This is the bread-and-butter work of community organizing that must be done before the more dramatic events of rallies and marches. It also was the part of the job Obama enjoyed. He liked hearing people’s stories, and he liked writing them up, said Kellman and organizer Mike Kruglik, who also worked with Obama.

Obama would turn in field reports that read like stories. At the time, he also was writing fiction in his free time and was weighing a future as a writer.

“Understanding story narratives was very key,” Kellman said. “He was already inclined to narratives, so he was very good at that.”

In setting up his presidential campaign, Obama turned to these same techniques. Kruglik spent countless weekends over the 2007 primary season training campaign workers and volunteers how to be community organizers.

“He’d tell volunteers, ‘Don’t do all the talking. Listen to people. Ask questions. If they tell you they don’t support Obama, ask them why. It can help us be more responsive,’ ” said Kruglik, 66, a blunt-spoken, gruff man who works in downtown Chicago for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing network.

Organizing Altgeld

Obama learned about poverty at a public housing project called Altgeld Gardens, which lies as far South as Chicago’s borders stretch. The community, built on a landfill, was created for returning African-American war veterans in 1945. The 1,500 two-story red brick homes look more like old-style military barracks than row houses.

The public housing community could not be more isolated. It’s a few miles from any other South Side neighborhood in an area dotted with train tracks, power lines, aged industrial buildings and a rusting metal bridge. It’s sandwiched between Interstate 94 and a polluted Calumet River. A rank-smelling water sewage treatment plant also graces its borders. Grassy, treeless hills that tower above the community are growing landfills.

The pollution is so concentrated that it attracts toxic tours by out-of-state university research groups, say residents like Cheryl Johnson, who runs People for Community Recovery, an environmental activist group based at Altgeld Gardens that her mother, Hazel Johnson, started in the 1970s.

Many children who live at Altgeld Gardens wheeze with asthma. And many who have lived there lost relatives to cancer. Johnson’s father died of lung cancer. Augustine-Herron, who lived there in the 1960s, lost a 7-year-old daughter to cancer.

Yet, Obama worked in Altgeld Gardens with an unbridled sense of optimism, even when he could count few victories.

“Altgeld is the wildest place you had ever seen,” said the Rev. Michael Evans, who helped run the Developing Communities Project, right after Obama left. “But Obama came out there and said, ‘No, this is good. We can do something with this.’ “

Often just getting residents to show up for meetings to talk about problems at the local church basement could be a challenge.

“The people are overwhelmed with their own problems,” Kruglik said, “and at the same time, you’re encouraging them to think of a better life and better way that they can create to get out of their problems.”

Seeking opportunity

Obama had a few victories. As factories closed, the South Side had become populated with many unemployed factory workers, and Obama organized Altgeld Gardens residents to pressure the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training to open a new intake center. It ended up opening in nearby Roseland.

He also helped organize Altgeld Gardens residents to meet with public officials and pressure the city to remove asbestos insulation from pipes. The city didn’t start removing the asbestos until after Obama left Chicago. And there’s some debate as to how much credit Obama deserves for the accomplishment, which he writes about extensively in his memoir.

Cheryl Johnson said her mother, Hazel Johnson, had started pushing to clean up asbestos at Altgeld Gardens years before Obama came to town. Hazel Johnson’s environmental work has been recognized by President Bill Clinton and the first President Bush.

“She knew the problem. She has lived through it and seen it. She doesn’t want any one person taking the credit,” Cheryl Johnson, 47, said of her mother.

No one was surprised when Obama left for law school.

Kellman said Obama realized the limits of community organizing when it comes to addressing larger, systematic problems like economic issues or racism.

“Frankly, I was always on the lookout to see if he’d be gone, he had a lot of opportunities,” Kellman said. “Something had to happen. He either had to fail or succeed in order to leave. And he succeeded pretty well, and that’s why he left. By succeeding, he was able to see the limitations of what could be expectations.”

But Kruglik sees Obama’s departure differently.

Kruglik says that on the presidential campaign trail, Obama often talks about the “world as it is and the world as it should be,” and how he’s fighting to make the world as it “should be.”

Obama pulled that phrase straight out of community organizing training, Kruglik says. He sees Obama’s campaign, and its community organizing tactics, as an experiment for an Obama presidency. But he adds, there’s still a place for organizers to hold Obama accountable.

“Obama is combining the vision of a better world with the practicality and reality of community organizing that it takes to get that better world,” he said.

Staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report

TampaBay

Obama’s early years in California, New York

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:38:12 +0000

NEW YORK — The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog’s head.

This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city’s derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the bum, who approached him menacingly.

Until his skinny, Ivy League-educated friend _ Barack Obama _ intervened.

He “stepped right in between. … He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. `Hey, hey, hey.’ And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking,” Siddiqi recalls.

There was a time before Obama wore tailored suits _ when his wardrobe consisted of $5 military-surplus khakis and used leather jackets, and he walked the streets of Manhattan for lack of bus fare. It was a time well before the political arena beckoned, when his friends thought he might become a writer or a lawyer, but certainly not the first black man with a real chance to become president of the United States.

Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then in New York at Columbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” talks about this time, but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as “Sadik” _ “a short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party.

Obama’s campaign wouldn’t identify “Sadik,” but The Associated Press located him in Seattle, where he raises money for a community theater.

Together, the recollections of Siddiqi and other friends and acquaintances from Obama’s college years paint a portrait of the candidate as a young man.

They remember a good student with a sharp mind and unshakable integrity, a young man who already had a passion for the underprivileged. Some described the young Obama’s personality as confident to the point of arrogance, a criticism that would emerge decades later, during the campaign.

Not everyone who knew Obama in those years is eager to talk.

Some explained that they feared inadvertently hurting Obama’s campaign. Among his friends were Siddiqi and two other Pakistanis, all of them from Karachi; several of those interviewed said the Pakistanis were reluctant to talk for fear of stoking rumors that Obama is a Muslim.

“Obama in the eyes of some right wingers is basically Muslim until proved innocent,” says Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental who is now a journalism professor at New York’s Lehman College. “It’s partly the Muslim factor by association and partly the fear of something being twisted.”

The young man Mifflin remembers was “an unpretentious, down to earth, solidly middle-class guy who seemed somewhat more sophisticated than the average college student. He was slightly reserved and deliberate in a way that I sometimes thought betrayed an uncertainty.”

But another former Oxy classmate, Robert McCrary, now general manager of a contract sewing company, saw him differently: “He definitely had a cocky, sometimes arrogant way about him. … He was not open to others.”

Of course, he was only 18 when he arrived at the small liberal arts college nicknamed “Oxy.” His freshman roommates were Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who’s now a Boston banker, and Paul Carpenter, now a Los Angeles lawyer.

Carpenter recalled Obama as “a good bodysurfer” who had “a funky red car, a Fiat,” and who also played intramurals _ flag football, tennis and water polo. “He was an athletic guy. He was gifted in that regard,” said Carpenter. He also remembered Obama being “super bright. He could get through the course work in a fraction of the time it took me.”

Obama had an international circle of friends _ “a real eclectic sort of group,” says Vinai Thummalapally, who himself came from Hyderabad, India.

As a freshman, he quickly became friends with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis. There were others, Thummalapally recalls: a French student and both black and white Americans, including Jon K. Mitchell, who later played bass for country-swing band Asleep at the Wheel (Mitchell remembers that Obama wore puka shell necklaces all the time, though they were not in style, and that “we let it slide because he spent a lot of time growing up in Hawaii.”)

The friends got together often to watch basketball games _ they were Lakers fans _ and eat the southern Indian food that Thummalapally cooked with his cousin.

There was serious talk, too. Obama had concerns about U.S. foreign policy _ including the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran under Jimmy Carter, and American support of the Contras in Latin America.

Thummalapally lived with Obama the summer of 1980. The two ran together daily, three miles in the early morning, often chatting about their dreams. Thummalapally wanted to start a business back home; Obama talked about helping people.

“I want to get into public service,” he recalls Obama saying. “I want to write and help people who are disadvantaged.”

___

In 1981, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia. In between, he traveled to Pakistan _ a trip that enhanced his foreign policy qualifications, he maintained in a private speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last month. Obama spent “about three weeks” in Pakistan, traveling with Hamid and staying in Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary.

“He was clearly shocked by the economic disparity he saw in Pakistan. He couldn’t get over the sight of rural peasants bowing to the wealthy landowners they worked for as they passed,” says Margot Mifflin, who makes a brief appearance in Obama’s memoir.

When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi _ a friend of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama’s idealism _ he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor.

“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.”

Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man.

“We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay,” said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique.

The Obama campaign declined to discuss Obama’s time at Columbia and his friendships in general. It won’t, for example, release his transcript or name his friends. It did, however, list five locations where Obama lived during his four years here: three on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn _ one in Park Slope, the other in Brooklyn Heights. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge.

“We didn’t have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application,” Siddiqi said.

Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama “wanted no part of it. He put down the truth.”

The apartment was “a slum of a place” in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable existence. We were slumming it.” What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps.

While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples.

But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.

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.”

In his memoir, Obama recalls fasting on Sunday; Siddiqi says Obama was a follower of comedian-activist Dick Gregory’s vegetarian diet. “I think self-deprivation was his schtick, denying himself pleasure, good food and all of that.”

But it wasn’t exactly an ascetic life. There was plenty of time for reading (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul) and listening to music (Van Morrison, the Ohio Players, Bob Dylan). The two, along with others, went out for nights on the town. “He wasn’t entirely a hermit,” Siddiqi said.

Siddiqi said his female friends thought Obama was “a hunk.”

“We were always competing,” he said. “You know how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn’t out-compete him in picking up girls, that’s for sure.”

Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi’s mother, who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate _ he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but “he was really patient. I’m surprised he suffered me.”

Finally, their relationship started to fray. “I was partying all the time. I was disrupting his studies,” Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.

In July 1985, after spending two years as a writer for a business newsletter and as a coordinator at City College in Harlem for an environmental and consumer advocacy group, Obama left New York for Chicago _ where he found a job, a wife and, eventually, a political career.

___

Andrew Roth knew Obama at Occidental and in New York. He speaks bluntly: “The thought, believe me, never crossed my mind that he would be our first black president.”

And yet, here he is, on the brink of the Democratic nomination. And he’s gotten there with the help of some of those friends from so long ago.

Neither Hamid nor Chandoo would be interviewed for this story; Hamid is now a top executive at Pepsico in New York, and Chandoo is a self-employed financial consultant in the New York area.

Both have each contributed the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign, and records indicate each has joined an Asian-American council that supports his run for president. Both also are listed on Obama’s campaign Web site as being among his top fundraisers, each bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions from their networks of friends.

Both also attended Obama’s wedding in 1992, according to published reports and other friends.

Thummalapally has stayed in contact with Obama, too, visiting him in New York, attending his wedding in 1992 and joining him in Springfield, Ill., for the Feb. 10, 2007, announcement of Obama’s run for the White House.

President of a CD and DVD manufacturing company in Colorado Springs, Colo., Thummalapally also is listed as a top fundraiser on the campaign Web site.

Siddiqi has not kept in touch. His has been a difficult road; years after his time with Obama, Siddiqi says, he became addicted to cocaine and lost his business.

But when he needed help during his recovery, Obama _ the roommate he drove away with his partying, the man he always suspected of looking down at him _ gave him a job reference.

So yes, he’s an Obama man, too. Witness the message on his answering machine:

“My name is Hal Siddiqi, and I approve of this message. Vote for peace, vote for hope, vote for change, and vote for Obama.”

___

Associated Press writers Deborah Hastings in New York, Justin Pritchard in Los Angeles, Gene Johnson in Seattle, and AP researchers Judith Ausuebel and Barbara Sambriski contributed to this story

Suntimes

Barrack Obama and “Dreams of My Father”

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:32:29 +0000

Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4th 1961 to Barrack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. He is only the fifth African American to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate and currently is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. He is among the Democratic Party’s leading candidates for nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Born to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, Obama had a very diverse cultural upbringing. His parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father died in a car accident in Kenya when Obama was 21. He spent his entire childhood in the U.S. state of Hawaii except for four years between ages 6-10 which he spent living in Jakarta Indonesia with his mother and his step-father Lolo Soetoro. After his short time in Indonesia he returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents until his graduation in 1979. Obama talks about his diverse childhood in his memoir Dreams From My Father in which he writes: “That my father looked nothing like the people around me-that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk-barely registered in my mind.” The main focus of the memoir relates his struggles as a young man trying to reconcile

After graduating in 1979, Obama attended Occidental College for two years, after which he transferred to Columbia University. While attending Columbia University he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations, receiving his BA degree in 1983. After which he went to work at Business International Corporation for a year before moving to Chicago to direct a non-profit project assisting local churches to organize job training programs. He continued to direct this project till 1988 when he entered Harvard Law School. While at Harvard he distinguished himself becoming the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, and completed his J.D. degree magna cum lade in 1991.

After leaving Harvard Law School he returned to Chicago and immediately began and directed a voter registration drive in an effort to encourage the citizens of Chicago to registrar to vote. Deeply interested in voting rights, civil rights, and community organizations, he worked as an associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland from 1993 till 1996 taking on cases in which he primarily represented community organizers, discrimination claims, and voting rights cases. Obama also became a lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School in 1993 and continued to lecture until his election in 2004 to the U.S. Senate

Associated Content

Years at Harvard in photos

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:17:06 +0000

Harvard Law School( Photo courtesy Harvard Law School) This photograph taken in the fall of 1990 shows the Harvard Law Review Board of Editors for the 1990-1991 academic year. At center, holding the staff, is Barack Obama, the year he became the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review

Obama at Harvard (Photo courtesy Obama campaign) Barack Obama, as a Harvard Law School student, was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama and Africa in photos

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:58:00 +0000

Obama's first trip to Africa (Photo courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng Barack Obama poses with his grandmother during his first trip to Africa to visit the family of his father, Barack Obama, Sr.

Early Africa visit (Photo courtesy Auma Obama) Michelle hugs her fiancé during their first trip together to Africa in the early 1990s. The photo was taken in Kibera, Africa's largest slum, in Nairobi, Kenya

Obama’s earlier years in photos

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:53:59 +0000

Baby Barack ( Photo courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng ) Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961. This is an undated photo provided by Barack Obama's half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng

Barack and baseball in Hawaii (Photo courtesy Obama campaign) In this 1960's photo provided by the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows the Democratic presidential hopeful, Obama, with his baseball bat in Hawaii

Obama family 1970s (Photo courtesy Maya Soetoro-Ng) Stanley Dunham, Stanley Ann, Maya and Barack Obama in Hawaii in the early 1970s

Barack Sr. & Jr. (Photo courtesy of Barack Obama Barack Obama Sr. poses with his son in the Honolulu airport during Obama Sr.'s only visit to see his son while he was growing up in Hawaii. Young Barack was in the 5th grade when the photo was taken

Obama's family (Photo courtesy of Barack Obama) At their home in Jakarta, Ann Dunham poses in this undated photo with her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, their daughter, Maya, and Barack Obama

Barack Obama 1972 (Punahou School yearbook photo) This 1972 photo provided by Na Opio, the yearbook of Punahou School, shows Barack Obama, in the back row, third from left, posing with his 5th grade class at the Punahou Elementary School a prestigious private school in Honolulu that attracts the island's wealthiest, and most accomplished students

Oxy Remembers “Barry” Obama ’83

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:47:59 +0000

January 29, 2007

Almost 30 years ago, he was a freshman from Honolulu living in Haines Hall, playing pick-up basketball and developing a reputation as a campus activist.

Today, Barack Obama ’83 is a Democratic presidential hopeful, and the national media have discovered that he spent his first two years of college at Occidental. “It’s a wonderful, small liberal arts college,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a Jan. 29 news story. “The professors were diverse and inspiring. I ended up making some lifelong friendships there, and those first two years really helped me grow up.”

Drawing on interviews with faculty, alumni, and excerpts from Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, the Times story described him as a serious student, a good athlete, and a man of principle who made friends with students from across the political spectrum.

“He came off as a serious, articulate, intelligent young guy,” Eric Newhall, professor of English and comparative literary studies, was quoted as saying. “I didn’t say, ‘Here is presidential timber,’ but I said to myself, ‘I like our student body because they are going out to do interesting things.’”

According to Obama, who then went by the name of Barry, it was his involvement in the South African divestment movement at Occidental that first set him on his current path. “I got into politics at Occidental,” he said in a 2004 interview with Occidental magazine. “I made a conscious decision to go into public policy.”

It was a decision that eventually led him to transfer to Columbia University – “the idea of being in New York was very appealing,” he says – where he received his bachelor’s degree, and later to Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review.

This is not Occidental’s first brush with presidential politics. Reporters also descended on campus when Jack Kemp ’57, former pro football quarterback and Republican congressman, ran for president in 1988 and as a vice presidential candidate in 1996.

Occidental College

Occidental celebrates Obama’s election

Resi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:43:14 +0000

Barack Obama ’83 Elected President

November 4, 2008
Contact: Jim Tranquada, (323) 259-2990

Students celebrate in Samuelson Pavilion

A roar that could be heard all across the Occidental College campus erupted Nov. 4 when television commentators declared Barack Obama ’83 had been elected the 44th president of the United States – the country’s first African-American chief executive.

Students gathered in Haines Hall, where Obama lived in a ground-floor room his freshman year, and packed into Samuelson Pavilion broke into cheers when the announcement was made — a moment captured by a local television crew.

“We are proud that an Occidental alumnus will be serving in the country’s highest office,” said Occidental President Robert A. Skotheim. “Barack Obama is the latest expression of Occidental’s long history of public service that has produced such distinguished leaders as Robert Finch, Class of 1947, Jack Kemp, Class of 1957, and Rear Admiral Marsha Johnson Evans, Class of 1968.”

Kemp, a presidential candidate in 1988 and a vice-presidential nominee in 1996, served as one of Sen. John McCain’s chief economic advisors and barnstormed through the key states of Ohio and Florida during the final days of the campaign urging voters to support his old friend.

Although Obama transferred to Columbia University in 1981 at the end of his sophomore year, the significance of the two years he spent at Occidental was a theme that ran through much of the reporting about his candidacy.

“Much has been made in this presidential campaign, both good and bad, of Obama’s Ivy League pedigree, his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, and his law degree from Harvard,” the Boston Globe reported. “But it is during the two years Obama spent at Occidental, a small liberal arts school in Los Angeles, that he started on the path that has led to the Democratic presidential nomination.”

“Oxy, as it is affectionately known, nurtured his transformation,” said the Globe. “By the end of his sophomore year, he was on his way to becoming a self-assured, purpose-driven scholar plotting a career in public service.”

“It’s an indescribable feeling right now,” Obama campaign worker Katie deMocker ’10 said in a telephone interview from Arizona. “I couldn’t be more proud. Before when I told people I went to Oxy, and that it was a liberal arts college, they didn’t seem to know what it meant. Now when I tell people that Obama went to Oxy, their eyes light up. I can’t think of a better representative of our school than Barack Obama.”

“I think this whole election has put Oxy on the map, but more importantly, Barack Obama and his values and principles are from Oxy,” said Tessa D’Arcangelew ’10 from the Obama campaign in Virginia. “I think his win gives a lot of hope to the Oxy students who share his values and beliefs and want to make the world a better place — that they can make a difference with their lives.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Obama described Occidental as “a wonderful, small liberal arts college. The professors were diverse and inspiring. I ended up making some lifelong friendships there, and those first two years really helped me grow up.”

It was at Occidental where he stopped being called “Barry” and became Barack Obama, Newsweek pointed out in its account of Obama’s formative years that featured his black-and-white freshman photo on the cover. “It was when I made a conscious decision: I want to grow up,” he told the magazine.

Occidental continues to influence Obama today, albeit indirectly: both the New York Times and Washington Post report that the president-elect’s reading during the final days of the campaign included the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars by Steve Coll ’80, the former Post managing editor who currently is a staff writer for New Yorker magazine and an Occidental trustee.

Occidental’s role in Obama’s career has led to a new focus on the transformative power of a liberal arts education, a subject Teagle Foundation President Robert Connor addressed on his blog. In a recent commentary aimed at overseas readers, journalist Tom Plate cited Occidental as an “iconic exemplar of the American search for the leadership ideal in education … because it regularly shows up in the top small-college rating lists and because among its most prominent former students is Barack Obama.” After two years “in the cauldron of change marked by intense courses in literature, arts, philosophy and social science, the student found himself as Barack, with all its implications, not as Barry.”

Obama is only the second U.S. president to have attended a small liberal arts college west of the Rockies, the first being Richard Nixon of Whittier College. Eleven other presidents attended liberal arts colleges, including William McKinley (Allegheny), Woodrow Wilson (Davidson, before transferring to Princeton) and Ronald Reagan (Eureka).

Occidental College