January 13, 2009
Obama, student lefty [Ben Smith]
A writer for the conservative magazine Human Events, Evan Gahr, last week unearthed another scrap of Barack Obama's slim paper trail: A March, 1983 reported article for a Columbia University magazine, Sundial.
Gahr sent on a copy of the article, which I've posted in full here.
Written just months before Obama graduated, this is not exactly his best work, but it offers a new glimpse of his very conventional campus liberalism of the time. The article is a warm review of two campus groups, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism.
“These groups, visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead end track," Obama wrote.
The piece doesn't admit anything resembling a conservative viewpoint, or one outside the left of the Democratic Party, and has some (wonderfully dated) gentle criticism for the anti-nuclear group:
Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets. When Peter Tosh sings that “everybody’s asking for peace, but nobody’s asking for justice,” one is forced to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problems instead of the disease itself.
Nobody deserves to be judged by his college writing, and the awful prose from a guy who can clearly write suggests he didn't exactly put heart and soul into this one. But it also fills in a gap in his political evolution, and helps draw a fairly straight line from the campus liberalism of the 1980s to what was still pretty conventional liberalism in Hyde Park in the late 1990s. His seamless rhetorical transition to positions that made him a strong national candidate was one of his campaign's great accomplishments.
It's also, incidentally, quite a failure of opposition research, and reporting on his Columbia years, that this one hadn't turned up before.
UPDATE: My intern, Anna Phillips, emails that "the piece that Obama wrote for The Sundial was printed in full in the Nov./Dec. 2008 Columbia alumni magazine in the class notes section.... It's pretty funny that a bunch of journalists hunting through the Columbiana archives didn't find this gem, but the school's promotional magazine quietly printed it in its back pages."