Transparency: A former classmate has added a tantalizing question to the mysteries surrounding Barack Obama's college years. Perhaps the GOP nominee, whose tax records are demanded, should call the president's bluff.
Not many students whose grades supposedly were good enough to get into Harvard Law School can say that 400 of their classmates taken randomly don't remember a single thing about him or his even being there. But Barack Obama, Columbia University class of '83, can.
Student Obama spent two years at Columbia after transferring there from Occidental College in Los Angeles. And for all the impression he made on his classmates, he might as well have been in the witness protection program.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News called that random group of 400 Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.
Like most transfer students, Obama lived off-campus, a factoid defenders use to explain his apparent lack of human contact during his Columbia years. Obama himself does not speak much about his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, other than he attended both and was elected president of the Harvard Law Review.
Interestingly, Obama contributed not one signed word to the Harvard Law Review or any other legal publication. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at anytime." A curious factoid for an alleged scholar.
In October 2007, the New York Times ran a piece titled "Obama's Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say," which would have won the Pulitzer Prize for understatements if there was one.
The article noted that Obama, when asked, "declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."
Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast One of those fellow students is Wayne Allen Root, former Libertarian vice presidential nominee. He wonders, as we do, what's in Obama's Columbia file that warrants standards of secrecy higher than, say, the details of the Osama bin Laden raid or our efforts to derail Iran's nuclear program with a computer virus.
Root asks if Obama's grades were good enough to get into Columbia. We have a copy of Mitt Romney's high school report card, which was deemed by the Boston Globe important enough to reveal to the world, but President Obama's Columbia transcripts remain a mystery.
Root asks another question, namely how did young Obama, raised by a single mom and from a modest background, pay for all this education? Root wonders if one of the secrets in Columbia's files is perhaps an application for aid given to poor foreign students.
Root has been dismissed in some quarters as a "birther," and we too might dismiss him out of hand if not for the fact that so much of what Obama has said about himself is not true. Recently we asked the question, "Is President Obama A Pathological Liar?" and provided tales he has told about himself that are simply false.
We've also noted that Obama waited five years to apply to Harvard Law. As World Net Daily reports, from 1985 to 1988 he worked as a consultant and trainer for a subsidiary of Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, founded on the principles of Saul "The Red" Alinsky. On the board of Gamaliel sat Northwestern University professor John McKnight, a student of Alinsky's radical tactics.
Getting into Harvard Law School is not easy. Mc-Knight wrote Obama a letter of recommendation after Obama begged him for one. But why didn't Obama's college grades speak for themselves and cause the scholar to be drowning in scholarships?
Suggestion to Mitt Romney: Agree to release all your tax returns if President Obama releases all the records pertaining to his college years.