September 5, 2008: Libertarian Vice Presidential Candidate Says ‘No One’ Remembers Obama at Columbia University, Calls Obama ‘Marxist,’ ‘Communist’

Wayne Allyn Root. [Source: NNDB (.com)]Wayne Allyn Root, a millionaire businessman, Las Vegas sports bettor, and right-wing talk show host who is running for president on the Libertarian ticket alongside former Republican congressman Robert “Bob” Barr, lambasts Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-IL) as a “Marxist” and “communist” whose “mother was a card-carrying communist… he says she’s the most important person in his entire life; he learned everything from her.” Root is most interested in casting doubt that Obama ever attended Columbia University from 1981 to 1983; Obama graduated with an undergraduate degree from that university at the same time Root attended it. Root promises a million dollars that if Obama did attend Columbia, he had a lower grade point average than Root had, and claims that the only reason Obama was allowed to attend Harvard Law School was because of the color of his skin. Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1991. “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,” Root claims. “I don’t have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever!… No one ever heard of him.” Root then speculates that Obama “maybe… was involved in some sort of black radical politics.… Maybe he was too busy smoking pot in his dorm room to ever show up for class. I don’t know what he was doing!” Root notes that he graduated with a political science degree, the same degree Obama has, in 1983, and “[n]ever met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him.” Root says he was asked to be “speaker of the class” at the 20th class reunion, not Obama, who apparently did not attend the reunion. “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.” Root speculates that Obama had some sort of racial “identity crisis” that precluded him from socializing with many people. “All my buddies are white, what can I tell you! They don’t know him, nobody’s ever seen him, I don’t know what to tell you.… I mean, when I went to Columbia, the black kids were all at like tables going, ‘Black power!’ We used to walk by and go, ‘What the hell are they talking about?’ And they didn’t associate with us and we didn’t associate with them. So if you track down a couple of black students, they’ll probably know him. But nobody white’s ever heard of this guy. It’s quite amazing. Nobody remembers him. They don’t remember him sitting in class.” Root finds the Obama campaign’s refusal to release Obama’s Columbia student transcript “suspicious,” and says he is willing to bet “a million dollars cash… that my GPA was better than Barack’s… and he got in [to Harvard Law School] based on the color of his skin.… He had a lower average than me and he got into Harvard and I didn’t.” Root uses the opportunity to claim that America has never been unfair to minorities; instead, he says: “It was unfair to me. A white butcher’s kid, whose father had no money, but nobody gave me a break. And do I have a chip on my shoulder? You’re damn right I do. And I represent millions and millions of poor people in this country who weren’t lucky enough to be poor and black, they were unlucky enough to be poor and white, and they can’t get into Harvard. So maybe that country Barack’s fighting for, he’s got the wrong country here. He’s been just fine in this country. The rest of us need someone to defend them.… I’m for affirmative action—I think the NBA [National Basketball Association] should be 80 percent white.” He concludes, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” [Reason, 9/5/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 2/10/2011]