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My White Girlfriend Inspired Obama's Big, Dark Regina in Dreams from My Father
American Thinker
John Drew
7/17/2012
Excerpt:
"As far as I know, I am the only person in the world willing to verify young Barack Obama was an ardent Marxist-Leninist. My face-to-face report on how I confronted young Obama's ideological extremism is now featured in Paul Kengor's new book, The Communist - Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor.
Bloggers who have sought to discredit my story have asserted that I never met young Obama, that I was not part of young Obama's inner circle of friends, and that I was in no position to verify his most private ideological views. I am expecting these fragile defenses of young Obama's credentials as a pragmatic centrist will fall apart now that David Maraniss's Barack Obama: The Story reveals that the Occidental College girlfriend who introduced me to young Obama was one of the inspirations for the composite character "Regina" in Obama's Dreams from My Father. True, Regina appears in Dreams as "a big, dark woman," but why deny Obama a little poetic license?
According to Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Obama created Regina out of the European adventures of a young black female student at Occidental named Sarah Etta-Harris, the Chicago family stories of Michelle Robinson -- the President's future wife, and anti-apartheid activism of my then 22 year-old white girlfriend, Caroline Boss (now Caroline Grauman-Boss). This somewhat disconcerting news came to my attention last month along with the even more telling news that the name Regina was the name of Boss's real life grandmother, a Swiss woman who worked as a maid. In Dreams, you may recall, Regina is such a central figure in young Obama's life that, along with Obama's Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, she is remembered as one of the key reasons why young Obama chose to become a community organizer.
When I first read Dreams in 2008, I remember thinking the character of Regina reminded me of Boss, a girl I dated and lived with -- off and on -- for slightly over two years between the Spring of 1979 and the Spring of 1981. Much of the information I have shared about my relationship with Boss has recently been published in Paul Kengor's new book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor. There, Kengor reports on my romance with Boss along with details of a heated debate over the 1980 Christmas break where I confronted the impracticality of her and Obama's anticipation of an inevitable Communist revolution.
Obama introduces composite Regina by writing: "I had seen her around before, usually sitting in the library with book in hand, a big, dark woman who wore stockings and dresses that looked homemade, along with tinted, oversized glasses and a scarf always covering her head." (Dreams, pp. 103-104.) In contrast to this description, I can report the real Regina was a fun, scintillating, hyper-extraverted figure on the Occidental College campus. In contrast to the seriousness of Michelle Obama, I would say the young Caroline Boss was more like that character played by Lisa Kurdow on Friends -- the fiercely independent, quirky, nurturing Phoebe Buffay.
Like Phoebe, Boss had long blond hair which she wore pinned back in a bun or twisted up in a pony tail. Her posture was terrible. When she stood up at her full 5'8" height, however, she was somewhat taller than me -- especially in her clogs. By the time Boss introduced me to young Obama -- whom she had known for almost one year -- she was a thin, almost anorexic girl. I remember she dressed like a hippie from the 1960s, complete with a woven ankle bracelet, blouses that reflected her Swiss heritage, and big colorful Indian print skirts. Boss did wear big sunglasses. She was also fond of wearing scarves round her neck. I cannot remember her ever wearing a scarf over her head. What I recall best about her clothing was that she had a habit of wearing shirts tucked inside bulky light blue overalls. I clearly remember the real Regina also had a sensible, if somewhat guilty, appreciation for the superior fit of designer jeans from Gloria Vanderbilt.
In contrast to the composite Regina, Boss was a Marxist and a socialist looking forward to a Communist revolution in the United States. She believed this revolution would be the inevitable result of larger social forces working through the dialectic logic of Marx's scientific socialism. In the end, however, I do not remember Boss so much as a campus Stalinist leader as I remember her as an uninhibited girl with a permanent, mischievous smile who pushed the boundaries of social norms. I remember Boss appeared in her own Occidental magazine, Tattooed Lady, as a tasteful nude in a manner that still reminds me of Gwyneth Paltrow in the film Great Expectations. Consistent with my circle of radical friends at Occidental, Boss enjoyed mixing Marxist feminist politics with art, literature, film and photography. Accordingly, I am not surprised Maraniss indicates Boss was the model scout who introduced young Obama to Lisa Jack, the student photographer who captured him posing, Choom Gang-style, with a cigarette on his lips and a straw hat on his head."
.....................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...my_father.html
American Thinker
John Drew
7/17/2012
Excerpt:
"As far as I know, I am the only person in the world willing to verify young Barack Obama was an ardent Marxist-Leninist. My face-to-face report on how I confronted young Obama's ideological extremism is now featured in Paul Kengor's new book, The Communist - Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor.
Bloggers who have sought to discredit my story have asserted that I never met young Obama, that I was not part of young Obama's inner circle of friends, and that I was in no position to verify his most private ideological views. I am expecting these fragile defenses of young Obama's credentials as a pragmatic centrist will fall apart now that David Maraniss's Barack Obama: The Story reveals that the Occidental College girlfriend who introduced me to young Obama was one of the inspirations for the composite character "Regina" in Obama's Dreams from My Father. True, Regina appears in Dreams as "a big, dark woman," but why deny Obama a little poetic license?
According to Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Obama created Regina out of the European adventures of a young black female student at Occidental named Sarah Etta-Harris, the Chicago family stories of Michelle Robinson -- the President's future wife, and anti-apartheid activism of my then 22 year-old white girlfriend, Caroline Boss (now Caroline Grauman-Boss). This somewhat disconcerting news came to my attention last month along with the even more telling news that the name Regina was the name of Boss's real life grandmother, a Swiss woman who worked as a maid. In Dreams, you may recall, Regina is such a central figure in young Obama's life that, along with Obama's Communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, she is remembered as one of the key reasons why young Obama chose to become a community organizer.
When I first read Dreams in 2008, I remember thinking the character of Regina reminded me of Boss, a girl I dated and lived with -- off and on -- for slightly over two years between the Spring of 1979 and the Spring of 1981. Much of the information I have shared about my relationship with Boss has recently been published in Paul Kengor's new book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor. There, Kengor reports on my romance with Boss along with details of a heated debate over the 1980 Christmas break where I confronted the impracticality of her and Obama's anticipation of an inevitable Communist revolution.
Obama introduces composite Regina by writing: "I had seen her around before, usually sitting in the library with book in hand, a big, dark woman who wore stockings and dresses that looked homemade, along with tinted, oversized glasses and a scarf always covering her head." (Dreams, pp. 103-104.) In contrast to this description, I can report the real Regina was a fun, scintillating, hyper-extraverted figure on the Occidental College campus. In contrast to the seriousness of Michelle Obama, I would say the young Caroline Boss was more like that character played by Lisa Kurdow on Friends -- the fiercely independent, quirky, nurturing Phoebe Buffay.
Like Phoebe, Boss had long blond hair which she wore pinned back in a bun or twisted up in a pony tail. Her posture was terrible. When she stood up at her full 5'8" height, however, she was somewhat taller than me -- especially in her clogs. By the time Boss introduced me to young Obama -- whom she had known for almost one year -- she was a thin, almost anorexic girl. I remember she dressed like a hippie from the 1960s, complete with a woven ankle bracelet, blouses that reflected her Swiss heritage, and big colorful Indian print skirts. Boss did wear big sunglasses. She was also fond of wearing scarves round her neck. I cannot remember her ever wearing a scarf over her head. What I recall best about her clothing was that she had a habit of wearing shirts tucked inside bulky light blue overalls. I clearly remember the real Regina also had a sensible, if somewhat guilty, appreciation for the superior fit of designer jeans from Gloria Vanderbilt.
In contrast to the composite Regina, Boss was a Marxist and a socialist looking forward to a Communist revolution in the United States. She believed this revolution would be the inevitable result of larger social forces working through the dialectic logic of Marx's scientific socialism. In the end, however, I do not remember Boss so much as a campus Stalinist leader as I remember her as an uninhibited girl with a permanent, mischievous smile who pushed the boundaries of social norms. I remember Boss appeared in her own Occidental magazine, Tattooed Lady, as a tasteful nude in a manner that still reminds me of Gwyneth Paltrow in the film Great Expectations. Consistent with my circle of radical friends at Occidental, Boss enjoyed mixing Marxist feminist politics with art, literature, film and photography. Accordingly, I am not surprised Maraniss indicates Boss was the model scout who introduced young Obama to Lisa Jack, the student photographer who captured him posing, Choom Gang-style, with a cigarette on his lips and a straw hat on his head."
.....................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...my_father.html