54 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyWelch: Yeah, but you were like selling, you know, Amway in college or something, weren’t
you?
Root: Is that what you think of me! And the best damned Amway salesman ever!
Welch: No, I’m sure that you were an outgoing young man, I’m just guessing.
Root: I am! That’s my point. Where was Obama? He wasn’t an outgoing young man, no one
ever heard of him.
Tim Cavanaugh: Maybe he was a late bloomer.
Root: Maybe. Or maybe he was involved in some sort of black radical politics.
Welch: Ooooooooooh.
Root: 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!
Welch: Wait, you weren’t smoking pot in your dorm room?
Root: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t. But I don’t hold that against anybody, but I wasn’t.... Nobody
recalls him. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not kidding.
Welch: Were you the exact same class?
Root: Class of ‘83 political science, pre-law Columbia University. You don’t get more exact
than that. Never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him. At the class reunion,
our 20th reunion five years ago, 20th reunion, who was asked to be the speaker of the class?
Me. No one ever heard of Barack! Who was he, and five years ago, nobody even knew who he
was.
Other guy: Did he even show up to the reunion?
Root: I don’t know! I didn’t know him. I don’t think anybody knew him. But 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.
Welch: That’s peculiar! Do you have any theories?”^13
In spite of his intent to deceive and dissemble, Obama has lavished praise on Zbigniew, as for
example in his first foreign policy speech in Iowa in 2007, when he called in Zbiggy to introduce
him. On this occasion, Obama paid homage to the Polish revanchist in effusive terms: “Brzezinski
is someone I have learned an immense amount from,” and “one of our most outstanding scholars
and thinkers.” The New York Times account of this critical and decisive phase in Obama’s life
stresses the obsessive secrecy with which the Obamakins attempt to shroud this entire phase.
Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an
undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces
only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the
metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.” He tells of
underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire
escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods”
bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to
multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself
with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.
He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior
year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet