Wayne Allen Root investigates, and can’t find anybody who remembers Obama from his days at Columbia U.,

Looking for evidence of Obama’s past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him.

Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983. In 2008, Root says of Obama, “I don’t know a single person at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me.

I don’t have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever! Nobody recalls him. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not kidding.”
Root adds that he was also, like Obama, “Class of ’83 political science, pre-law” and says, “You don’t get more exact or closer 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, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me.

No one ever heard of Barack! And five years ago, nobody even knew who he was. 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.” Obama’s photograph does not appear in the school’s yearbook and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia, provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia.

You know, as I’ve said before, I’m not really into the birther thing, but the more I actually see about Barack Obama’s past, the stranger it nevertheless seems.  While questions do not equal evidence, I still have to admit that there are a lot of unanswered questions that common sense would suggest shouldn’t really need to remain unanswered.

Why has Obama’s administration failed to produce an actual, genuine birth certificate, one that can be easily obtained from the county in which the birth was recorded for around $10 or so?  Why are the names of three different hospitals floated as places where he was born?  Why do many people over in Kenya claim to have seen his birth?   I don’t know the answer to any of these, but I’m sure there are perfectly good explanations for them all.

What about Obama’s disappearing act at Columbia?  His picture not appearing in yearbook isn’t all that instructive.  Once you get past my freshman year, I doubt that my picture would be in my undergrad university’s yearbook, since I don’t think I was all that interested in wasting the time to have it taken.   BUT.  There are tons of people – professors and students mostly – who would remember me from my undergraduate days.  When you go to college, you’re part of a community, and at a smaller college like Columbia University (which in 2009 admitted slightly less than 1900 students into its freshman class), people know each other, or at least know of each other.  Columbia’s admissions numbers were probably even smaller back in 1979, when Obama would have been entering as a freshman.  In fact, Columbia’s class sizes seem pretty comparable to my own undergrad university’s.  In neither school would a student who did anything besides sit in their dorm room 24/7/365 be an unknown.  Especially not someone as obviously outgoing and participatory as Barack Obama seems to be. 

A sampling of 400 students who were in school at the time Obama says he was, at a school that small, would be a large, inclusive sample.  400 out of, say, 7600 students (taking the 2009 number as a guide) is 5.26% of the putative student body, or slightly more than 1 out of 20 students from that period.  Somebody should remember him, on statistical odds alone. 

Yet they don’t. 

Granted, this doesn’t prove the contentions of the birthers.  But it is odd enough to make you pause and scratch your head.

As does the question of why Americans were dumb enough to elect an enigma wrapped up in mystery like Barack Obama.