Who was quoted as saying that he "bragged about being a foreign student" 30 years ago?
Someone with an agenda now might remember him saying something about family in Kenya, and decide to phrase it as "bragged about being a foreign student." The "brag" part gives it away.
Speculation on your part.
A woman who claims to have been a classmate
delivered some bizarre claims about President Barack Obama in an interview.
As Right Wing Watch first reported, Mia Marie Pope told right-wing preacher James David Manning that she believes that Obama was not only active within the gay community, but also a heavy cocaine user during his years in Hawaii.
"He always portrayed himself as a foreign student," Pope said. "Girls were never anything that he ever was interested in ... He would get with these older white gay men, and this is how we just pretty much had the impression that that's how he was procuring his cocaine."
Obama Was A Cocaine-Using Gay Hustler Says Woman Who Claims To Have Been Hawaiian Classmate
Or we could listen to what actual classmates and teachers of his say- you know ones who are in the yearbook with him- instead of some woman who has no proof she ever even met Barack Obama
His Basketball coach
"He was what I would call a ‘Basketball Jones,'" says
Chris McLachlin '64 who coached the lanky teen during his senior year on the Varsity team. "That's a person who lives, eats, and sleeps with their basketball: they dribble it to school, they dribble it between classes, they shoot baskets on Middle Field during lunch. And Barry had that real love and passion for the game."
"
Played forward, he was a smasher, driver, post-up, rebounder kind of guy. Also very good at one-on-one moves, very creative. He just loved the game, would play it 24/7 if he could. One of only a handful of kids I’ve ever coached in 38 years of coaching who would dribble his basketball around with him during school. First to arrive at practice, last one to leave."
Tony Peterson, Basketball Friend
There were only five black kids out of 1,600. I used to get to school early; I'd see Barry and he'd say: 'Let's go shoot some hoops' and we'd play pick-up basketball together. He was a bit chubby but far better than me. Rik, Barry and myself jockeyed around and talked casually, and realised that here we are, intelligent black men, and we could have some good conversations.
Barry was 14, younger than the other two. He was bright, Tony recalls, but not especially charismatic, so Tony was amazed later to see how magnetic his friend had become, watching him on TV. They talked about girls and about race. Would the white and Asian girls date them, those black boys? (They would.) Why was a young black man with a book perceived to be "acting white"? Would there ever be a black president of the United States? Not in their lifetime, they concluded. They couldn't imagine it.
Burt Heilbron, Classmate
"The Barry you saw back then, he was a little bit different ... not out in the limelight," said Burt Heilbron, another classmate, who is vice president of Hawaiian Agents Inc., a product warehousing and distribution company. "He was not outspoken, but always a very well-liked person at Punahou."
Bobby Titcomb, Classmate
His pals say he hasn't changed. "He's honest, he's truthful and he's always encouraged the better things in you," says Bobby Titcomb. "And you always go back to those people who water your plant, who water your garden."
Titcomb recalls when the two friends would take off by themselves into the Hawaiian forest. "We'd go hike up Peacock Flats and camp, just the two of us," he says. "We'd try to get away from everything. We'd basically live on nuts and whatever we could eat on the trail for two or three days. And we'd talk about how the world could be. We didn't say, Wouldn't it be great if we could drive this car or if I could own this house. It was, Don't you think the world should be more like this?"