WASHINGTON, 6 April 2007 — There’s a curious story making the rounds just when it’s been announced that Sen. Barack Obama has come in second in presidential campaign funding, with some $25 million, just shy of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign war chest of $26 million.
The story first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, and was then picked up by ABC News. The story involves a good high school chum of Sen. Obama, Keith Kakugawa. But the story of their friendship is ultimately tragic — Obama’s friend is now an out-of-prison drug addict living on the street.
Kakugawa is one of the most compelling characters in Obama’s best-selling memoir of his struggle with his racial identity. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama described Kakugawa, — half-black and half-Japanese and native Hawaiian — as an older-brother figure to Obama at their exclusive, mostly white Honolulu high school.
The two became friends, Obama wrote, “due in no small part to the fact that together we made up almost half of Punahou’s black high school population,” in a student body of about 1,700. Obama called Kakugawa “Ray” in the book to protect his privacy.
Through Obama’s freshman and sophomore years, the two were mutual sounding boards, notes both the WSJ and ABC News. While most whites at the high school remember “Barry” Obama as a carefree, popular student with a megawatt smile, Obama opened up more to Kakugawa about his absent father back in Africa, life with his white mother and grandparents, and their school’s, as well as Hawaii’s, dearth of black role models.
Kakugawa excelled at track and football, graduated in 1977 and left for the mainland with college scholarships. He quickly married, had two sons, finished college and divorced.
Kakugawa says he held a string of jobs and used cocaine. He has been convicted three times for possession and sale of drugs since the late 1990s, according to Los Angeles County Superior Court records. He admits he has spent much of the past six years in and out prison, mostly on charges related to cocaine possession and dealing.
“To be honest with you, to survive, I’ve moved drugs,” Kakugawa said.
Both men say they lost touch once Kakugawa, two years older than the 45-year-old Obama, left Hawaii for the mainland. Kakugawa says he knew little of Obama’s rise over the years, and hasn’t read Obama’s book, though someone told him several years ago that he was in it. About a year ago he learned Obama might run for president.
Obama has been reluctant to talk publicly about the hard times that have fallen upon his friend. “That’s a shame,” he told the Chicago Tribune when informed that Ray was then in prison. “Suddenly, everybody who’s ever touched my life is subject to a colonoscopy on the front page of the newspaper.”
Shortly after getting out of prison earlier this month, Kakugawa called Obama’s office. Kakugawa said: “This is Keith Kakugawa otherwise known as Ray in the book,” he says. The person who answered the phone, said: “Oh my God,’ and she, put me right in touch with him” on his cell phone.
“He just left the Senate floor,” Kakugawa says, growing emotional. “He asked about my dad — I told him I was proud of him.”
Obama told Kakugawa he had to go — he was heading for a campaign event — and put him in touch with an assistant, Devorah Adler, who helps the senator keep track of friends and family. Kakugawa says Adler told him, “Senator Obama would like to help you, what can we help you with immediately?”
And he said his response was simple: “Money.”
“I’m homeless,” Kakugawa told ABC News. “I sleep in a car. I ask everyone for money.” Kakugawa said he was struggling and needed help.
Obama declined to be interviewed about the conversation but said in an earlier interview that he recently became aware that Kakugawa had “serious issues.”
A campaign spokesman confirms the two men talked, adding, “It was a nice conversation between folks that knew each other a long time ago.”
The advisers suggested Kakugawa get help from social-service agencies, and that the Obama office would help with that. But he would not get money.
The exchange left Kakugawa upset. “Everybody’s just abandoned me,” he says.
But Obama campaign officials says Kakugawa’s comments were not as he is now portraying them. They say he threatened to tell negative stories about the senator to the media if money was not wired to him. Kakugawa denies this.
“Obviously [Sen. Obama] feels badly that Keith, 30 years later, has fallen on hard times,” said an Obama campaign aide. “There’s a sadness to this, a distinct human sadness to this story.”
