Better late than never: one week before his inauguration, an article Barack Obama wrote for the now-defunct campus magazine The Sundial has finally surfaced in full on Politico. The article had first been excerpted in the class notes section of Columbia College’s alumni magazine’s November/December issue.

Written in the spring of 1983, just months before Obama’s graduation, the article lauds two campus groups – Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism – for their anti-war efforts. Declaring that “the more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience,” Obama compliments the two groups on bringing “the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.” Oh, and he quotes Peter Tosh, which Bwog considers nothing less than awesome.

As Politico puts it, “this is not exactly his best work, but it offers a new glimpse of his very conventional campus liberalism of the time.” Somehow, though, Bwog doubts this would’ve changed anyone’s vote.