The Time To Lead Is Later

Rachel Swarns of the Times delivers a comedy classic in trying to whitewash cover Obama's evolving views on affirmative action.  Over the past twenty years Obama has been all over the map, which is fair enough - people ought to be allowed to change their thinking as they accumulate new experiences and encounter new ideas.  However, as the Times reporting makes clear, most of Obama's new thinking seems to be about how best to position himself politically on this topic.

No matter - the biggest howler is in the fifth paragraph:

His ruminations about shifting the balance between race and class in some affirmative action programs raise the possibility that, if elected in November, he might foster a deeper national conversation about an issue that has been fiercely debated for decades. He declined to comment for this article.

I can hardly wait - Obama is so eager for a national conversation on affirmative action that he won't talk to the Times about it, but we can look to the day when he shines his light into the darkness of America's soul.  Please.

The Times appreciation (or anticipation) of Obama's nuance provides a nice companion piece to "Barack Obama's Lost Years" by Stanley Kurtz in the Weekly Standard.  There was a politician who favored minority set-asides!

MORE:  Obama has personal experience of the notion that affirmative action stigmatizes black achievement:

Mr. Obama was sympathetic to minority students who argued that affirmative action undermined them in the eyes of their white colleagues. But he said he never felt that way at Harvard.

“I have not personally felt stigmatized,” Mr. Obama wrote in his letter to the editor in 1990.

That changed after law school.

A federal judge once asked a friend of Mr. Obama’s whether he had been “elected on the merits” as law review president, Mr. Obama told The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2001. He said the question came up again when he applied for a job as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Obama has not described how he felt then. But as a state senator, he spoke with empathy about accomplished minority students at elite universities who sometimes lived “under a cloud they could not erase.”

However, Ms. Swarns can't make the intellectual leap necessary to connect that stigma to this:

Studies suggest that employers often favor white job seekers over black applicants, even when their educational backgrounds and work experiences are nearly identical.

I can't dredge up any links [Yes We Can!] but I am certain this was kicked around here a few years back, when an economist wrote about discrimination against people with "black-sounding" names in resumes that were mailed to prospective employers.  One of my points was that if the two people have seemingly equal resumes but one has had a consistent opportunity to benefit from affirmative action, than the resumes are not really equal, now are they?

PILING ON:  Donald Douglas of American Power details the link to the Kurtz piece.  Don Surber asks a rhetorical question, so I'll answer it:

Question: Did Republican Sen. John McCain benefit from affirmative action?

Answer: Nope.

Not so fast - John McCain benefited from a legacy preference at the Naval Academy, if "legacy preference" is broadly defined to include being given additional opportunities to have your sorry ass shot at.  Tricky call - Obama can go on for half an hour about service to the United States without ever mentioning military service, so maybe getting shot at is not a real benefit.

The North Vietnamese also offered McCain an early release based on his legacy status, but McCain turned then down.

 

Comments

[bad]

banks
schools
medical facilities
IRS

[Sara]

Shows you how dumb I am, I didn't know kids could have bank accounts in their own name and thought they had to have a joint account with a parent or guardian as long as they were minors.

Hmmm.

[bad]

DMV

[cathyf]

I'm actually intrigued by the whole story where some contractors were caught snooping in Obama's passport files, and then it turned out that they worked for a major Obama supporter, and had also snooped McCain's and Clinton's.

I would be pretty interested in what his passport says... In his book, Obama describes taking his original somewhat battered birth certificate to get his passport. Imagine that he was adopted by Soetero in about 1966 through the Hawaiian family courts. Then from that date forward (including today), any birth certification issued by the state would show Soetero's name, etc. But suppose that his grandparents never destroyed his original birth certificate, and that's what he used at the DMV when he was 16 (in 1977), and when he got his passport, etc. As far as I know, even now when we have lots of sophisticated tools to prevent identity theft, if you show up with your 1961 birth certificate then no one would think to check and make sure that it hasn't been superceded by an adoption later. But I'm pretty sure that in the late 70's when I got my first passport and first driver's license we showed the original documents.

But, anyway, even if Obama were adopted, he was still the natural-born child of a US citizen (Duham) and a foreigner (Obama Sr removed and replaced with Soetero). So still eligible to be president.

[Sara]

I don't think it is about citizenship. It could be about using fraudulent/invalid documents to identify your person. And using those documents to obtain other government documents that would then also be considered fraudulent or invalid.

Seems awfully stupid not to "fix" the situation legally when you decide to get into the public arena. He could have asked for a legal name change thru the courts, or even filed for an a.k.a. as his pseudonym.

If he used the original birth certificate, he was using a certificate that in the eyes of the law no longer existed.

What I don't get, is why all the secrecy? Just explain the situation, that your desire to be your father's son as an adult was what you wanted and you took the easy route. Wouldn't change his eligibility, although I don't know about his electability.

[M. Simon]

cathyf,

The States have ballot access laws. That is where the problem probably lies.

[Sara]

Wow, just wow, this thing is getting ugly.

OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE: FEC Commission Requesting Obama Investigation

[cathyf]

Those of us of a certain age (and Obama is old enough) remember staying home to watch the mini-series "Roots" -- it was a huge sensation. And we remember that when Alex Haley was accused of plagiarizing sections of the book, it was obvious that at least the oldest parts of the book were fiction, not fact. (And not even fiction authored by Haley.)

I still think that somehow this goes back to the extreme lameness of lying in your autobiography. But I'm still having a hard time imagining how this would work -- I just can't imagine anything that couldn't be spun as "I believed the self-serving fictions invented by my mom and didn't realize until seeing some of these documents that what she told me wasn't true." Look, everybody in America has a relative who "edits" his/her self-history, and is probably deluding him/her self first of all. (Have I told you the story about when my grandmother was on the bus crossing the Sierras and the bus had to stop and wait for the yeti to go across the road?) Obama telling some sympathetic reporter in an interview about how this left him sad and newly sympathetic to his mom... Look, all of the adult-at-the-time players in this drama other than his grandmother are dead, and not there to give their version of the story. So it's just really hard for me to imagine any "there" that could be there that couldn't be spun into a form ultimately sympathetic to Obama.

[Sara]

My maternal grandmother was famous for never giving her age the same way twice on any given document. It wasn't until 55 years after her death, when I got hold of her original birth certificate and we found out that she was actually 7 years older than my grandfather and never wanted him to know it. She lied on her marriage license, on her first driver's license, and in many other incidents where she had to give her age, even her death certificate, obit and tombstone are wrong because those left behind to give the info never had it right.

And does Grandma, of middle America Kansas, even know the truth? It wouldn't have been easy socially to have a daughter as an unwed mother in 1961, it was still very taboo. Add in the mixed race issue, also taboo in 1961, and you've got the prescription for lots of elaborate stories and cover-ups.

[cathyf]

Yeah, Sara, but in his autobiography he talks about all of these things which were taboo in 1961, and I just can't imagine anything that is really any worse than what he already talks about freely. I keep coming back to the fact that a significant part of his schtick (and what Jesse Jackson was threatening to castrate him for) is that he complains about parents who are irresponsible towards their children. I just can't come up with any scenario with the COLB that doesn't just reinforce his message (other than him not being a native-born citizen, but I'm sorry I can't believe that even someone as monstrously narcissistic as Obama would put the country through that.)

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