Discriminations

Revisionist interpretations of the Obama phenomenon are already appearing ... even before there is an Obama administration.

ÜberBlogger Glenn Reynolds points to a Washington Post article today proclaiming that Obama’s “Not Black,” and observes:

Hmm. Gates reappointed at Defense, an Iraq-Hawk Secretary of State, keeping the tax cuts, and now the next President turns out not to be black — hey, they told me if I voted for McCain we’d get a third term for Bush, and I guess they were right!

Elsewhere he points to a Los Angeles Times blog discussion of a new report from the Campaign Finance Institute revealing that “Obama’s small donor base image is a myth.”

Everybody knows how President-elect Barack Obama’s amazing campaign money machine was dominated by several million regular folks sending in hard-earned amounts under $200, a real sign of his broadbased grassroots support.

Except, it turns out, that’s not really true.

In fact, Obama’s base of small donors was almost exactly the same percent as George W. Bush’s in 2004 -- Obama had 26% and the great Republican satan 25%. Obviously, this is unacceptable to current popular thinking.

If this sort of analysis continues, pretty soon Tom Friedman and the New York Times will be giving Obama credit for victory in Iraq.

Oh, wait.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, even George Will can be wrong, even when he is agreeing with someone who is as seldom wrong as Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth Circuit.

In a recent column Will praises Wilkinson for damning — in a Virginia Law Review article — the Supreme Court’s Heller decision of last June, which held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and bear arms. Wilkinson, amplified by Will, argues that Heller was bad for he same reasons that Roe v. Wade was bad.

Writing for the Virginia Law Review, Judge Wilkinson ... says that Heller, like Roe, was disrespectful of legislative judgments, has hurled courts into a political thicket of fine-tuning policy in interminable litigation and traduced federalism. Furthermore, Heller exposed “originalism” -- the doctrine that the Constitution’s text means precisely what those who wrote its words meant by them -- as no barrier to “judicial subjectivity.”
....
In Roe, the court said that the 14th Amendment guarantee of “due process” implies a general right of privacy, within which lurks a hitherto unnoticed abortion right that, although it is “fundamental,” the Framers never mentioned. And this right somehow contains the trimester scheme of abortion regulations.

Since 1973 the court has been entangled in the legislative function of adumbrating an abortion code the details of which are, Wilkinson says, “not even remotely suggested by the text or history of the 14th Amendment.” Parental consent? Spousal consent? Spousal notification? Parental notification? Waiting periods? Lack of funding for nontherapeutic abortions? Partial-birth abortion procedures? Zoning ordinances that exclude abortion facilities? The court has tried to tickle answers for these and other policy questions from the Constitution.

Conservatives are correct: The court, having asserted a right on which the Constitution is silent, has been writing rules that are detailed, debatable, inescapably arbitrary and irreducibly political. But now, Wilkinson says, conservatives are delighted that Heller has put the court on a similar path.

In Heller, the court was at least dealing with a right the Constitution actually mentions. But the majority and minority justices demonstrated that there are powerful, detailed, historically grounded “originalist” arguments for opposite understandings of what the Framers intended with that right to “keep and bear arms.”

Now the court must slog through an utterly predictable torrent of litigation, writing, piecemeal, a federal gun code concerning the newfound individual right. What trigger locks or other safety requirements impermissibly burden the exercise of this right? What registration requirements, background checks, waiting periods for purchasers, ballistic identifications? What restrictions on ammunition? On places where guns may be purchased or carried? On the kinds of people (e.g., those with records of domestic violence) who may own guns? On the number of gun purchases in a month?

Will/Wilkinson conclude — rather extremely, in my view — that unless either the Constitutional text or the intent of the framers is unequivocal, judges must defer to other branches of government.

Judicial conservatism requires judges to justify their decisions with reference to several restraining principles, including deference to the democratic branches of government and to states’ responsibilities under federalism. But, Wilkinson writes, Heller proves that when the only principle is originalism and when conscientious people come to different conclusions about the Framers’ intentions, originalist judges must resolve the conflict by voting their policy preferences.

One problem here, among others, is that neither text nor intent is often unequivocal, and conscientious people can come to different conclusions regarding just about everything and anything. Indeed, legislators differ over the proper interpretation of the legislation they wrote; ordinary citizens, conscientious all, frequently differ over the interpretation of contracts they signed; etc. If judges had to defer to other branches every time “conscientious people come to different conclusions” about the constitutionality of challenged measures, they would never decide anything.

What both Will and Wilkinson miss here, surprisingly, is the fact that there are reasonable, conscientious arguments on both (or even many) sides of an issue doesn’t mean that some arguments aren’t better than others, nor does it mean that when faced with conflicting, reasonable arguments judges must choose between deferring to other branches or letting their own policy preferences run wild. It is possible, in short, for a judge to decide that one well-reasoned, conscientious argument is better than another well-reasoned, conscientious argument even when the better argument leads to a result that, as a matter of policy, the judge opposes. Not only is that possible; it’s done all the time, as I’m sure Judge Wilkinson knows better than most.

Fortunately Judge Wilkinson doesn’t practice what he preaches here (Will, a mere ink stained wretch, doesn’t practice anything). Consider, for example, what he has written, widely and well, and decided about affirmative action preferences. In one of his better known opinions, for example, writing for the Fourth Circuit majority in J.A. Croson Co. v. City of Richmond 822 F.2d 1355 (1987), he had no trouble in refusing to defer to Richmond’s policy of requiring a racial quota for city contractors. As summarized by a succinct Stanford review of his decisions, in Croson:

Judge Wilkinson held that in order to show the compelling government interest necessary to justify the plan, the city must show prior discrimination by the city itself, not merely broad-based historical discrimination. Otherwise, the plan would constitute a bald dispensation of public funds and employment based on the politics of race. Judge Wilkinson held that the city failed to show a firm basis for believing it had engaged in past discrimination that required remedial action.

Further, even if remedial action was necessary, Judge Wilkinson held that the plan was not narrowly tailored to any remedial goal because the 30% quota was the product of arbitrary choice and bore no relationship to the percentage of minority-owned businesses in the city. Therefore, the quota imposed an overbroad competitive burden on non-minority businesses.

Judge Wilkinson’s opinion, with its holding that an organization may engage in racially preferential hiring only to correct its own past discrimination, was, as everyone knows, upheld by the Supremes. But surely Judge Wilkinson, gracious gentleman that he is, did not believe the Richmond city councilmen who instituted quota hiring and the able lawyers they hired to represent them were lacking in conscientiousness. Nor would he be so churlish as to suggest that his colleagues who disagreed with his Fourth Circuit opinion, or Justices Marshall and Blackmun who dissented from Justice O’Connor’s opinion for the Supreme Court, were lacking in conscientious, reasonable arguments. He certainly could not find in the text or history of the 14th Amendment any compelling evidence that it allows an employer to discriminate to correct his past discrimination but not “societal” discrimination. Similarly, I’m sure, Judge Wilkinson would readily acknowledge that the 14th Amendment nowhere mentions “narrow tailoring,” nor can he doubt that the framers of that Amendment had no intention whatsoever to ban all race preferences. Still, he showed no hesitation, and since has shown no remorse, for refusing to defer to the democratic decision of local authorities in this case.

Nor has Judge Wilkinson’s determined refusal to defer to local decision-makers’ reasonable, conscientious interpretations of ambiguous, somewhat open-ended Constitutional commands been limited to Croson. In fact, there is no more eloquent, no more persuasive root and branch refutation of his criticism of the Heller majority than the praise he recently heaped on the opinions by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas in Parents Involved, lauding the Court’s holding in that case that Seattle and Louisville could not assign students to schools by race.

Judge Wilkinson, meet Judge Wilkinson. Parents Involved, the latter Judge Wilkinson writes in the Harvard Law Review,

goes a considerable way toward affirming that our common citizenship and shared humanity transcend differences of ethnicity and race and that a Republic riddled with race-conscious decisionmaking is not what America aspires to be....

These are noble “aspirations,” and I for one agree with them, but his reserving to the courts to choose certain aspirations over others does not comport with the exaggerated judicial deference commanded by his Heller critique. Thus it could be said with equal force (indeed has been said with great force), that neither does America aspire to be a nation where the state can disarm its citizens, limited only by its own discretion, but I’ll come back to that later. The question here is not the question of “what America aspires to be,” but who has the authority to determine what aspirations shall control.

Judge Wilkinson confronted head on the very sort of objections to his argument that he made against Heller, and he was not impressed. “It will be said,” he predicted, accurately,

that the Court forsook not only its traditions but also its respect for precedent; that a Court majority ostensibly opposed to activism was all too ready to practice it....

These arguments “are not without poignancy and force,” he admitted, and

the Supreme Court majority must have known for a certainty that all this and more was coming. It took some courage therefore for the Court plurality to express itself in such unequivocal terms. The Court could have seized upon some narrow defect in means and left it at that....

But the Roberts opinion to its credit did much more. The concessions it made were only those recent precedent required it to make. It limited the nonremedial state interest of diversity to the expressive interests unique to higher education. It characterized the school boards’ interest, by contrast, as that of simple racial balancing which, were it accepted as compelling, “would justify the imposition of racial proportionality throughout American society.” The opinion courted a powerful dissent which it then took on in hard-nosed terms. It praised Brown v. Board of Education as unambiguously committed to the rejection of all forms of discrimination based on race. And finally: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

There are great risks in this sort of ringing clarity, particularly in an area so burdened by history, so fraught with contemporary controversy, and so open to strong opposing argument. But there are far greater risks in failing to defend a principle that is not easily sliced and diced or otherwise compromised....

And what, readers of Judge Wilkinson’s Heller critique and others are entitled to ask, is that principle, where does it come from, and who should be its final arbiter? Again, Judge Wilkinson himself here forthrightly steps up to the plate and slams the other Judge Wilkinson’s Heller reservations right out of the park:

The whole sad saga of the early African American experience teaches that racial decisions by the state remain unique in their capacity to demean. To squeeze human beings of varying talents, interests, and backgrounds into an undifferentiated category of race is to submerge what should matter most about us under what should matter least. To seize upon this one proven odious criterion of judgment as the basis for preferment of some and disfavor for others, and as a potential determinant of the destiny of all, is to commit this country to the perpetuation of means employed in the darkest hours of its history. From this, the Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to be the instrument of deliverance....

.... Race and religion are the great potential dividers in America — just as the Establishment Clause inhibits governmental preferences based on religion, the Fourteenth Amendment inhibits governmental preferences based on race....

DISCRIMINATIONS Readers will find this argument familiar, and know that I fervently agree with it. They will also know that far feebler analysts than Judge Wilkinson have made essentially the same argument. My problem, in short, is not that I don’t agree with Judge Wilkinson’s argument here — indeed, I do, fervently, and his argument is far stronger than my excerpts can reveal — but that the Judge Wilkinson who criticized Heller as an activist decision based on a hotly contested Constitutional premise does not.

Look again at this both compelling and revealing sentence:

The whole sad saga of the early African American experience teaches that racial decisions by the state remain unique in their capacity to demean.

I agree; it does, but the Heller-criticizing Judge Wilkinson would no doubt reply, “Yes, but whom does it teach? Surely the Seattle and Louisville school authorities, their lawyers, and the many fine judges who agree with them have also conscientiously learned their American history, and what authorizes a bare 5-4 majority of unelected judges to tell them they’re wrong?”

In one sense it is odd that Judge Wilkinson is so unabashedly hostile to the Heller majority’s holding on the meaning of the 2nd Amendment, since over the past few decades that view has become so accepted in legal academia that it has come to be called the “Standard Model.” (Heller, asserts a recent treatise, “effectively endorses the so-called Standard Model view of the Second Amendment.”) That does not mean that it is uncontested, or that there are no reasonable, conscientious scholars who disagree, but it has by now commanded a broad consensus including not only conservative scholars but such well-known liberals as Laurence Tribe, Akhil Amar, and Sandy Levinson. There is certainly a much broader consensus today among not only constitutional scholars but a vast majority of the public that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right than there was in 1954 that the 14th Amendment commanded an end to school segregation.

And speaking of the 14th Amendment (which all Judge Wilkinsons with whom I am familiar do so eloquently), let me conclude by noting that I also find it surprising — almost to the point of being inexplicable — why Judge Wilkinson has not been persuaded by Prof. Amar’s compelling demonstration, in THE BILL OF RIGHTS: CREATION AND RECONSTRUCTION , summarized eloquently by this recent Harvard Law Review article, that, whatever the “original meaning” of the 2nd Amendment, the combination of the virtually contemporaneous and immediately subsequent state constitution treatments of citizens and their arms and then the 14th Amendment itself have confirmed that the pervasive understanding of the American people is that the Constitution granted them an individual right to bear arms. (If you read only one article on the 2nd Amendment, and especially on Heller, read this article by Amar.)

Under proper originalist and textualist ground rules, the Constitution should indeed be read to protect an individual right to have a gun at home for self-defense....... [T]he key is to read the Constitution in a holistic fashion and to widen our analysis beyond the Second Amendment....

The Ninth Amendment’s text does not quite say that “the enumeration in the Constitution of certain purposes of rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other purposes for those rights.” But it does say something rather similar, and it was designed to reassure the American public that the fundamental rights that they believed they already had would not be lost merely because only some of these rights were explicitly enumerated or because others were narrowly worded. Even if the English common law right of self-defense was different than the Second Amendment right, many Americans in the Founding era may have believed they had both rights — and the Ninth Amendment was designed to reassure such Americans that unduly narrow interpretations of the protected rights would be disfavored. And even if later Americans in the antebellum period were demonstrably mistaken about the correct reading of the Second Amendment as originally understood, their widespread mistake about the scope of their fundamental rights and their evident celebration of an individual right of arms for self-defense should be protected by the Ninth Amendment.

Now add the Fourteenth Amendment to the mix. This Amendment proclaimed that all citizens would be protected in all their fundamental “privileges” and “immunities” — that is, in all their most essential rights and freedoms. The Amendment explicitly protected these fundamental freedoms against states (“No state shall . . .”), but its drafters and ratifiers also believed and said that the federal government was equally obliged to respect these fundamental rights. Reconstruction Republicans insisted that these fundamental rights inhered in the very fact of American citizenship. These rights thus found shelter in the sweeping text of the Fourteenth Amendment’s first sentence, which proclaimed all those born or naturalized in America to be full and equal citizens at both the state and federal level. To be a citizen was ipso facto to have fundamental rights, and this basic principle went without saying where rights against the federal government were concerned....

The Fourteenth Amendment did not itemize the privileges and immunities of American citizenship. Instead, like the Ninth, the Fourteenth invited interpreters to pay close attention to fundamental rights that Americans had affirmed through their lived experience and had memorialized in state bills of rights and in other canonical texts such as the Declaration of Independence and landmark civil rights legislation. And when it came to guns, a landmark companion statute to the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted by Congress in 1866, declared that “the right . . . to have full and equal benefit of all laws . . . concerning personal liberty [and] personal security . . . including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens.” Here, in sharp contrast to the general tenor of Founding-era legal texts, the “bear arms” phrase was decisively and undeniably severed from the military context in a high-profile legal setting. Women as well as men could claim a “personal” right to protect their “personal liberty” and “personal security” in their homes. (Note the Fourth Amendment–style language and imagery infusing this restatement of the “bear arms” rights.) The Reconstruction-era Congress emphasized that Southern blacks might need guns in their homes to protect themselves from private violence in places where they could not rely on local constables to keep their neighborhoods safe. When guns were outlawed, only outlaw Klansmen would have guns. This critical chapter in the history of American liberty furnishes compelling evidence of an individual right to have a gun in one’s home, regardless of the original meaning of the Second Amendment.

Given the eloquence, power, and force of Judge Wilkinson’s usual evocation of the compelling meaning of the 14th Amendment, his failure to consider the large impact of that Amendment on the meaning of the 2nd Amendment leaves a disappointing and uncharacteristic hollowness at the core of his Heller criticism.

UPDATE [9 December]

Nelson Lund of the George Mason law school and David Kopel of the Independence Institute have a similar, but much more thorough, criticism of Judge Wilkinson’s Heller critique, Unraveling Judicial Restraint: Guns, Abortion, and the Faux Conservatism of J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, here. That link will take you to the abstract; you can download the full text here.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you stay tuned, or check back later, you will discover that I am on the verge of doing something I don’t usually do: criticizing George Will. (Unusual, but not unheard of; see here.) Before getting to that post, however, I want to say in this one that one of the things we have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving day is ... George Will. If he didn’t exist, in this day and age I’m not sure it would be possible to invent him, or someone like him: an erudite, deeply informed conservative scholar who writes an important, widely read column at a major newspaper with wit, style, and grace.

Today’s column is no exception, skewering as it does the scholarly skunk, Stanley Fish, as “an intellectual provocateur with a taste for safe targets” who, using “slippery language,” wraps himself in the mantle of bravery while attacking “straw men” and who, while enjoying “seeming to be naughty, tamely opts for dogmatic denial” that the twin icons on “today’s academic altar,” race and gender, pose any threats to academic integrity.

Actually, Will went a bit easy on Fish. For some other points he could have made, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

According to this report, Democrats “are pouring millions of dollars as we speak in Georgia to win this special election and elect the liberal Democratic candidate Jim Martin.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that

Obama is keeping 25 of his Georgia field offices open for Martin, leaving most of his in-state paid staff on the ground here and importing about 100 field operatives from Southern states to help Martin, according to Matt Canter, a spokesman for Martin’s campaign.

The New York Times reports this weekend that

Republicans are approaching the [Georgia race] with a new sense of urgency given that they are on the brink of losing their ability to use Senate procedure to thwart Democrats or force them into negotiations.

But I have a question: if President Obama really wants to be inclusive, to be a healer, to move beyond bitter partisanship, why is he trying so hard to achieve a vetofilibuster-proof Senate majority?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Many observers have noted that Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as Attorney General and Greg Craig as White House Counsel has brought the deportation of young Elian Gonzalez to Cuba back into the news. Holder was deputy attorney general when federal agents broke down the door of Elian’s relatives in Miami and seized the boy at gunpoint. Craig represented Elian’s father, who had remained in Cuba when his wife and son escaped.

Now that Hillary is to be Secretary of State, however, it is worth pointing out that during that sad affair she executed one of the most colossal flip-flops of her career, a fact that has not been often noted. It was noted at the time, however, and since this article is apparently no longer readily available online I have decided to post the whole thing here:

Hillary Flip-Flops on Kids’ Rights
Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2000
By John S. Rosenberg.

Do children have legal standing to assert their own rights in opposition to their parents? That divisive question has roiled the presidential campaign, not only in Florida but across the nation.

No, I’m not talking about Elian. I’m referring to the case of 11-year-old Gregory K. In 1992 an Orlando juvenile court judge ruled that Gregory K could sue his own parents for what news reports described as “divorce.” Gregory K’s suit became a campaign issue because of several articles written by the young Hillary Rodham, in which the future first lady defended children’s rights apart from, and sometimes opposed to, their parents.
“And what does Hillary believe?” Pat Buchanan thundered to the Republican Convention that year. “Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents!”

And indeed she does -- or at least did. In a 1973 article in the Harvard Educational Review, she argued that “the presumption of identity of interests between parents and their children should be rejected whenever the child has interests demonstrably independent of those of his parents.”

Which brings us back to Elian. Does the provision of the immigration statute providing that “any alien . . . irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum” apply to children, as the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week suggested it did? Mrs. Clinton’s writings clearly support Elian’s standing to assert his own interests in court, but the Senate candidate and first lady has changed her tune.

The question of Elian’s competency, of how much weight should be attached to his preferences, is distinguishable from the question of whether his interests are different from his father’s. Even on the question of competency, however, Mrs. Clinton is on record opposing the assumption that children have no standing. “The first thing to be done is to reverse the presumption of incompetency and instead assume all individuals are competent until proven otherwise,” she wrote in a 1979 article.

One wonders if the president recalls Gregory K, who ultimately won his suit against his parents, or his wife’s writings. Apparently not, for on April 20 in the Rose Garden, when he was asked his view of the 11th Circuit’s suggestion that Elian has interests and rights at odds with his father’s, the president responded that any such conclusion would be “a dramatic departure from the law.” Neither he nor his wife has mentioned that for years that is precisely what she called for.

Nor, for that matter, have some conservatives acknowledged that before Elian they stood foursquare for parental rights. But conservatives at least have a plausible explanation for making an exception of Elian: Not to do so would be to consign an innocent boy to life under a totalitarian regime in which neither adults nor children have any rights.

It’s harder to understand why Mrs. Clinton and other liberals would abandon their principles in this case. Do they think Cuba is free? Do they think the difference between freedom and communism is not important enough to create divergent interests between parent and child? Or do they want Elian deported for purely political reasons?

Whatever the reasons, standing by her man one more time, in what will probably be the postimpeachment Clinton presidency’s defining moment, Hillary has abandoned the very values and arguments on which she built her legal and intellectual reputation.

Citing this piece a couple of years later (July 2002), I wrote (here):

There were those (I was one) who regarded the deportation of Elian as akin to a slave mother drowning as she swam to freedom with her child only to have the child ripped from his relatives in the North and returned to his loyal Uncle Tom father who, when offered freedom with his son, chose to remain on the plantation. Anyone who felt that way then who does not protest to the State Department now is guilty of Hillary-class hypocrisy.

If there are any Senators who still feel that way, they may want to ask Hillary and Holder if they feel any remorse over their roles in sending Elian back to Cuba.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:31 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

During the recent election the Right was often accused of waging a campaign of unmitigated hate against Obama. Whether hateful or not, I certainly posted a good deal of criticism of Obama here. Thus I thought it might be useful (even fair and balanced) to listen in for a moment on what the Left is saying. Here’s are some excerpts from a good example by Michael Lind, who discusses “the meaning of Obama” as he explains to a British audience how and why “[t]he new president has a chance to redefine American liberalism”:

• His election was “an example of colour-blind democracy,” although setting that example was not the reason whites voted for him.

• If Bush’s presidency was an aberration, then Obama’s election can be seen as a restoration. On the other hand, if Bush’s presidency was typical of an earlier pattern, then Obama’s election can be viewed as a novel departure.

  ... Obama’s election was a restoration, not a transformation.

• Obama, the product of left-wing Chicago activism, moved to the centre by brutally repudiating his mentor, the radical black preacher Jeremiah Wright, denouncing the Supreme Court for restricting the death penalty, musing about invading Pakistan to hunt down al Qaeda and preaching nearly universal tax cuts like a Republican, all the while making “change” his mantra.

• During the campaign he aptly compared himself to a Rorschach test, in which people saw what they wanted to see.

• Obama has authored two autobiographies but still seems sphinxlike. In part this is the result of successful dissimulation; though he was hardly the “pal of terrorists” the right made him out to be on the basis of his association with a former Weatherman radical, Obama was quite left-wing in his earlier career. But there seems to be a genuine indeterminacy, a certain chameleon quality, in the “Barry” Obama who reverted to “Barack.”

• Opportunism can be a virtue in a statesman. And Obama’s opportunism is breathtaking.

• Opportunism can be a virtue in a statesman. And Obama’s opportunism is breathtaking. When his long association with the black nationalist Wright became an issue, Obama gave a televised address in which he said he could no more disown Wright than his own white grandmother. Garry Wills declared in The New York Review of Books that Obama’s “speech about race,” defending his association with Wright, was at the level of Lincoln’s second inaugural address in 1860. Within weeks, to the discomfort of his sycophants in the press, Obama had publicly disowned Wright, tossing him aside as an obstacle to his campaign. [Ed: He, of course, also tossed aside his “typical white person” grandmother.]

• One of the character flaws of George W Bush was his inability to sacrifice friendship to statesmanship.... This is not how Obama will go about staffing or running his administration.

• If the left stands for equality, in what sense are the Democrats a party of the left? Obama showed his contempt for the white working class when, in what he thought was a secret meeting with rich donors in San Francisco, he said white working-class voters who favoured Hillary Clinton were “bitter” people who “cling to guns, or religion,” or their antipathy to people unlike themselves.... Like every Democrat since George McGovern in 1972, Obama won the votes of an affluent white minority, plus solid non-white majorities, while losing the white working class. It is a very strange party of the left that combines the enlightened rich with the unskilled servants who work for them against a native majority working class. But then, a similar mutation of the left seems to be occurring in Europe.

• So, after a generation in which they denounced any deviation from free-market orthodoxy as the kind of old thinking that had marginalised the party, the Clintonian New Democrats are almost as clueless as the Republicans.... With all the talk of a new New Deal under Obama, you might think there would be neo-New Dealers waiting in the wings with volumes of plans. But the New Deal strain of liberalism is all but extinct in progressive think tanks and university faculties.... In their purge, the neoliberal thought police successfully limited the socially acceptable left in the US to a combination of support for free markets with support for public goods like universal health care plus mildly redistributive tax credits for the losers from globalisation.

• The Democratic party is in equally bad shape when it comes to thinking about foreign policy. The few ideas it has are those of the Clinton years, and most are now irrelevant.

• Obama’s movement has so far been a personality cult, not a true movement with a substantive agenda. He is the leader of a party dominated by ideas about domestic policy that now seem trivial in their incrementalism, a party whose ideas about muscular US interventionism have been doomed by the costs of the Iraq quagmire.
  

If this is what Obama’s supporters think of him, what’s left for the rest of us to say?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Peter Salins, provost of the State University of New York, the country’s largest comprehensive university system, from 1997 to 2006 and now a professor of political science at SUNY Stony Brook, argues in a compelling New York Times OpEd that the SAT predicts the likelihood of students to graduate within six years better than their high school grades. He claims, based on an analysis of extensive data from the SUNY system, that those critics who “claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages,” are wrong.

“Consider,” Salins writes, “the changes in admissions profiles and six-year graduation rates of the classes entering in 1997 and 2001 at SUNY’s 16 baccalaureate institutions.”

Among this group, nine campuses raised the emphasis they put on the SAT after 1997. This group included two prestigious research universities (Buffalo and Stony Brook) and seven smaller, regional colleges (Brockport, Cortland, New Paltz, Old Westbury, Oneonta, Potsdam and Purchase).

Among the campuses that raised selectivity, the average incoming student’s SAT score increased 4.5 percent (at Cortland) to 13.3 percent (Old Westbury), while high school grade-point averages increased only 2.4 percent to 3.7 percent — a gain in grades almost identical to that at campuses that did not raise their SAT cutoff.
Yet when we look at the graduation rates of those incoming classes, we find remarkable improvements at the increasingly selective campuses. These ranged from 10 percent (at Stony Brook, where the six-year graduation rate went to 59.2 percent from 53.8 percent) to 95 percent (at Old Westbury, which went to 35.9 percent from 18.4 percent).

Most revealingly, graduation rates actually declined at the seven SUNY campuses that did not raise their cutoffs and whose entering students’ SAT scores from 1997 to 2001 were stable or rose only modestly. Even at Binghamton, always the most selective of SUNY’s research universities, the graduation rate declined by 2.8 percent.

I find this argument and evidence persuasive, but then I’m fond of “merit” as rather traditionally defined and believe that the SAT does a reasonable job of measuring some aspects of it. Since those who are less impressed with the SAT, however, are sure to raise their trademark objection — that its results are more closely associated with a student’s family wealth and social class than with academic ability, I sent an email to Prof. Salins to get his response to that objection, and to the predictable view of critics “that what explains the higher graduation rates at the SUNY campuses that raised SAT requirements is that they got wealthier students.”

He replied promptly, and again persuasively:

.... SUNY campuses have never had many students from either tail of the class/income spectrum.... At Old Westbury, for example, the higher SAT scoring students there today — that are graduating at twice the rate of their counterparts four years ago — have almost exactly the same racial/family income profile of their predecessors — namely predominantly African American and lower middle class. Moving to more typical schools like Oneonta and Brockport; these are places that then and now have been predominantly white and middle-middle class, with profiles nearly identical to that of their lower SAT scoring counterparts, Plattsburgh and Oswego. And when Oneonta and Brockport raised their SAT profiles, their graduation rates rose. This may not be the last word on the subject, but I would not overestimate the socioeconomic dimension. In any case, the point of my analysis is to determine predictive validity, not admissions policy. If campuses want to admit low SAT scoring applicants, they are free to do so; they just should not be surprised if they don't do well academically — or they can use the SAT data to justify giving them additional academic support and guidance.

Salins’ view comports nicely with the position I’ve long argued here — that although I like merit, colleges are and should be free to disregard it, or to subordinate it to other goals such as achieving “diversity,” if they wish (so long as they don’t engage in racial discrimination). An easy way to do that, as others have pointed out (and as I discussed here), is to minimize the importance of the SAT.

In short, I disagree with critics of racial preference policies who base their objections heavily on their affection for merit. “If,” as I wrote here,

one objects to racial preference only where “merit or deservedness” is “at stake,” then ... one will see nothing wrong when a white or Asian child is denied his or her preference for a school close to home, or a school with some special programs, solely because of his or her race. In fact, if distributing burdens and benefits based on race is wrong only where “merit or deservedness” is compromised, then there would be nothing wrong with, say, counting black votes as worth more than white or Asian votes (perhaps each black vote could be counted as equal to 1.4 white votes to make up for the 3/5 of a person apportionment compromise in the original Constitution) or, for that matter, with racial segregation where there is no invidious intent and facilities are in fact “separate but equal.”

And here:

I wish I didn’t have to keep repeating that the most fundamental, and also most persuasive, criticism of racial preference is not based on a false fealty to “merit.” Merit is nice. Most conservatives (and even many liberals) like it. But racial preferences would be wrong even if merit were not an issue.

Racial preference policies are wrong not because they often reward people who are less qualified (not necessarily unqualified, but often less qualified), though they do that, but because it is wrong to reward some and punish others because of their race.

I could quote myself many times making versions of this same point, but I won’t. The point of this post was not to rehash my often-stated objection to pinning objections to race preferences on the tail of merit, but to commend Salins’ OpEd, which I do. Read the whole thing.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Gretna, Nebraska, a city of 2355 souls (in 2000) in Sarpy County, Nebraska, is the fastest growing city in Nebraska. Unfortunately, this growth in size does not seem to have been accompanied by a comparable growth in understanding civil rights at the Gretna Breeze.

Its editorial, “Negative Action,” begrudgingly acknowledges that “Equal opportunity for everyone regardless of race or gender sounds like the best way to approach hiring and firing employees and admitting students to college.” But “sounds like,” to the Breezy editors, does not mean “is,” and the passage of the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, by a Michigan-sized majority, leaves them with nothing but a forlorn sounding “hope” that things won’t get much worse.

Let’s just hope it [equal opportunity for everyone regardless of race or gender] works.

Here’s hoping women of childbearing age are still able to find work.

Here’s hoping black teenagers from low-income families can scrape together the money for college when they don’t get that sorely needed scholarship money which was once set aside specifically for them.

Here’s hoping someone of Middle Eastern descent is able to find a job, a school, a place to live ... anything.

Here’s hoping the Breezy editors will explain in a future editorial why they think prohibiting their state government from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender — requiring, that is, “equal opportunity for everyone regardless of race or gender” — could possibly have a negative effect on “women of childbearing age” looking for work or “someone of Middle Eastern descent” trying to find “... anything.” Do they really believe that before NCRI passed the state did, or should, grant preferential treatment to women of childbearing age looking for a job, or to people of Middle Eastern descent looking for ... anything?

It is true that NCRI will, or at least should, prevent the state from restricting scholarship money to teenagers of one race, but apparently a substantial majority of Nebraskans (58% of those voting), unlike the Breezy editors, see treating citizens without regard to their race as a Good Thing.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As the evidence mounts that racial bias of whites has declined dramatically over recent decades, bias researchers (biased researchers?) have begun to emphasize a new research tool, the Implicit Association Test (I.A.T.), to argue that whites may no longer express biased beliefs and attitudes and may not think they’re biased but, deep down, they really are. They continue, for example, to associate “black” with dirty and evil and “white” with clean and pure.

John Tierney has a fascinating article in the New York Times today (it appeared online yesterday) summarizing this research, and the firestorm of methodological criticism it has engendered. For example:

Last year, a team of researchers at Harvard made headlines with an experiment testing unconscious bias at hospitals. Doctors were shown the picture of a 50-year-old man — sometimes black, sometimes white — and asked how they would treat him if he arrived at the emergency room with chest pains indicating a possible heart attack. Then the doctors took a computer test intended to reveal unconscious racial bias.

The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.

But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites — meaning that the more “biased” doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.

Does this result really prove dangerous bias in the emergency room? Or, as critics suggest, does it illustrate problems with the way researchers have been using split-second reactions on a computer test to diagnose an epidemic of racial bias?

In a series of scathing critiques, some psychologists have argued that this computerized tool, the Implicit Association Test, or I.A.T., has methodological problems and uses arbitrary classifications of bias. If Barack Obama’s victory seemed surprising, these critics say, it’s partly because social scientists helped create the false impression that three-quarters of whites are unconsciously biased against blacks.

On the other hand, maybe these I.A.T. researchers really are on to something. I implicitly associate the New York Times with bias, for example, and probably wouldn’t have read this interesting article if not prompted to do so by two esteemed readers.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes liberals like “difference,” and sometimes they don’t.

Insofar as “diversity” provides a coherent justification for treating people differently based on their race or ethnicity, it is that we benefit from being exposed to people different from us. In practice, as I’ve pointed out many times (see here and here for examples), this means that blacks and Hispanics have to be imported to selective schools so that Asians and whites can reap the benefits of being exposed to them.

But I digress. The point I want to emphasize here is not the exploitation at the core of “diversity”-justified preferences. It is the simple fact that if the preferentially admitted were not regarded as “different,” they would provide no “diversity.”

Thus “difference,” in the cult of multiculturalism, is good.

Except when it’s bad. It’s bad when it makes students feel, well, different. A case in point is the raging debate over reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in tiny (pop. 810) Woodbury, Vermont (hat tip to Drudge) that, according to the mother of a first-grader, “is tearing our community apart.”

The brouhaha in the Vermont school began in September, when parent Ted Tedesco began circulating petitions calling for its return as a daily practice in the 19th-century schoolhouse, which has 55 children in grades kindergarten through six.

School officials agreed to resume the pledge as a daily exercise, but not in the classroom.

“We don’t want to isolate children every day in their own classroom, or make them feel they’re different,” said Principal Michaela Martin.

Instead, starting last week, a sixth grade student was assigned to go around to the four classrooms before classes started, gathering up anyone who wanted to say it and then walking them up creaky wooden steps to a second-floor gymnasium, where he led them in the pledge.

H.L. Mencken once famously defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. Similarly, liberal (which is to say, orthodox) school policy often seems to be based on the haunting fear that somewhere, some student may be forced to feel different.

But, we may well ask, how different does “different” have to be to be bad? In Woodbury, for example, “about half the students” chose to give up pre-school play time and walk up the creaky wooden steps to recite the Pledge. What if 75% or 85% or 95% of the students had not wanted to recite the Pledge (this is Vermont, after all, home of our only declared socialist Senator)? Wouldn’t it make the tiny minority of Pledgers feel “different” to force them to leave their classroom and troop to a distant, isolated location to practice their patriotism?

Would Principal Michaela Martin care about their feelings? In fact, maybe even the actual 50% are made to feel “different” by being segregated and sent upstairs to practice a strange ritual that other students don’t want to be exposed to.

In the Clintonian world in which we still live (indeed, Obama seems to be picking more Clinton retreads for his transition than Hillary would have), I suppose there are simply different definitions of “difference” for different occasions.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Greenlining Institute, according to its web site,

is a multi-ethnic advocacy, research, leadership development, and public policy organization whose ultimate goal is to increase the role that low-income and minority Californians play in the civic arena in order to create equitable policies and improve quality of life for all communities.

A cursory glance at its recent STATUS REPORT ON THE DIVERSITY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MEDICAL STUDENT BODY might lead the unwary reader to conclude that the Greenlining Institute, like other minority advocacy organizations, favors a strict, quota-like proportional representation of minorities in medical school admissions. For example, from the Executive Summary of the Report:

–Our analysis shows that there are insufficient numbers of under- represented minorities (African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans) graduating from the eight medical education programs in the University of California’s five medical school campuses. This report shows, among other findings, that:

1. Underrepresented minorities (URM) comprise 44% of California’s population, but only 17.8% of first-year medical students (2007 entering class) across all eight programs; a 38.2% representation gap....

A pull quote in the margin next to this observation states, in bold italics:

“How can we take care of the health care needs of our communities when we are not even close to representing the demographics of the state?”

–Third Year Latino Student,
UC Irvine

In fact, however, I think a good case can be made that the Greenlining Institute does not favor proportional representation, that it actually favors disproportionate representation.

Consider these two “Key Findings” listed at the very beginning of the report:

FINDING 1
The University of California is failing to train enough physicians of color to meet the present and future health needs of an increasingly diverse state. The disparity between minority representation in California’s population and in the UC medical student body is growing.
....
FINDING 3
The representation of minority groups in the pool of applicants to UC medical school programs is very similar to their representation among the matriculants. This means that schools are accepting students of diverse backgrounds in proportion to the rates at which they apply....

The Greenlining Institute, in short, seems to be disappointed that California medical schools do not accept a higher proportion of minority applicants than are present in their applicant pool. Its report, moreover, says nothing about the relative quality of these applicants. That is, it does not compare the GPAs and MCAT scores of minority applicants (either accepted or rejected) to those of the applicants who are not deemed underrepresented.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Boston Globe editorializes tomorrow that Obama’s election creates the “potential” for the nation to “mov[e] away from stale notions of affirmative action.”

The BG implies that Obama is ready to seize this potential, noting that Obama has said that his daughters, who are privileged, don’t deserve to benefit from it. I have discussed that comment, and its limitations, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

If you read all (or even some) of the above, you will see that I have my doubts as to whether Obama will take advantage of the “potential” to abandon “stale notions of affirmative action” (I must have been dozing when the Boston Globe opposed these “stale notions,” since I don’t recall them), but I hope my skepticism is misplaced.

My hunch is that he will continue to make opaque comments about equality that sound good to everyone, keeping the hope for “change that we can believe in” alive in those who see more “potential” than I do, even as he proceeds to fill the civil rights enforcement positions in the government, and later nominate judges, who are confirmed preference pushers.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I somehow missed Roger Clegg’s excellent OpEd in the New York Post last Friday appealing to the better angels of Obama’s nature, his political and legal astuteness, the words and logic of his speeches, and especially to his very identity in laying the foundation for hoping that the new administration will move away from racial preferences. You shouldn’t (miss it).

One of Roger’s many appealing qualities is that he, without engaging in purely wishful thinking, is often able to see a glass that, if not exactly half full, at least has something in it where those of us less discerning, and less optimistic, than he see only emptiness.

As the new Obama administration takes shape and then takes off, there will no doubt be fierce internal struggles between the committed preference pushers in his inner circle and those who really believe it’s time for, as the candidate often put it in different contexts, change we can believe in. Those change agents could do much worse, and no doubt will (there I go again), than to take Roger’s OpEd into battle with them.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that black college football coaches are increasing the pressure to hire more ... black college football coaches.

The Black Coaches and Administrators organization turned up the heat on colleges today in an effort to increase minority hiring in big-time football programs.

During a news conference, the group introduced an employment lawyer who will be available to provide free advice to job candidates, opening legal routes to fight the dearth of minority candidates chosen as head coaches.

And how dramatic is this “dearth”?

Only four minority candidates were hired as head coaches of college-football programs out of 31 searches in the 2007-8 hiring cycle, the coaches’ group said today in its fifth annual report on hiring in college sports.

Truly shocking! The percentage of black coaches hired, 12.9%, was only marginally higher than the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population, 12%!

The black coaches claim to want only equal opportunity, i.e., “transparancy” in the hiring process, but it’s clear that what they really want is ... more black college football coaches.

“In order for us to resolve this issue, we’re leaving nothing unturned,” said Floyd A. Keith, executive director of the coaches’ group. “I think that we’ve tried, and we’ve tried for five years to bring a transparency to searches. What we’re disappointed with is we’re not in the end zone and we’re not getting enough head coaches hired when we should.”

What the black coaches’ complaint asks us to believe is that colleges that eagerly lower their standards in order to give preferential admissions to black students and hiring preferences to black faculty and that energetically recruit the best college athletes, a “disproportionate” percentage of them black, refuse to hire the best qualified coaches because of racial bias. Presumably they care about excluding potentially winning black coaches more than they do about winning games.

If you believe that, you probably believe ... well, you're a typical believer in racial preferences.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Racial preference in college admissions, hiring, contracting, etc., is based on the assumption (or in many cases, a quasi-religious faith) that blacks and Hispanics cannot compete on equal terms with whites and Asian — either because they are damaged goods, handicapped (or disabled, if you prefer the politically correct term) by centuries of racist oppression or because of current, ongoing racial discrimination.

Racial preference in voting, enshrined in the Voting Rights Act’s requirement of racial gerrymandering, is based on the same assumption, although here it emphasizes continuing white refusal to vote for black candidates.

The assumption has long been wrong, and the recent election, as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom point out in today’s Wall Street Journal, should be the nail in its coffin.

The conventional wisdom among voting-rights advocates and political scientists has been that whites will not vote for black candidates in significant numbers. Hence the need for federal protection in the form of race-based districts that create safe black constituencies where black candidates are sure to win.

But the myth of racist white voters was destroyed by this year's presidential election.

Six out of 10 votes for Obama, they point out, came from whites. Although he lost the “white” vote by 55% to 43%, no Democrat since Lyndon Johnson has received a majority of the white vote, and Obama’s 43% was actually higher than Gore’s 43% or Kerry’s 41%.

So what happened to all those “racists” or “rednecks” that John Murtha spoke of so recently? If there had been that many of them, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Virginia and Florida would have gone the other way, and we would have a President-elect McCain today. Racism is the Sherlock Holmes dog that did not bark in the night.

Consider Iowa, with only a miniscule African-American population. The 5% of voters who said race was the most important factor in their choice of whom to vote for backed Mr. Obama 54% to 45%. Or consider Minnesota and Wisconsin, also overwhelmingly white, where Mr. Obama's lead was 18% and 21% respectively among the 5% to 7% of voters who made race their highest priority.

The insistence on “max-black” districts, like racial preference everywhere, magnifies rather than reduces racial polarization, and it leads to inanities worthy of Saturday Night Live:

The Republicans created majority-minority (which is to say, majority black) districts in a successful ploy to herd Democrats into fewer districts. That was, and is, offensive. The Democrats went along with that, and now argue that not putting enough blacks into a district is racist AND putting in more than enough to elect a Democrat is racist. That is mind-bogglingly offensive.

Over five years ago I wrote (here):

The Discriminations Hypocrisy Award goes to the Republicans. Under Bush I they realized that they could trumpet their fidelity to the Voting Rights Act, and by implication to black voters, by herding black voters into “majority-minority” districts that would be likely to elect black representatives for the first time. And by draining the surrounding districts of black, i.e., Democratic, votes, the policy would have the added benefit -- purely incidental, I’m sure -- of electing more Republicans. The Democrats, unable to oppose procedures that would lead to the election of more blacks, were effectively silenced and co-opted.

It was a brilliant tactical move, sacrificing only principle. Twenty-six such districts were created after the 1990 census, greatly contributing to subsequent Republican gains in the South.

The necessity for “majority-minority” districts was based on the assumption of “bloc voting,” that whites wouldn’t vote for blacks, but it did not take long for that assumption to be proven false. Once it became clear that super-majorities of blacks were not necessary to elect at least a significant number of blacks, the Democrats slowly emerged from the woodwork and began to argue (remember, they’ve never been addicted to consistency) that herding too many of blacks into “majority-minority” districts was racist, smacking of apartheid. At the same time, however, they argued that placing too few blacks in a district was also racist. To the Democrats, “too many” means more than enough to assure the election of a Democrat, and “too few” means not enough. By some cosmic co-incidence, the Democrats implicitly argue, that precise balance is what the law requires. This behavior thus has earned the Democrats the much-deserved Discriminations Award for Brazenness.

Both parties, in short, have proven themselves unprincipled. When the Republicans took over the state government in Virginia recently, for example, they moved quickly to round up as many blacks as possible and, freely admitting they were “taking race into account” as one factor among many (sound familiar?), herded them together in as few districts as possible. Not to be undone on the unprincipled front, the Democrats brought in heavy hitter Ronald Klain, Gore’s top advisor and head lawyer in the Florida recount, who, presumably with a straight face, argued to the Virginia Supreme Court: “We submit that what was going on here was race-conscious districting....” (Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2002, p. B5) The Virginia Supremes (including the new black chief justice) were not amused, and ruled for the Republicans.

The Thernstroms conclude, persuasively:

racially gerrymandered districts are an impediment to political integration at all levels of government. Herding African-Americans into “max-black” districts forces black candidates to run in heavily gerrymandered districts. The candidates who emerge from those districts are, unsurprisingly, typically not the most well-positioned to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.

Black candidates can win in multi-ethnic and even majority-white districts with color-blind voting. Mr. Obama should make it a priority to give more aspiring black politicians the opportunity to stand before white (and Latino and Asian and other ethnic) voters. He won, so can they.

American voters have turned a racial corner. The law should follow in their footsteps.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Juan Williams, who often has thoughtful thinks to say, writes in the Wall Street Journal today that Obama’s election brings “the end of an era for black politics.”

he idea of black politics now tilts away from leadership based on voicing grievance, and identity politics based on victimization and anger. In its place is an era in which it is assumed that talented, tough people of any background will find a way to their rightful seat of power in mainstream political life.

The Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Rev. Jeremiah Wrights remain. But their influence and power fade to a form of nostalgia in a world of larger political agendas, such as a common American vision of setting the nation on a steady economic course and dealing with terrorists. The market has irrevocably shrunk for Sharpton-style tirades against "the man" and "the system." The emphasis on racial threats and extortion-like demands -- all aimed at maximizing white guilt as leverage for getting government and corporate money -- has lost its moment. How does anyone waste time on racial fantasies like reparations for slavery when there is a black man who earned his way into the White House?
....
The onus now falls on individuals to take advantage of opportunities....

The “onus,” if that’s what it is, of taking responsibility for pursuing abundantly available opportunities has, of course, been on individuals since well before Obama’s election, but if that election helps more people to assume it, so much the better.

I hope that Williams’s prediction that the influence of grievance/victim/blame-the-man politics will decline in the black community (and among liberal fellow-travelers and Democratic grievance peddlers), but I fear that he may be a bit of a Pollyanna. When has Obama ever said “No!” to the Wright-like preference pushers?

We shall see.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Following are some almost randomly collected comments on Obama’s election that I found of interest. You may want to check this post periodically, if this post interests you, since I’ll probably be adding to it as new pithy, or whatever, comments pop up.

Shelby Steele

Obama's special charisma — since his famous 2004 convention speech — always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas....

His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America -- and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.

Ward Connerly

The election of Barack Obama is good for black people in a way that it is not so, necessarily, for whites or others: it liberates blacks from the debilitating mindset of seeing themselves as victims in America. Obama’s victory enables blacks to be, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “free at last.” Free to be Americans stripped from the legacy of second-class citizenship. Free to be seen in the eyes of one’s fellow citizens as inherently as capable as others without the historical restrictions imposed by skin color.

Wall Street Journal editors

The election of a black President doesn't mean that racism no longer exists. But it does make it harder to justify the claim that a racist country is the major obstacle to black advancement.

Roger Wilkins (civil rights activist, affirmative action history professor)

... I think that there are lots and lots of people who say, ‘Damn, we’re not as racist as we thought we were,’ so they’re pleased.”

Iraqi Terrorist

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The leader of a jihadi group in Iraq argued Friday that the election of Barack Obama as president represented a victory for radical Islamic groups that had battled American forces since the invasion of Iraq.

George Will

The election of an African-American discomfits the Democratic Party. It practices identity politics, stressing the relevance of “race-conscious” policies, defending racial preferences in public hiring, contracting and education. But the election of Barack Obama is an American majority’s self-emancipation: We are free at last from the inexpressible tedium of the preoccupation with skin pigmentation.

Michael Barone

Do Obama and the Democrats have a mandate?....

.... The decisive shift of public opinion came when the financial crisis hit. McCain approached it like a fighter pilot, denouncing Wall Street, suspending his campaign, threatening to skip the first debate. Obama approached it like a law professor, cool and detached. Voters preferred law professor to fighter pilot. This was a triumph of temperament, not policy.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Say What? (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Barack Obama is an opposite of George Bush in many ways (one or two of them good), and so it should be no surprise that Obama Derangement Syndrome is an opposite of Bush Derangement Syndrome. People afflicted with BDS (mainly intellectuals, academics, journalists, etc.) hate Bush so much they have lost the ability to discuss or write about him rationally. BDS obscures their vision so completely that they become analytical cripples, totally incapable of seeing or saying anything good about the object of their scorn.

ODS is the same, but different — the other side of the same coin. Those suffering from the heartbreak of ODS (many of the same intellectuals, academics, journalists, etc.) love Obama so much that they, too, are analytically incapacitated. They see him as more saint than man, turn a blind eye to what non-ODS sufferers regard as the Obamessiah’s human flaws, and show little tolerance for those who point out that the Emperor’s clothes may be lacking a thread or two and need patching here and there.

Like BDS, ODS is democratic. It strikes the high and the mighty — those who have demonstrated impressive intellect, scholarship, or talent in non-ODS infected areas — along with the humble. A case in point is the eminent Harvard Constitutional scholar, Laurence Tribe. Way back in July of 2007, after appearing in a campaign ad for Obama, Tribe swooned:

“Unlike a number of other candidates for both the Republicans and the Democrats, what you see with Barack is what you get,” Tribe explained. “He is not a person who is carefully tacking to one side and then the other to attract the party base for the primary and then the center for the general election.”

Well, maybe Obama didn’t “carefully” tack back and forth during the campaign, but tack he did. Remember his refusal to abandon Rev. Wright, his opposition to national security wire-tapping, etc., etc.? As no less an authority on tacking (or not), Karl Rove, wrote a few weeks before the election,

[Obama] seems to recognize that the U.S. is still a center-right country. His TV ads promise tax cuts and his radio ads savage Mr. McCain's health-care plan as a tax increase. It's a startling campaign conversion for the most liberal member of the Senate.

Rove made the same point several times in his analysis on Fox News last night:

“Look, he’s a very smart politician,” Rove said of Obama, “and he clearly understands that the country is centre-right. He went there very smart and very hard.”
....
... [He’s] a very smart politician who has clearly moved to the center over the course of this campaign.

And yesterday, “in his morning prayers in Memorial Church’s Appleton Chapel,” Tribe was even more worshipful:

“There are those in whom challenge stirs greatness, those who rise to challenge rather than letting it break their stride or spin their compass,” said Tribe about Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, whom he called “the most impressive and talented of the thousands of students I have been privileged to teach in nearly 40 years on the Harvard faculty.”

I don’t doubt that Obama, who was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, was an impressive and talented student, but — call me a churlish skeptic (or worse, if you want) — I can’t help doubting that he was the best student Tribe ever taught, a doubt I suspect is widely if silently shared by many of those who occupy the upper reaches of legal academia.

Perhaps “what you see ... is what you get” — if what you see is what you want to see.

Another case in point is the justifiably eminent historian, John Patrick Diggins, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In two recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education — this one by him and this one about him — he argued, as the subtitle to his article states, that “America needs integrity and humility in the Oval Office.” Let me say first that coming from Diggins this statement is not pure pablum. Diggins, a deep thinking follower of the theologian Reinhold Nieburhr, has thought long and hard, and written wisely, about such matters as humility, as this article demonstrates. Far from a politically correct fellow traveler of today’s fashionable academic left, he has been critical of critics of America’s cold war policies and even published an admiring study of Ronald Reagan.

But even Diggins seems to have been blinded by the light reflected off the Obamessiah’s halo, blown away by what The One said was “the righteous wind” at his back. Diggins likes the fact Obama can see the “moral imperfections” of our own society — any follower of Reinhold Niebuhr would like that. “At this moment of crisis,” Diggins tells his Chronicle interviewer,

we need “a leader who can acknowledge our own moral imperfections,” pointing to the extraordinary example set by the subject of his 2000 book, On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History (Yale University Press). “Lincoln reminded war-torn Americans that the Civil War may be God’s judgment upon America for the sin of slavery,” he says, noting how that sentiment makes for a sharp contrast with the theological certitude that has characterized the George W. Bush era.

A fair point, although Diggins, like most of those who make it, usually fail to recognize any Niebuhrian insight in, say, the judgment of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson that AIDS may be God’s judgment on American society for what they regard as the sin of tolerating homosexuality.

But now listen to how Diggins believes McCain and Obama measure up (or don’t) to his “humility” standard:

But now that the Bush years are coming to a close, is either John McCain or Barack Obama capable of injecting the presidency with a dose of humility, doubt, and honesty?

“McCain regards his moral history as impeccable,” Diggins responds curtly. The Arizona senator’s apparently open-ended commitment in Iraq suggests that the candidate is dangerously enthralled with the idea that “America can prevail on the basis of sheer military power because that is what happened with the Soviet Union.” That attitude betrays a disconcerting “cockiness about our military capacity,” the historian argues. Furthermore, it is contradicted by history: “Ronald Reagan was talking about the ‘evil empire,’ but all along he wanted to negotiate with the Soviet Union, and that is how the cold war came to an end. We talked our way out of it because of Reagan’s confidence and sense of empathy toward Gorbachev. The idea that we should not talk to Syria, Iran, or North Korea is just nonsense.”

Though Diggins has misgivings about Obama — “he speaks again and again of change, but not once has he asked the American people to change their views” — he is encouraged by Obama’s character. “If ethics is a sense of humility, and the ability not to succumb to the temptations of boastful pride, Obama seems to have those qualities,” he says. “In that respect, Obama reminds me of Lincoln.”

The cold war came to an end because of talk, because of Reagan’s “empathy with Gorbachev”? Obama, like Lincoln, lacks “boastful pride”? Where was the skeptical Diggins when Obama predicted that his election would “change the world”? When he announced that “we are the ones we have been waiting for”? When he intoned after winning the nomination that

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick, and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal. This was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment, this was the time when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves. [Emphasis added]

Can Diggins really believe these comments, and others, were uttered by someone with a Lincolnian “sense of humility, and the ability not to succumb to the temptations of boastful pride”?

As I stated at the beginning, even those of demonstrated wisdom and accomplishment are not immune from the ravages of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Nov. 4, 11:10 P.M.

According to the Omaha World-Telegram, “Nebraska voters approved a constitutional amendment that would ban race- and gender-based affirmative action programs.”

The vote total was not provided; I’ll add it later. A court challenge to the initiative is also still pending.

With about 25% of the precincts reporting at this hour, the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative is losing, 51.89% to 48.11%.

I’ll update these totals later or, more likely, tomorrow.

UPDATES

11:20 P.M.

The Lincoln Journal-Star reports that the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative passed with 56% of the vote.

Nov. 5, 12:45 A.M.

The Colorado Civil Rights Initiative is slowly inching up. With about half the precincts reporting, CCRI is still behind, but now by only 50.89% to 49.11%.

Nov. 5, 6:58 A.M.

With 2,796 of 3,215 precincts reporting, CCRI now trails by 50.34% to 49.66%.

Meanwhile, in Nebraska, the Omaha World Telegram has expanded its article, cited above, now grudgingly reporting that

The voters have spoken, banning affirmative action in Nebraska.

Now the Nebraska Supreme Court might get its say....

But David Kramer, the director for Nebraskans United, which opposed the ballot measure, said he holds out hope that a Lancaster County District Court judge soon will declare the petition drive — and therefore Tuesday's vote — invalid....

Kramer acknowledged that some voters would be frustrated if the courts invalidated the election results.

Well, yes. People do become “frustrated” when judges throw out clear and unequivocal election results.

Nov. 5, 9:40 P.M.

With 2,935 of 3,215 precincts reporting, the margin between opponents and proponents of racial preferences in Colorado remains razor-thin: 50.36% in favor of preserving state racial preference policies; 49.64% in favor of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, which would prohibit them.

Explanations vary for why Colorado may become the first state to reject a proposal mandating colorblind equality. There were so many complex initiatives on the Colarodo ballot this year, nearly all of which failed, that many observers think there was a large “No” vote against any and all initiatives.

Voters took a look at one of the longest sets of ballot measures in state history and responded with one short word: "No."

Nine of 14 statewide questions were rejected by voters, including two that had the high-profile support of Gov. Bill Ritter and other top state Democrats. One other [CCRI] was losing late, though still too close to call.

Floyd Ciruli, a Colorado pollster and political analyst, had an additional explanation of why so many Coloradans voted against a ban on preferential treatment: the presence of Barack Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Ultimately, Ciruli believes, the massive turnout for Obama helped the opponents.

“They benefited from a good year.... They also picked up the progressive audience who were voting for a black president.”

So, the presence of a black but allegedly “post-racial” candidate may have served to preserve discrimination based on race and ethnicity in Colorado. Congratulations, President Obama.

Nov. 6, 11:10 P.M.

With 96% of the precincts reporting, CCRI is losing, 51% to 49%. Most of the remaining precincts are in liberal Boulder and Mesa counties.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)