Could Obama Have Survived Appointment In Another Administration?

The last two Democratic administrations, Obama’s and Clinton’s, have a similar interesting embarrassment in common: both appointed or attempted to appoint intelligent, articulate, very highly regarded black graduates of an elite Ivy League law school, Yale, and both had to be thrown under the bus after their radical views came under scrutiny.

Actually, Lani Guinier’s views were well inside the mainstream of elite legal academia, as Bill and Hillary Clinton clearly knew when they nominated her, just as Van Jones’s views are so commonplace on the left that he is still being defended by influential Democrats like Howard Dean, and he is now sitting in an office at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank run by Obama transition chief John Podesta. But this post is not about Democrats abandoning their good friends when the heat’s turned up, even though Obama, as a serial thrower of old friends and grandmothers under the bus, makes that tempting.

What I want to do instead is suggest that you pause to consider the counterfactual possibility that if he had not run for president Barack Obama himself, whose own record and identity so closely fits the profile of both Lani Guinier and Van Jones, might not have survived appointment in a more traditional Democratic administration. (For my hypothetical I might even allow him to have been elected to the Senate, since all he did in his two years there was plot his presidential run and write the second volume of his pre-presidential autobiography.)

What if, for example, a President Biden (remember, this is a counterfactual hypothetical, after all) had nominated the young Senator (or perhaps still Illinois state senator) to be the new, say, Secretary of Education or, shades of Guinier, head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department (even Biden would not have regarded Obama as qualified to be Attorney General).

At some point, either before or after Obama assumed his new position, someone in the mainstream media would have noticed all the unfettered radicalism of Obama’s career to date — his twenty-year association with the racist, America-bashing Rev. Wright, his years of work with Weatherman Bill Ayers radicalizing the Chicago schools and funneling money, through his work on the Woods Foundation, to ACORN and other radical groups, his work favoring extreme version of race preferences while a state senator and his successful efforts to block protection for young (very young) survivors of botched abortions, even though an identical federal law had passed the Senate unanimously. Indeed, the charge that he enabled infanticide was probably less hyperbolic than the current “death panel” accusations.

I’m assuming here that his attempt to lie his way out of that vote would have have been less successful than it was during his actual presidential campaign.

In short, if anyone in the mainstream media had bothered to read the revelations about the young man named to be the new Sec. of Education or head of the Civil Rights Division aired by Sean Hannity or compiled, chapter and verse, by the diligent research of Stanley Kurtz, the fate of this radical, mysterious, bright, articulate (even “articulate and bright and clean and … nice-looking”) black Ivy League law school graduate might well have met the same fate as the eerily similar Guinier and Jones.

Say What?