Discriminations

I thought the RealClearPolitics link to Anna Quindlen’s Newsweek article, “Obama Won. Now Follow the Leader,” was a mischaracterization of it. She couldn’t have really said that. But she did, and it isn’t.

The article’s actual title accurately summarizes its argument: “Follow the Leader. We elected him to do the right thing — Not take dictation.”

Quindlen believes Massachusetts sent no message in electing Scott Brown. His election “was a classic toss-the-bums-out event, neither specific nor illuminating.” For some reason, though, Obama’s election came with a clear mandate to do ... what Quindlen would like him to do.

It’s not surprising that Quindlen was not illuminated by Scott Brown’s election, because her quotient for illumination seems quite limited. Her understanding of the past, for example, is a dim as of present:

... we forget that most of the things that make America great—civil rights, the safety net, Social Security—were pushed through despite their unpopularity.

Even the editors of the New York Times begrudgingly recognize that “Eighty Republicans in the House voted for the Social Security Act in 1935,” and the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights were both passed with bi-partisan majorities.

In the final analysis, Quindlen’s theory — we should follow the president wherever he leads because he won — falls of its own weight, even though that weight is slight. True, Obama won, but so did the senators and representatives whom Quindlen blames for blocking his path. She must think that they, unlike Obama, were not “elected to do the right thing.”

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In the post immediately below I discussed a conspiracy of Congressional Democrats meeting behind closed doors to impose a revived health reform bill on a public they regard as dumb and forgetful.

Standard procedure requires the Senate and House to pass identical bills before submitting the legislation to the president for his signature. When the versions differ, those differences are usually ironed out in a conference committee, with the resulting compromise sent back to both houses for approval. The trouble here for the Democrats is that the new version is also subject to filibuster in the Senate, and now the Democrats have “only” 59 Senators, not their pre-Brown filibuster-busting 60.

But Democrats don’t like standard procedures when they threaten to get in their way. So their first attempt at bypassing them came when they eschewed a conference committee altogether (because those pesky Republicans would have been present) in favor of having Democratic leaders from both houses agree among themselves. Even some Democrats couldn’t stomach this deviousness, but that train was on the verge — or “precipice,” in the president’s term — of arriving at its destination when Scott Brown’s election derailed it.

Their apparently pending second bypass attempt is persuading the House to pass the Senate bill as is, based on a promise that the Senate will then “correct” the flaws in the bill — “provisions such as a new tax on high-end ‘Cadillac’ health plans and special aid for Nebraska,” abortion restrictions, etc. — with legislation that could be passed — even though by “reconciliation,” i.e., by a simple 51 vote majority, which they could probably get even though some Democratic senators oppose this maneuver. This stratagem has been widely discussed in the press, but I don’t recall seeing any articles describing it for what it is: a fraud.

Under this scenario, the House would be asked to pass, as is, the current Senate bill based on winks from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi that it’s not the “real” bill, which would emerge only after the Senate passes its un-filibusterable fixes. In short the House would knowingly be voting for a fraudulent Potemkin bill.

On the other hand, that’s about par for course in the House of Pelosi.

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The Los Angeles Times reports today that Democrats are conspiring behind closed doors on methods to revive and pass health reform. You may be forgive for thinking the LAT didn’t put it quite that way, but I don’t believe I’ve mischaracterized their report. You decide:

President Obama’s campaign to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system is officially on the back burner as Democrats turn to the task of stimulating job growth, but behind the scenes party leaders have nearly settled on a strategy to salvage the massive legislation.

They are meeting almost daily to plot legislative moves while gently persuading skittish rank-and-file lawmakers to back a sweeping bill.

This effort is deliberately being undertaken quietly as Democrats work to focus attention on more-popular initiatives to bring down unemployment, which the president said was a priority in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. [Emphasis added]

And what of the often-promised but now forgotten “transparency that was supposed to accompany health reform? Again, Obama is not the only one who’s forgotten it.

In a 24-hour news cycle, with the Internet and bloggers and cable news, sometimes a lot more can be accomplished, especially with healthcare, when it happens behind closed doors,” said Drew Altman, a healthcare policy expert who heads the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Among those plotters behind closed doors is Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, described by the LAT as “a conservative Democrat who was among a group of centrist Democrats from the House and Senate” who’ve been meeting. “Formerly conservative” or “a Senator who would like to be thought of by his constituents as conservative” might be more accurate, but whatever his political coloration at the moment Pryor believes he has plumbed the depths of human nature, and he’s discovered that people, or at least voters, are not as smart as he is.

“A little bit of time and quiet could help,” he said.

“Human nature being what it is, it's always easier to be against something than to be for it. And if you create any uncertainty with change, opponents can jump on that and just try to scare people. . . . That has been hard to overcome politically,” Pryor said. “Maybe over time, people will have a chance to understand what is in the legislation.”

In other words, we were too dumb to understand what Obama explained to us in 29 (or was it 39?) speeches and endless snippets from them on TV. But maybe if they just keep quiet about it for a while and bring it up later, we will have forgotten that we don’t like it.

Democratic leaders do not reserve their condescending scorn for voters who disagree with them; they have similar contempt for many of their own skittish followers (or not) in Congress who were, for some reason, “rattled by Brown’s winning campaign in Massachusetts.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) particularly want to give members time to recover from the shock of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race two weeks ago. The election cost Democrats their filibuster-proof Senate majority.

But in the coming weeks, Pelosi and Reid hope to rally House Democrats behind the healthcare bill passed by the Senate while simultaneously trying persuade Senate Democrats to approve a series of changes to the legislation using budget procedures that bar filibusters.

But why should they recover from the shock? Will the threat to Democrats intent on passing unpopular legislation implicit in the message of Brown’s election lessen over time?

The Dem leaders thus assume not only that voters are too dumb to appreciate the wisdom of the Dems’ health reform but also that they are so dim they will forget their opposition, thus allowing the “rattled” Democrats in Congress to recover from their Brown-induced “shock” and stick by their former willingness to impose massively unpopular legislation on a forgetful public.

Given the regard in which Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Pryor Democrats hold their constituents, this may work.

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President Obama, speaking in Holmdel, New Jersey, 16 July 2009:

“Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you,” the president told residents of the Garden State. “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan....”

President Obama, State of the Union Address, 27 January 2010:

Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan.

President Obama, appearing before the Republican Caucus, 29 January 2010

... let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.

What “stray dogs” and “stray cats” would those be? In addition to all their other transgressions, must Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi now also be reported to the SPCA? Sorry to be snarky here, but would some reporter please ask the president to be “exactly clear” about which of his health care provisions he now regards as stray mongrels?

More seriously, though, “let me say this about health care and the health care debate”: for once I find myself in total agreement with the president. It is absolutely true that the way he has debated the issue “bears on a whole lot of other issues.” He has repeatedly said things that are not true. He has repeatedly denied responsibility for his own decisions — those stray dogs and stray cats somehow “got in” without his knowing about them; those provisions that “might have” violated his pledge “got snuck in” without his knowledge or approval.

One final question: who, Mr. President, were the sneakers?

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Last month I discussed how Berkeley Solves Racial Achievement Gap!. “The solution,” I wrote, quoting a recent proposal that had been approved at a meeting of the Berkeley High School Governance Council,

is both obvious and simple: “eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.”

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Now comes frequent DISCRIMINATIONS commenter and retired editor extraordinaire, Linda Seebach, who has a thorough analysis of the “equity”-induced Berkeley educational fiasco on the Breitbart “Big Journalism” site. Read the whole thing.

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Really, if Chris Matthews didn’t exist (he does exist, doesn’t he? Or is he simply a figment of Rachel Maddow’s and Keith Olbermann’s imaginations?) we’d have to invent him. I’m not even referring to the thrill he felt going up his leg when he heard Obama speak, but to his even more dramatic outdoing of Harry Reid’s Negro dialect gaffe.

After the State of the Union speech last night, Matthews inadvertently revealed quite a lot about ... Chris Matthews, as reported, well, everywhere (the following from the Washington Post’s “Politics and Policy” blog):

On MSNBC News Wednesday night, “Hardball” host Chris Matthews had an idiosyncratic take on President Obama’s first State of the Union. He told Keith Olbermann that during Obama’s speech, “I forgot he was black.”

Matthews seemed to be trying to articulate how Obama had moved beyond race. “He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country and passed so much history in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about,” Matthews said. “I was watching, I said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people.’ And here he is. President of the United States, and we’ve completely forgotten that tonight. Completely forgotten it. I think it was in the scope of his discussion -- it was so broad-ranging, so in tune with so many problems, of aspects, and aspects of American life that you don’t think terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity.”

Let me translate.

I forgot he was black.

Most of the time Matthews thinks of Obama as a black president, but last night he forgot.

He is post-racial by all appearances

Obama doesn’t look like a Negro.

You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country ...

Once he’s been president another couple of years he might actually be a leader

... and passed so much history in just a year or two.

Not sure about passing history. I don’t think Matthews means passing history like passing gas, but he couldn’t be referring to passing legislation. Maybe this is Matthews’ way of saying We Have Overcome. But liberals don’t agree with that view — still too much to be done to have overcome already, etc. — so let’s just say Matthews misspoke here, whatever he meant.

‘Wait a minute, he’s an African-American guy in front of a bunch of other white people.’

Wow! Other white people! Imagine that! Matthews is saying. Obama’s as white as you and me and all those Congresspeople!

... we’ve completely forgotten that [he’s black] tonight. Completely forgotten it.

But if we’ve completely forgotten it, why are “we” spending so much time talking about it? Matthews is quite proud of himself for forgetting about race ... for a few minutes. But more to the point, why did he forget it about it at all? Because...

... it was in the scope of his discussion -- it was so broad-ranging, so in tune with so many problems, of aspects, and aspects of American life that you don’t think terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity.

In short, Obama is not black “by all appearances” because he is so well-spoken ... and on so many topics (look at that “scope”!) that blacks don’t usually talk about. All the African Americans we're used to are so, well, tribal. But Obama talks just like us on the very things we talk about, so he doesn’t even look black.

Now I think I’ve finally figured out who Chris Matthews really is. He’s a more verbose, less articulate Joe Biden! Remember, Biden said all of the above, much more concisely, back in 2007:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Chris Matthews, plagiarist.

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Inside Higher Ed reports today that the College Board has released a new study, “The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color,” and the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that four Democratic members of Congress met on Tuesday to discuss its findings regarding “the barriers minority men face along the path to higher education.” The College Board issued a press release summarizing the report, “Destructive Pressures Undermine Educational Aspirations of Minority Males,” and the full report is available online.

The reported problems do seem dire, and they were discussed in (quoting from the full report)

four one-day seminars organized by the College Board to explore the educational challenges facing young men of color in the United States. The Dialogue Days brought together more than 60 scholars, practitioners and activists from the African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Native American communities.

I’m not sure what educational “practitioners” are — teachers? — but all the participants in these high-powered gripe sessions (my characterization)

expressed their opinions and listened to the voices and anxieties of community leaders about the state of educating young men of color in the United States. Each leader brought a unique perspective, experience and expertise to the discussion about the critical problems that exist.

The Dialogue Day sessions pinpointed powerful societal forces that threaten educational aspirations of young men of color. These include the lack of role models, the search for respect outside the education world, the loss of cultural memory in shaping minority male identity and pride, barriers of language, the challenges of poverty, extraordinary community pressures and a sense that the education system is failing young men.

All of this must be placed in the context of the general disadvantaged condition of minority populations in the United States. Whether measured by unemployment rates, poverty, imprisonment or recidivism, the challenges facing minorities — both males and females — are stark and undeniable.

These complaints were closely tracked by seven “themes” that were identified, such as

2. At work are destructive community pressures that undermine minority male aspirations and expectations for academic success.

3. Lack of male role models leads to a search for respect outside our educational institutions.

4. Cultural and historic memory is deeply important to minority male identity and pride.

The report is suffused with a consensus that society is the culprit, with participants critical not only of schools but

also highly critical of the rest of society, arguing that the larger economy undermines minority male aspirations. A sense emerged from these meetings that not only are schools failing these young people, society is failing them. This is a function of communities in which there is no traditional work (but many opportunities in the underground economy) ... of families stressed to the breaking point ... of a society that measures success with an index of stock prices while ignoring the economic circumstances of most people within the economy ... and of governments that seem willing to spend eight to 10 times as much per person to hold young men of color in jail as they do to educate them.

These complaints were predictably accompanied by calls for federal action. I’m not sure what Congress or other institutions can do to shore up the “cultural and historic memory” that is said to be lacking among young black men, but some sense of what might be expected in other areas was provided by Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ), who said (quoting here from the Press Release):

Minorities are disproportionately represented in schools with high dropout rates, and we must work to turn those schools around. All middle school and high school students should have the support they need to graduate, and they should be prepared for college regardless of their circumstances. Any policy that fails students in these respects is a policy that fails the country.

It is certainly true that all students should be prepared for college and have the support they need to graduate, but how to accomplish those worthy goals and how much it would cost remain unclear. Perhaps Rep. Grijalva could introduce legislation requiring a much larger representation of minorities in schools with low or even average dropout rates.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, has noticed a central problem not emphasized in the report, which he has generously allowed me to quote since the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “comment” feature seems not to be working:

From the National Center for Health Statistics: By population subgroup, the percentage of children born out of wedlock is 70.7 percent for non-Hispanic blacks, 64.6 percent for American Indians/Alaska Natives, 49.9 percent for Hispanics, 26.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites, and 16.5 percent for Asians/Pacific Islanders. Illegitimacy correlates with just about any social problem you can name (poverty, crime, dropping out of school, substance abuse, etc.), and it — not discrimination — is the principal cause of racial disparities in all these areas. So, I hope the Representatives bear all this in mind.

Hope springs eternal....

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John Gibson, former president of Alabama A & M, has a letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Affirmative Action: Let's Not Screw It Up,” stating that he is “amazed at the passionate outcries against affirmative action,” citing this article in particular (an article I discussed here.)

According to Gibson,

it is ridiculous to ask questions such as “What is the benefit of diverse student bodies?” What about asking: “What was the benefit of segregated student bodies?” I certainly saw no benefit in segregation, and neither did the courts. Or what about this: “How many complaints do you have about the diversity of athletic teams and the tremendous amounts of money generated by these teams?” Right, none so far!

I am a baby boomer who remembers the Jim Crow South. I participated in marches with Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Ala. I was a plaintiff in the desegregation lawsuit in Alabama that found the state still had a de jure system of segregation (Knight v. James). Affirmative action has engendered vast aspirations and achievement goals for future generations—why this recrudescence of 1950s attitudes? We just elected a black president of the United States.

I don’t understand Gibson’s sports question — does he believe, say, professional basketball is “diverse,” or is he simply saying that he has no complaints about the fact that it isn’t? — but I do understand his clear implication that those who oppose engineered “diversity” affirmatively support “segregated student bodies.”

I too remember what Jim Crow Alabama was like, but I also remember that segregation was brought down by the moral force of the argument that it is wrong to deprive anyone of rights because of race, something Gibson seems to have forgotten. Somehow, amazingly, the belief that people should be treated without regard to race has become the “recrudescence of 1950s attitudes.” Left unexplained is how the “black president of the United States” could have possibly been elected by voters who must partake of that “recrudescence,” since according to all polls — and votes in California, Washington, Michigan, and Nebraska — they overwhelmingly oppose preferential treatment based on race.

ADDENDUM

No doubt a few of the criticisms of affirmative action that “amazed” Gibson in the Chronicle of Higher Education article he cited came from Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, who was quoted there. Roger submitted the following comment to the Chronicle, but since it has yet to appear there he gave his permission for me to post it here:

Professor Gibson’s generalized claim of historical discrimination as a justification for racial preferences is, to begin with, a legal nonstarter, since the Supreme Court has long rejected it. And the Court was right to, since skin color is a poor and unnecessary proxy for individual disadvantage (plus, how does it justify, for example, giving Latinos a preferences over Asians?).

In any event, the dubious benefit claimed by Professor Gibson of the use of racial preferences must be weighed against its myriad costs: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.

Adding up all these costs, it’s clear that using affirmative action is what’s really screwed up.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED UPDATED TWICE]

Over thirty years ago the University of California got into big trouble because its medical school at the Davis campus

had two admissions programs for the entering class of 100 students - the regular admissions program and the special admissions program....

The 1973 and 1974 application forms, respectively, asked candidates whether they wished to be considered as “economically and/or educationally disadvantaged” applicants and members of a “minority group” (blacks, Chicanos, Asians, American Indians).... Special candidates ... did not have to meet the 2.5 grade point cutoff and were not ranked against candidates in the general admissions process.

The liberal California Supreme Court found that this procedure violated the Equal Protection Clause. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed about the dual track procedure, although it lamentably did allow the camel’s nose of “diversity” as a rationale for racial discrimination (when all other things are equal, etc.) under the tent.

The University of Massachusetts apparently has a short memory. Inside Higher Ed reports this morning:

The University of Massachusetts, seeking to increase the diversity of its medical school, plans today to finalize a program to set aside 12 slots in its 125-seat medical school classes for members of certain groups who will be admitted to an undergraduate program at a UMass campus, followed by medical school admission, The Boston Globe reported. To be eligible for one of the slots, candidates will need to be either black, Latino, or come from certain Southeast Asian and other groups, or (regardless of ethnic or racial background) come from a low-income family or be a first-generation college student.

Stay tuned. I’ll be updating later....

UPDATE

What’s The Problem?

As is typical with programs of preferential admission, the UMass program seems designed to solve two problems, one of them cosmetic and the other a lack of sufficient “diversity.”

Cosmetically, the UMass medical school has been enduring the hardship of not looking like Massachusetts, and not producing doctors that sufficiently match the demographic profile of the state.

The Boston Globe reports that

[f]ive percent of doctors in Massachusetts are black or Hispanic, whereas 16 percent of Bay State residents belong to those groups.... Now, blacks and Hispanics make up 7 percent of UMass Medical School students, bur account for 27 percent of UMass Boston undergraduates, and 8 to 12 percent of students at the other [UMass] campuses.

The article did not explain — presumably because those proposing this new admissions program — exactly why Massachusetts need its population of doctors to match the racial and ethnic profile of its general population, or why that need is so compelling as to justify racially preferential admissions.

Well, that’s not completely accurate. The old standby “diversity” rationale was hauled out. Anthony Garro, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at UMass Dartmouth, the non-diverse medial students also “stand to gain from a more diverse class” because, he claimed, “[d]ifferent cultures ... handle the issues surrounding illness and deal in different ways, points that are difficult to teach in the classroom.”

Really? That would be news to all the sociology, anthropology, and history professors who teach courses on cultural difference. (Indeed, sometimes it seems as though they teach courses on nothing else.) Are all “Hispanic” attitudes the same? Do Mexican-Americans have the same cultural attitudes as Puerto Ricans-Americans and Cuban-Americans? Is there no concern that each of these sub-groups be adequately “represented”? In any event, it does not seem necessary to have different admissions standards for Hispanic medical school applicants so that the non-Hispanic students can learn about Hispanic approaches to sickness and dying. But then, most “diversity” arguments don’t make much sense when you examine them closely.

“Role Models”?

According Jack Wilson, the UMass president, “a key barrier to recruiting more minority physicians, or those from disadvantaged backgrounds, is the lack of role models.”

You hear this a lot, as in virtually every defense of preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity, but is it really true? Oh, forget true, which might be too exacting a standard. How about: is there even any credible evidence that it’s true? Are there really large numbers of blacks and Hispanics today who don’t know that they can become doctors if they meet the same admissions and performance requirement expected of all medical students? At some point shouldn’t those who assert the “role model” justification for racial discrimination have to provide at least some evidence that a significant number of highly capable blacks and Hispanics who are not doctors would have become doctors if only they’d had black and Hispanic “role models”?

Oddly, a large portion of the Boston Globe article discusses Jessica Zina, “a Portuguese-American in her first year at UMass Medical School, [who] is the type of student the new state program hopes to attract.” Zina is fluent in Portuguese, her father is a construction worker, and her mother a worker in a Hasbro factory, neither of them high school graduates. And yet, despite the absence of any “role models,” Zina “dreamed of becoming a pediatrician since high school.” Her path to medical school was not straight, but she didn’t need a special program designed to produce “role models” to get there.

In fact, the reason Zina did not attent UMass for college was not because it lacked a special admissions program for her.

Although she said she had never considered attending UMass for her bachelor’s degree because if its lackluster reputation, the Medical Scholars Program would have persuaded her to apply.

“I would automatically want to join something like that,” Zina said. “To be that much closer to medical school would really be an advantage. That would be golden.”

I’m sure it would. Of course such a deal would be “golden” for anyone, not just blacks or Hispanics — unless, that is, there’s intrinsic to the culture of “African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers” that makes them uniquely qualified to appreciate and benefit from preferential admissions treatment, a guaranteed summer research opportunity, and targeted financial aid.

UPDATE II

In addition to the “role model” justification for racial preferences being supported here (and in most places) by nothing more than mere, evidence-free assertion, Roger Clegg reminds us that there is another important argument against that rationale: it has been specifically rejected by the Supreme Court in Wygant v. Board of Education (1986). As the majority opinion in that case stated,

the role model theory employed by the District Court has no logical stopping point. The role model theory allows the Board to engage in discriminatory hiring and layoff practices long past the point required by any legitimate remedial purpose. Indeed, by tying the required percentage of minority teachers to the percentage of minority students, it requires just the sort of year-to-year calibration the Court stated was unnecessary in Swann, 402 U.S. at 31-32....

Moreover, because the role model theory does not necessarily bear a relationship to the harm caused by prior discriminatory hiring practices, it actually could be used to escape the obligation to remedy such practices by justifying the small percentage of black teachers by reference to the small percentage of black students....

Societal discrimination, without more, is too amorphous a basis for imposing a racially classified remedy. The role model theory announced by the District Court and the resultant holding typify this indefiniteness....

That opinion was written by Justice Powell, whose Bakke opinion pinned a “diversity” exception on the Equal Protection Clause. Another Justice, concurring with Powell, agreed “that a governmental agency's interest in remedying ‘societal’ discrimination, that is, discrimination not traceable to its own actions, cannot be deemed sufficiently compelling to pass constitutional muster” and that “a ‘role model’ theory to justify the conclusion that this plan had a legitimate remedial purpose was in error.”

That Justice was Sandra Day O’Connor, who at the end of her career would nail Powell’s “diversity” exception to equal protection more firmly in place.

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According to Charles Blow of the New York Times this morning, apparently all voters except the saving remnant of Democrats are now mindless, belligerent Tea Partiers.

Welcome to the mob: an angry, wounded electorate, riled by recession, careening across the political spectrum, still craving change, nursing a bloodlust....

Unfortunately, many now see Barack Obama as a left-leaning version of George W. Bush: just another out-of-touch emperor. It seems as if Obama and the Democrats made the mistake of believing that a heart once won was forever won, that people would be patient, and that the mob would accept their reasoning for lack of results.

They were wrong. The mob is fickle. And it’s back with a vengeance.

Blow has blown this horn in the NYT before (“Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt”), but that was back when he was still confident that we knuckle-dragging, right-wing racist morons were a tiny, hired faction of malcontents limited to raucous town-hall meeting out there in, well, America, i.e., that unknown and mysterious terriroty west of the Hudson.

Now he seems like the surrounded Lone Ranger in that famous exchange with Tonto (“What do you mean ‘we?’”).

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Dropping The Balz has been UPDATED.

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[This post has been UPDATED twice three times]

For once, everyone agrees: the astounding election of Scott Brown changes everything. But as usual, when everyone agrees it’s wise to wonder what everyone is missing.

What is lost among the cacophony of “cataclysmic change!” that is coming from Left, Right, and Center, I think, is realization of the fact that reducing the number of Senate Democrats from 60 to 59 puts it right back it was shortly after Obama was elected. Actually, it puts it back to one better than when Obama was elected. There were only 58 Democrats in the Senate until Al Franken, who ultimately won 42% of the vote in Minnesota plus a fraction more than Norm Coleman, was sworn in the Democrats held only 58 seats. With Franken’s swearing in they were up to 59, and when Arlen Specter switched parties at the end of April 2009 they finally had 60.

At the time everyone thought that 58, then 59, Senators put Obama in an all but unassailably commanding position to accomplish his hope and change, center-left, change the tone, bi-partisan agenda. Silly everyone. Who knew (other than those out of touch, angry, recalcitrant, racist right wingers) that the president would assume that his election gave him a carte blanche to abandon even the pretense of bi-partisanship and push through an uncompromisingly liberal agenda.

President Obama and his administration have attempted to justify their gleeful spending spree by explaining that they had no idea how bad the recession was until they got into office. That doesn’t speak very well of their understanding, but they can hardly claim that they didn’t realize that if they truly wanted to change the tone, reduce divisiveness, and increase bi-partisanship they’d have to, you know, compromise at least a little. The Democrats like to claim that there is no point compromising because the Republicans oppose everything. In the words of that archetypical “progressive,” Rep. Anthony Wiener (D, NY) this morning, commenting on his “expectations for bipartisanship”:

I don't hold out any hope for my Republican colleagues. From almost the word go they've made it clear their strategy has been to stop anything from happening. That's a given.

Dropping from 60 Democratic Senators back to the post-election total of 59 is only a calamity for an administration that takes it as “given” that there is no point in attempting to compromise with the opposition party, even on issues where polls show the public opposing its signature policy by margins that range from significant to overwhelming.

UPDATE

In an interview with ABC News today,

President Barack Obama is telling Democrats not to “jam” a health care overhaul bill through Congress, instead urging them to coalesce around popular parts of the bill.

If he’d done that a year ago, or six months ago instead of himself trying to “jam” through an unpopular bill, health care reform would have been passed and signed into law by now.

Indeed, other comments the president made in that interview reveal that he still doesn’t understand what went wrong.

“If there’s one thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values,” Obama told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview at the White House.

The president said he made a mistake in assuming that if he focused on policy decisions, the American people would understand the reasoning behind them.

“That I do think is a mistake of mine,” Obama said. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

What Obama doesn’t get is that we did “get it.” We did “understand the reasoning behind” those policies. We just didn’t agree with them.

Heaven help us if the lesson Obama has learned from the trouncing Democrats have taken in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts (Massachusetts!) is that what’s been lacking is his “speaking directly to the American people.” For most of this past seeming interminable year it has seemed like you couldn’t turn on the TV without encountering Obama “speaking directly to the American people” about health care or global warming or the big bad banks or whatever. Are we now going to have to listen to even more of him?

UPDATE II

Coming hard on the heels of the publication of his articulate, light-skinned Negro comment about Obama and his accusation that Joe Lieberman “double-crossed” him on health-care reform, Harry Reid has demonstrated that his remarkable, world-class obtuseness is at least bi-partisan:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), whose influence has grown in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, is puzzled over comments made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid about her intentions to strike a bipartisan health care deal.

Speaking with reporters in the Capitol Wednesday, Snowe said she has yet to speak with Reid regarding his critical comments in The New York Times last week. In the article, the Nevada Democrat is critical of the bipartisan talks that failed in th