I can almost see it now: the President of the United States sitting in the Oval Office with his feet up on his (actually, our) desk (the Resolute Desk was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes), browsing through his copy of today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. Suddenly he slaps his forehead, moaning “Oh, no!” as he reads Richard Kahlenberg’s discussion of the likelihood that Fisher v. Texas will wind up in the Supreme Court next term. (In that case a sharply divided Fifth Circuit recently upheld racial preferences at the University of Texas even though dramatic “diversity” had been achieved without them through its “top 10%” plan.)
“If the Supreme Court accepts a petition to hear the case,” Kahlenberg writes,
the oral argument could take place in the spring, with a decision likely a year from now — smack in the middle of the presidential campaign….
If the Supreme Court does decide to hear the case, the issue will put the Obama administration in an awkward position. At the lower court level, where very little attention was paid, Obama’s Department of Justice sided with the University of Texas in support of using race in admissions. But this position may be hard to reconcile with Obama’s stated belief that his own privileged daughters don’t deserve affirmative-action preferences, and that low-income students of all races do.
One can almost sympathize with the president’s evident (to me, in my mind’s eye) anguish. If he instructs his lawyers to argue before the Supremes that racial preferences are legal even where they are not necessary to produce extensive “diversity,” it will be much harder for him to maintain the fiction that he is a “post-racial” president.
But all is not lost. In fact, now comes a huge presidential sigh of relief as he sees the possibilities suggested by Kahlenberg’s next sentence: “Roger Clegg, of the conservative Center for Equal Opportunity, argues that Obama’s endorsement of race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action could be “a Nixon goes to China moment.”
Could he do it? Could the former Rev. Wright parishioner and ACORN lawyer who has never criticized any affirmative plan, who has opposed all state initiatives prohibiting race preferences, and whose Justice Department and all of his judicial nominees have never missed any opportunity to defend and extend racial classifications and preferences suddenly develop an appreciation for the principle that all Americans should be treated without regard to their race?
I doubt it. My ability to conjure up fantastical counter-factuals is simply not that strong. But stranger things have happened — after all, Obama did manage to convince millions of people that he intended to be a post-racial president — and if he does, we’ll all have Roger Clegg to thank.
