Has Obama Sent “Mixed Signals” On Race?

Poor Richard Kahlenberg. He’s still trying to persuade the Obama administration to abandon race preference for class-based preferences. In a New Republic blog post he writes that

one of the most consequential political decisions of the presidential campaign may soon take place without anyone noticing. On Monday, August 13, the Obama administration is slated to file an amicus brief in a U.S. Supreme Court case challenging the use of racial preferences in admission to the University of Texas at Austin…..

Depending on how President Obama handles the issue—and the administration’s amicus brief will give a strong indication of its intentions—it could expose critical, even decisive, vulnerabilities to his re-election bid.

Kahlenberg seems to have forgotten that the administration has already demonstrated how he “handles the issue” — by filing an extreme amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit supporting the University of Texas’s continuing use of race preferences even though its race-neutral top 10% policy has provided more “diversity” than its former race-based affirmative action policy. Geez, the administration’s brief even supported the University’s claim that it will be “diversity”-deficient until all of its classes have a critical mass of minority students.

What Kahlenberg is urging, in short, is for the Obama administration to file a brief in the Supreme Court on Monday that rejects the position the Obama administration took in the Fifth Circuit. Good luck with that.

Kahlenberg of course has not actually forgotten about the administration’s Fifth Circuit brief in Fisher; it’s just that he is afflicted by some sort of perceptual disorder that prevents him from reading Obama’s “signals.” Consider the following:

To date, the president has given mixed signals on racial preferences, wanting to neither offend his base nor anger swing voters. On the one hand, the Department of Justice supported Texas’s affirmative action program in the lower courts. On the other hand, when asked whether his own daughters, as privileged African Americans, deserve affirmative action, Obama responded that they do not, and that low-income students of all races deserve a leg up.

What president is he talking about? The one I see has never, ever encountered a race preference program that he opposes. Does anyone other than Kahlenberg really think that an administration brief filed in federal court supporting what would be the open-ended, unending use of race preferences is really of equal weight to Obama’s offhand comment about his daughters? “On the one hand, on the other hand” indeed.

Kahlenberg couldn’t have forgotten about that Fifth Circuit brief, because he’s made the same futile argument before about the administration should, an argument to which I responded here by concluding:

 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?

What Kahlenberg is urging, in short, is for the Obama administration to file a brief in the Supreme Court on Monday that rejects the position the Obama administration took in the Fifth Circuit and everywhere else the question of race preferences has arisen. Good luck with that.