MUST BE GREAT TO HAVE A SAUDI PRINCE GET YOU INTO HARVARD.
THE MANSOURIAN CANDIDATE....
Why Obama is mum about Harvard
Exclusive: Jack Cashill offers reason Barack, Michelle don't talk about
editor post
Posted: September 11, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
By Jack Cashill
http://www.cashill.com/natl_general/why_obama_is_mum.htm
On the surface, at least, Barack Obama's single most impressive
accomplishment has been his 1990 election to the presidency of the Harvard
Law Review.
This position also provided Obama his only real executive experience as he
supervised the law review's staff of 80 editors.
One has to wonder, then, why neither he nor wife Michelle emphasized this
singular honor during the up-by-the-bootstraps biographical sections of
their respective speeches in Denver.
In fact, neither of them so much as mentioned Obama's time at Harvard,
this despite his vulnerability on the executive experience charge.
Their silence likely derives from one verifiable fact: Obama's record at
Harvard was no more authentic than John Kerry's record in Vietnam.
Kerry was justifiably swift-boated because he fraudulently positioned
himself as a war hero. Obama seems to have learned from Kerry.
In the age of the Internet, the less said about a dubious credential the
better, and Obama's law presidency credential is dubious on any number of
levels.
For starters, Obama did not do nearly well enough at his previous stop,
Columbia University, to justify admission to Harvard Law.
According to the New York Sun, university spokesman Brian Connolly
confirmed that Obama graduated in 1983 with a major in political science
but without honors.
In the age of affirmative action and grade inflation, a minority in a
relatively easy major like political science had to under-perform
dramatically to avoid minimal honors. Obama apparently did just that.
The specifics we may never know. As the New York Times concedes, Obama
"declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his
Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker,
roommate or friend from those years."
Would that Bristol Palin could get off so easily!
There are any number of possible reasons for Obama's reticence about
Columbia: his grades, the courses he took, his writing samples and, of
course, his associations.
At that time, for instance, both Bill Ayers and Obama fell within the
orbit of left-wing Columbia superstar Edward Said. Just recently out of
hiding, Ayers was attending the Bank Street College of Education, which
adjoins the Columbia campus.
Five years after leaving Columbia, Obama decided on law school. His lack
of resources did not deter him from thinking big. Nor did his B-minus
effort at his Hawaii prep school or his equally indifferent grades at
Columbia.
As Obama relates in "Dreams From My Father," he limited his choices to
only three law schools – "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." (It must be nice to be
Obama.) He does not mention his connections.
Harvard Law School is notoriously difficult to get into. Annually, some
7,000 applications apply for some 500 seats. Applicant LSAT scores
generally chart in the 98 to 99 percentile range, and GPAs average between
3.80 and 3.95.
If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission, we would know about them. We
don't.. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more
tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets.
We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall
below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted
black norm at Harvard.
As far back as 1988, however, Obama had serious pull. He would need it. As
previously reported, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince
Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President
Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf.
An orthodox Muslim, al-Mansour has not met the crackpot anti-Semitic
theory he could not embrace. As for bin Talal, in October 2001, New York
Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent his $10 million relief check back un-cashed after
the Saudi billionaire blamed 9/11 on America.
For an insight into the Khalid al-Mansour connection, see see this video.
These are not connections that Obama would like to see broadcast, which
further explains his shyness about the Harvard experience.
There is more. Obama did not make the Harvard Law Review (HLR) the
old-fashioned way, the way HLR's first black editor, Charles Houston, did
70 years prior..
To Obama's good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which
editors were elected based on grades – the president being the student
with the highest academic rank – with one in which half the editors were
chosen through a writing competition.
This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was "meant to help
insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review."
It did just that. At the end of his first year, Obama was named, along
with 40 or so of his classmates, an editor of the HLR.
Unlike most editors, and likely all its presidents, Obama was not a
writer. During his tenure at Harvard, he wrote only one heavily edited,
unsigned note.
In this note for the third volume of the 1990 HLR, he argued against any
limits on abortion, citing the government's interest in "preventing
increasing numbers of children from being born in to lives of pain and
despair."
Obama's timing, however, was better than his writing. In the same spring
1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Harvard
Law School found itself embroiled in an explosive racial brouhaha.
Black firebrand law professor Derrick Bell was demanding that the Harvard
Law School appoint a black woman to the law faculty.
This protest would culminate in vigils and protests by the racially
sensitive student body, in the course of which Obama would compare the
increasingly absurd Bell to Rosa Parks.
Feeling the pressure, HLR editors wanted to elect their first
African-American president. Obama had an advantage. Spared the legacy of
slavery and segregation, and having grown up in a white household, he
lacked the hard edge of many of his black colleagues.
"Obama cast himself as an eager listener," the New York Times reported,
"sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with
all of them at once."
In February 1990, after an ideologically charged all-day affair, Obama's
fellow editors elected him president from among 19 candidates. As it
happened, Obama prevailed only after the HLR's small conservative faction
threw him its support.
Curiously, once elected, Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR
or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National
Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns
up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any
time."
One more thing: The 1990 Times article about Obama's election notes that
the president of the HLR usually goes on to serve as a clerk for a Supreme
Court justice.
Not the Mansourian Candidate. Here, oddly, his ambition deserted him. He
told the Times that he planned "to spend two or three years in private law
practice and then return to Chicago to re-enter community work, either in
politics or in local organizing."
In this unlikely surrender to Chicago politics, the realist sees
insecurity at best and, at worst, the quid for al-Mansour's quo.
Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with
a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
"There is nothing more real than a man's character and values. The
track record of what he has actually done is far more real than
anything he says, however elegantly he says it." Thomas Sowell
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