XPost: alt.california, ba.politics, alt.gossip.celebrities   
   XPost: rec.arts.tv   
   From: peederphiles@sfmayor.org   
      
   The irrepressible Donald Trump has raised still another question   
   the major media have dared not to ask: Did Barack Obama qualify   
   for Columbia and Harvard on his own accomplishments?   
      
   “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”   
   asked Trump of the Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it, I’m   
   certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”   
      
   Trump asks a very good question for which the anti-journalists   
   of the major media have no good answer. So allow me to fill in   
   the gaps.   
      
   Although the late New York politico Percy Sutton admitted to   
   helping Obama get into Harvard Law, Obama likely could have   
   gotten in on his own.   
      
   Obama had the one thing it took all along, and he surely began   
   to understand this when, as a bench-warming, B-minus student at   
   his Hawaiian prep school, he “won” a full scholarship to   
   Occidental where he spent his first two years of college.   
      
   New Yorker editor David Remnick has chosen not to see what   
   greased Obama’s skids despite adding considerable information   
   about Obama’s academic record in his Obama biography, “The   
   Bridge.”   
      
   Remnick tells us that Obama was an “unspectacular” student in   
   his final two years at Columbia and at every stop before that   
   going back to grade school.   
      
   A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference   
   for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think   
   [Obama] did too well in college.”   
      
   How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose   
   applicants’ LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99   
   percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.8 and 4.0 is a subject   
   Remnick bypasses.   
      
   Obama had decided on law school as a way to follow in the career   
   path of the recently deceased Chicago mayor, Harold Washington.   
   Washington went to Northwestern’s very respectable law school in   
   Chicago. The thought doesn’t cross Obama’s mind.   
      
   In “Dreams from My Father,” he limits his choices to “Harvard,   
   Yale, Stanford.” Writes Obama biographer David Mendell as   
   casually as if the honor were deserved, “Obama would soon be   
   accepted at the most prestigious law school in the nation.”   
      
   As to Obama’s LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa’s body will be unearthed   
   before those are.   
      
   Michelle Obama’s experience shows just how wonderfully   
   accessible Harvard Law School could be. “Told by counselors that   
   her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for an Ivy   
   League school,” writes biographer Christopher Andersen,   
   “Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.”   
      
   Jack Cashill’s literary investigation uncovers revelations   
   galore about Obama’s alleged life narrative. Order the new book   
   “Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Love and Letters of America’s   
   First Post-Modern President”   
      
   Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, “Michelle frequently   
   deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself   
   as a person who did not test well.” She did not write well,   
   either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at   
   Princeton as “dense and turgid.”   
      
   The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, “To describe   
   [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis   
   cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This   
   is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”   
      
   Still, Michelle was admitted to and graduated from Harvard Law.   
   She had to have been as anxious as Bart Simpson at Genius   
   School, but Bart at least knew he was in over his head, and he   
   knew why: He had cheated on his IQ test.   
      
   Obama was sufficiently self-deluding – some would say   
   narcissistic – that he felt little of that anxiety. Later in his   
   book, Remnick lets slip into the record a revealing letter Obama   
   had written while president of the Harvard Law Review.   
      
   Remnick attempts here to illustrate Obama’s maturity on matters   
   racial. In the process, however, he suggests one explanation for   
   how Obama got into Harvard and how he became an editor of the   
   Harvard Law Review (HLR). Wrote Obama to the Harvard Law Record:   
      
   I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly   
   benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic   
   career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law   
   Review’s affirmative action policy when I was selected to join   
   the Review last year, I have not felt stigmatized within the   
   broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review.   
      
   Remnick refuses to concede Obama’s need for affirmative action,   
   let alone any stigma attached to it. He boasts that this “inner   
   sanctum of the establishment” accepted only the “brightest and   
   most ambitious” first-year students and offers as explanation,   
   “Obama’s grades were good.”   
      
   As he does on many occasions, Remnick chooses not to share with   
   the reader a larger truth. The fact is that Obama did not make   
   the Law Review 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.”   
      
   The election for president of the Harvard Law Review was based   
   more on popularity than competence. Obama prevailed over 18   
   other candidates only after the HLR’s small conservative faction   
   threw him its support.   
      
   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.”   
      
   In calling Obama a “terrible student,” Trump speaks a bit   
   harshly, but not overly so. By Harvard Law standards, Obama was   
   a terrible student prior to admission. Following graduation, he   
   contributed nothing to legal scholarship.   
      
   Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, but that was   
   surely as much due to charm as it was to performance.   
      
   Remember that Michelle, who both wrote and tested poorly, also   
   graduated from Harvard Law.   
      
       
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)