Obama: Affirmative Action Man

Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. have written Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. Their comprehensive study says university affirmative action students often rank low in their class and struggle to finish college or pass professional exams. And whatever their academic achievements, affirmative action arguably both stigmatizes its beneficiaries and, knowing they have gained preferential treatment, compromises their self-esteem and self-respect.

Obama at Harvard Law
Barack Obama is America’s Affirmative Action Man. As with lesser known affirmative action beneficiaries, he’ll never know where he’d be if affirmative action hadn’t pushed him forward.  

Obama in 1991 became the first African-American President of the Harvard Law Review. Six years later, he was an Illinois State Senator, and a further decade on, was running for U.S. President.

The honor for 90 years until the 1970s of leading the Harvard Law Review went to the student with the best grades. But by Obama’s time, the school was using affirmative action to select some of the 46 Law Review editors, with the editors in turn electing their Law Review President.

As U.S. President, Obama empowered the Justice and Education departments to push affirmative action. Obama also placed other same-generation diversity winners in top positions, including key advisor Valerie Jarrett, Attorney General Eric Holder, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, while Sonia Sotomayor was one of his two Supreme Court appointments.  

Does affirmative action’s “compromised self-respect” help explain Obama’s scorching attack on Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner?

With Trump in attendance, Obama mocked the then-reality TV star’s presidential ambitions. Trump, Obama said, had shown the “acumen of a future president” by firing Gary Busey from “Celebrity Apprentice”, and by advancing conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace.

Obama had just released his Hawaii birth certificate, which Obama said allowed Trump to shift to “serious issues” such as whether the moon landing actually happened and the whereabouts of murdered rappers Biggie and Tupac.

Obama added, “No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than ‘the Donald,’” as he took on Trump’s claim of having forced the issue’s conclusion. As to Trump’s firing actor Busey instead of rock singer Meat Loaf, Obama quipped: “These are the types of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir.”

Supporting the theory that Obama’s 2011 attack on Trump prompted Trump to run for and win the presidency in 2016 — to the likely horror of Obama — we know Trump trademarked “Make America Great Again” immediately after Obama won re-election in 2012!

Another questionable Obama comedy turn took place last November when he told Stephen Colbert how he could extend his own presidential tenure, using

a stand-in or front-man [who] had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony.


Really? A third term for Obama, operating through a front-man? Just comedy? Every day, Biden’s presidency looks more and more like Affirmative Action Man never left.

The late columnist Charles Krauthammer, an M.D. in psychiatry, in 2014 called then-President Obama a “narcissist:”

I think he’s extremely self-involved. He sees himself in very world historical terms, which means A) because he’s an amateur, he doesn’t know very much, and B) because he’s a narcissist, he doesn’t listen.  [L]ook at .     .     . the way he introduces high officials — I’d like to introduce my secretary of state. He once referred to “my intelligence community.” And in one speech.   .   . “my military.” For God’s sake, he talks like the emperor, Napoleon. [It’s] all being a drama about him, and everybody else is just sort of part of the stage.


Clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis, discussing Trump in Vanity Fair, said:

Narcissism is an extreme defense against one’s own feelings of worthlessness. To degrade people is .   .   . antisocial and shows a lack of remorse for other people. The way to make it O.K. to attack someone verbally, psychologically, or physically is to lower them. That’s what he’s doing.


Those words also describe America’s Affirmative Action Man.

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