Obama the Myth: the Harvard Years

Since I’m being hammered from many sides to look at Obama as the superior candidate by some folks, I’ve decided to really take a look long and hard at the resume of Barack Obama. Because they tell me not to rely on the debate performances or his command of facts and issues, I decided to look at him like a job applicant.  One of my uncles graduated first in his class at Harvard Law School.  Just because I always was enamoured by my Uncle John, I started with the Harvard Law School party of Obama’s resume.  This was the FIRST thing I looked into.  I found that Obama is a job applicant with a short and padded resume and I got this information with very little time spent googling.  The MSM are really a lazy and nefarious bunch.

The first Obama accomplishment we’re presented is the constant repetition of this line that I grabbed from his senate bio.

In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review.

That just sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Despite implications by the press and others (I would include his campaign on that), Obama is NOT the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.  He is the THIRD.  He also didn’t achieve that position in the historical way which is by merit.

Why hasn’t any one done a little more research in to this?  It was completely easy to find that Obama padded his already razor thin resume.  Obama, is fact, the third black editor of the Harvard Law Review.  Academics get fired for this kind of resume lie. I find it reprehensible that Obama gets away with this on a daily basis.

Not only that, I would think that some one interested in promoting the achievements and history of black Americans would want to clarify this publicly. Any women or minority that achieved this kind of positions prior to efforts by the government to end discrimination is something folks should know about and recognize. Isn’t this the purpose of Women’s History Month and Black History Month? Unfortunately, these two gentlemen have know fallen prey to helping the establishment of Obama, the myth.

I would especially think that Harvard would point out that they’ve had blacks acheive the position prior to Obama.  One intrepid journalist asked them to clarify Obama’s resume ‘gaffe’ and published it  here. 

I wrote that letter to the Dean of the Harvard Law School Oct. 20, 2006. I received the answer in a letter dated Nov. 7, 2006. Dean Elena Kagan thanked me for my letter and said she was pleased to clarify a few points about the Harvard Law Review.

She said, “Members of the Harvard Law Review are referred to as editors. Each year there are many editors, but one person is elected president. The first African-American to serve on the Review was Charles Hamilton Houston, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1922. The second African-American to gain admission to the Review was William Henry Hastie who earned an LL.B from the Law School in 1930 and an S.J.D. in 1933. Barack Obama was the first African-American president of the Review; he graduated from the Law School in 1991.”

How Obama achieved the status of editor is also an interesting story.   As ferreted out by many, and published by few,  in 1990, the Harvard Law Review ceased to be a position achieved by merit.  The first two black men who achieved their post did so because they placed in the top 10% of their graduating class.

Jack Cashill of the World Net Daily wrote this article in September of 2008.   Here’s one of the highlights, although I do suggest you check out his entire column.

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.

NOTE:  I know this isn’t the greatest of sources, but the point is that the rules were changed and that mentioned was based on a news article from a legitimate source.  I’m not all that interested in Cashill’s opining as I am in why they changed the rules and that they did so RIGHT before Obama’s tenure.

This ‘achievement’ is supposedly Obama’s shining moment.  Yet, it appears as much invented and overlooked by the MSM as many of the other things Obama purports and denies.  This may serve the interests of Obama and the folks who want him elected at any cost.  However, the much needed praise paid to his TWO predecessors remains buried so that Obama the myth, can be elected.  Their TRUE achievements remained buried so that a myth can live on.