Gail Herriot writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Affirmative Action Backfires
Have racial preferences reduced the number of black lawyers?

BY GAIL HERIOT
Sunday, August 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action–and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions–about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been “matched” to the wrong school.

No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander’s study, “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the “mismatch thesis” can be definitively accepted or rejected.

Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander’s data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don’t want you–or anyone else–to know.

Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander’s study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure “risks stigmatizing African American attorneys.” At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.

Sadly, the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn’t formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander’s request for these data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens–university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders–have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.

If the policy is not working, they, too, don’t want anyone to know. …

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Until Proven Innocent, the new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson is now available. Read a review here, and check out Nicholas Stix’ Absolutely Definitive Account Of The Incredible Disappearing Duke Rape Hoax
from earlier this year.

John O’Sullivan’s July 30 American Conservative cover story Getting Immigration Right: How conservatives blocked the open-borders establishment has finally appeared online, as Steve Sailer noted here last week. It opens with an amusing account of how O’Sullivan, in his then-role of editor of National Review, maneuvered my own 1992 Time To Rethink Immigration? NR cover story, which he (perhaps too generously) says “launched the modern American debate on immigration”, past the magazine’s proprietor, Bill Buckley. This whole opening passage is a salutary reminder of the extreme inhibitions that had prevented even established conservative intellectuals from addressing immigration policy up to that point.

And, alas, subsequently. The glaring omission from O’Sullivan’s article is the fact that in 1998 National Review “stopped stridently claiming opposition to immigration as a conservative cause”, as Wall Street Journal Editor Robert L. Bartley accurately gloated (July 3, 2000), and did not return to the issue until some time in 2002. The reason for this, of course, is that Buckley fired O’Sullivan and purged the magazine of immigration reformers (e.g. me).

In an embarrassing aside that he would have been better advised to omit, O’Sullivan implicitly denies these developments, although they are widely known. Of course, public silence was enjoined upon him by the terms of his severance agreement, which I am happy to say was negotiated by my lawyer.

Those of us who were personally injured by Buckley’s betrayal are obviously vitally interested in this story. But it is not without wider significance. It raises the question of whether the current National Review editors’ recent opposition to the Kennedy-Bush Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill was anything more than an opportunistic effort to insert themselves at the head of a parade, which they will abandon when their assessment of their career requirements shifts. After all, the amnesty they now congratulate themselves on opposing was the monomaniacal obsession of a president they slavishly supported, although his views were obvious.

Indeed, O’Sullivan provides an example of this opportunism. He writes:

Bill Kristol, representing many neoconservatives disposed to favor the bill, came out against it. He did so in part because it had serious drafting defects but, more importantly, because it was creating a bitter gulf between rank-and-file Republicans and the party leadership. That in turn was imperiling Republican objectives in other areas, notably Iraq.

Kristol will return to immigration enthusiasm once he has helped persuade Bush to attack Iran.

Buckley is conventionally credited with making the modern conservative movement. It is less commonly recognized that he has also been complicit in breaking it - beginning with his fratricidal attack on Pat Buchanan’s presidential insurgency in 1992, continuing with his allowing National Review to be taken over by sycophantic GOP gofers. This fatally facilitated the spreading Bush blight that has led the movement, the party and the country to utter disaster. O’Sullivan in effect suggests that Buckley tried to play the same role in the “modern American debate on immigration”. Only through luck, and the miracle of the internet, did he fail.

A reader has sent me a theory about why Sen. Barack Obama’s personality seems so different today than when he wrote his first autobiography in 1995. While highly speculative, his idea sounds not implausible.

Since I don’t watch television news, I’d never seen Barack Obama on video until after I read his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Thus, I developed a rather different perspective on Obama’s personality than the multitudes whose opinion was molded by seeing him on TV. Rather than seeing him as “comfortable in his own skin” (a phrase common among those who know him from TV), his memoir showed a supremely uncomfortable 33-year-old who was “a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh. …Obama has a depressive’s fine eye for the disillusioning detail. … The book’s chief weakness is that its main character—Obama himself—is a bit of a drip, a humor-impaired Holden Caulfield whose preppie angst is fueled by racial regret. (Obama has a knack for irony, but of a strangely humorless flavor.)”

Now, Waugh was an infinitely more interesting person than the man who was Prime Minister three times during Waugh’s early career from 1925-37, yet who is barely remember today. (Can you name that Tory PM? Waugh is now mentioned about 3.5 times more on the Internet than that Prime Minister.) Waugh was a man of near genius, but I’ve never heard of anyone ever considering him as a potential Prime Minister. The idea seems ludicrous. And that’s about the same impression I took away from Obama’s first memoir — a talented and highly interesting man, but not at all what you’d look for in a President.

Lots of people who hadn’t read Obama’s autobiography were outraged by my article about his book. They’d seen him on TV, where he looked very Presidential, so his book couldn’t possibly be like I said it was.

Kevin Drum of the liberal Washington Monthly, however, plowed all the way through Obama’s first book and reported back similarly, although Drum was less sympathetical and more distrustful than I was, but we seemed to be in agreement that twelve years ago Obama hadn’t portrayed himself as the kind of emotionally stable individual you’d want in the White House. Drum wrote:

Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable (one event is like a “fist in my stomach,” for example, and he “still burned with the memory” a full year after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian. Is he describing his real feelings? Is he simply making the beginning writer’s mistake of thinking that the way to convey emotion is to use lots of adjectives? Or is something else going on?…

There’s just something very peculiar about the book. I can’t put my finger entirely on what it is, but for all the overwrought language that Obama employs on page after page, there’s very little insight into what he believes and what really makes him tick. It was almost as if Obama was admitting to his moodiness and angst less as a way of letting us know who he is than as a way of guarding against having to really tell us. By the time I was done, I felt like I knew less about him than before.

But, clearly, Obama isn’t today the person portrayed in his first book. For one thing, he now has a mild sense of humor. Perhaps he never was who he claimed in 1995 to be — we now know his depiction of his Hawaiian days was quite distorted.

Or, perhaps he has changed. One possibility is that he goes through moderate hypomanic and depressive cycles. This is quite common among high achievers. The secret to winning your place in history is often to have an up cycle coincide by luck with a time when intense action is needed.

But, another possibility is that he’s done something to improve himself. A reader writes:

You should catch the Daily Show at 11. Not so much what Obama has to say, but just watching how comfortable he is in his own skin. I thought about you when Stewart showed him the headline, “Angry Obama the Pothead Is Not How They Remember Him In Hawaii”, his reaction was deep and genuine laughter, with no sign of self-consciousness or defensiveness.

From use of a throwaway use of the phrase, “push back against the habits of thought”, I think I know why “Angry Obama” seems so mellow, he’s gone through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I’d guess) and I think his shrink did the trick.

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