One problem with Obama running on his biography is that he’s systematically misled voters into imagining things about the implications of his life story that aren’t true. He has a gift for telling people what they want to hear. But that comes with a second problem: one of those people is Barack Obama. He is weak at learning from his own biography, tending to draw lessons that are cliches from the conventional wisdom, no matter how obviously inapt they are.

Here, for example, is the emotional climax of Dreams from My Father, in which Barack Obama Jr. visits his father’s and paternal grandfather’s graves in Kenya (p. 429). His passionate reflections on his father strike me as heavily Oprah-influenced and bizarrely backward:

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I guess 48 years just wasn’t enough on-the-job training for Fidel…

By the way, did you see how brother Raul is now letting Cubans buy personal computers for the first time ever? (I had a personal computer 23.5 years ago.) Only $700. Of course, $700 is a gigantic amount of money for Cubans not high up in the government or getting money from Miami. Cuba is really poor, compared to, say, the Dominican Republic.

In

1959, Fidel promised to issue bonds to pay for $1.85 billion in U.S. owned assets that he had expropriated, but, what with one thing and another, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc., that’s never been paid. At 5% interest, that comes to $21 billion, which isn’t much (for us, but it’s a lot for Cuba). At 10% interest that comes to $217 billion, which is a fair chunk of change.

Is there the makings of a deal here? Say the U.S. government offered to pay off the 1958 American debtors with 5% interest and lift the embargo in return for, say, three consecutive free elections over an eight year period, free speech, right of return for exiles, and freedom for Americans to invest in the Cuban economy?

The Washington Post reports:

A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too “confrontational” and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.

The statue is being made in China because, well, that’s where everything is being made these days.

[For the origin of the title quote, see here.]

With Tim Russert declaring Barack Obama to be the Democratic nominee the other day, I thought it might be interesting to run his name through the legal databases to see which of his cases popped up. I was familiar with his having “summered” (in the stomach-churning patois of what David Lat calls “BigLaw“) at white-shoe Sidley Austin (he didn’t join the firm, but met Michelle). But out of Harvard Law School, he joined up with the more modest Miner, Barnhill & Galland, variously described as a politically connected Chicago firm.[As Lawyer, Obama Was Strong, Silent Type, By Abdon M. Pallasch, Chicago Sun-Times, December 17, 2007]

Accounts have him working on a mix of everyday cases, but among the ones show to up in one popular database, he’s slugging it out not for the poor and oppressed generally, but blacks specifically. For context, Carol Moseley Braun once worked at the firm. Two examples of his cases are Barnett v. Daley and Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank.

In Barnett v. Daley (United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 1994, 32 F.3d 1196), Obama was part of team that challenged the racial apportionment of Chicago voting districts as shortchanging blacks, despite the fact that their district power was very close to the black percentage of Chicago’s population. Created were 19 black super-majority districts. Obama’s team wanted 24. At this stage of the case, the brainy Richard Posner reversed a lower court dismissal of the case on the pleadings and sent it back for a consideration on the merits.

Posner recites the Obama team’s information that “no black aldermanic candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent black is not a black ward–is indeed a white ward, even though only 42 percent of its population is white.”

I am always amused that in this day of finger-wagging that you can’t generalize about race, Voting Rights Act litigation flatly assumes that voters vote strictly along racial lines. “Candidate of their choice” for any group is, duh, a person of the same race as the district.

After consolidation with a similar suit brought by Hispanics and a 48-day trial (I don’t think Obama was involved), Chicago’s map was upheld, whereupon that decision was… upheld for the Hispanics and remanded for the blacks. At this point, I became exhausted reading about Barnett v. Daley.

But it’s interesting that as Obama embarks on reaching out to all colors of the rainbow, he was once arguing that blacks can’t get elected unless they have enough blacks to vote for them. And don’t bother with the “he was just advocating for his client” line: he’s touted his “civil rights” work as part of his true calling.

In another case, apropos of the current mortgage meltdown, Obama was on the legal team trying to get class certification for blacks “victimized” by home mortgage lenders (Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, 1995, U.S. District Court for the District of Northern Illinois). The charge was that Citibank wasn’t loaning to blacks. The judge granted the certification.

Of course, as has been noted on VDare.com and elsewhere, these legal “successes” probably underlie much of the meltdown today. Banks weren’t loaning to blacks because their credit is often terrible. When the law forced them to anyway, the expected happened. And, as usual, evil white bankers have been blamed for… “predatory lending.”

So, in just two prominent examples, we’ve seen Obama’s mindset revealed, and it’s one of vigorous black racial advocacy. As someone who’d one day like to engage in “white advocacy” in the courtroom, I’m a little jealous that he’s not only gotten the opportunity to fight his fight, but now finds himself running for president with that as a strength, not a weakness.