Media Criticism, Political Commentary

An Early Obama Letter

12 Comments

…confirms his inability to write:

Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick’s biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.

Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review’s affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

I am completely unsurprised by this. I think it at least partially explains why we aren’t allowed to see his transcripts.

12 thoughts on “An Early Obama Letter”

  1. I believe it was Plato — no, excuse me, I mean Play-Doh — who stuck to the wall when he said one must not put one’s transvestite in jeopardy if one is to become a cunning linguist.

  2. The substance of the letter is at least as important as the illiteracy of the Obamas. It has echoes of Clarence Thomas’ lament that an Ivy degree is less valuable to minorities, because employers know that Affirmative Action hires are uneducated dummies. That was covered well in the New Yorker – unusual to see such a lefty journal (and Jeffrey Toobin!) showering Clarence Thomas with such high praise. I can only imagine that, in Toobin’s hate filled lefty brain, it did not read that way. It truly DOES, though.

    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all

  3. “Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction.”

    (author unknown — http://articles.cnn.com/2006-08-16/justice/ramsey.ransom.note_1_jonbenet-ransom-note-small-foreign-faction-ramsey-home?_s=PM:LAW)

    Is that sentence correct? We — plural pronoun — are — plural form of “to be” — a group of individuals — noun object — is it singular “group” or plural “individuals” — that — subordinate clause qualifying a pronoun/noun, I think it is qualifying the subject “group of individuals” rather than the plural object pronoun “we” — represent — correct if group-of-individuals is plural, but what if it is singular, i.e., a “group”, singular, no? So it should be “group of individuals that represents” — plural verb?

    Please help! There is still a kidnapper/murder at large in Boulder, Colorado who is lacking in grammar skills.

  5. Megan McCain? For a while there I saw Megan McArdle. Ms. McArdle admitted to voting for Mr. Obama, and I don’t agree with all of her positions on public issues, but if she were in charge, I don’t think we would be in anywhere near the mess we are now.

  7. Obama graduated with honors, so that would imply that he did fairly well academically. It would still be interesting to see what classes he took.

  9. When I first read the Obama letter, I noticed the typos. But it is not clear that the typos originated with Obama and are not an artifact of transcription. For example, the third paragraph is

    Once all the writing competition submissions have been graded, these scores, as well as the law school transcripts of all those who have chosen to release the, are submitted to a Selection Committee made up of the President ad two other Review editors who have been elected by their fellow editors.

    Clearly there is a missing noun (which should be in the block “the,”), and the “n” is missing from “ad”. There are other typos. But again, how do we know that these are not the byproduct of sloppy copying of a hardcopy text? Oddly, the last paragraph contains a typo, “ia”, that is notated with the obligatory “[sic]”, indicating an error in the original. Does that imply the other typos were not in the original? This is precisely the kind of question which my wife uses as evidence that the time I spend on this blog is completely wasted.

    Ah, well, in any case, I’d say about the only thing we know for sure about this grubby little episode is that the chances that Obama will be a better President than Rutherford B. Hayes are vanishingly small (or, as Obama might say, “is vanishingly small”).

  10. Um, wait a minute, on second thought, the “the,” is more likely supposed to be “them,”. A single elided letter is even easier to blame on a transcription error.

  11. Has anybody heard from any Obama classmates (anywhere?) or is it some form of selective memory loss on a massive scale? What about ex-girlfriends? Ex-room mates? Dope smoking buddies? Or old school teachers? Anybody?

  12. Larry, you’ve stumbled onto the real reason for interest in Alaska. They’re all being kept in a secret government hibernation chamber in the Klondike.

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