Obama and the missing paper trail .. www.redbourn.blogspot.com
Would Barack Obama be likely to fulfill his campaign promises of hope and change if he were elected President?
Judged by his previous achievements the answer would have to be a resounding ‘no’.
When faced with past failures he has always tried to obscure them, and if or when that was not possible he has blamed others.
The many "successes" that he has claimed in campaign speeches were often due to the work of others but he always took but never gave credit for them.
He has steadfastly refused to answer questions relating to his days at Harvard and such omissions are a continually recurring and worrying theme.He was appointed ‘President of the Law Review’ which is something that should not be minimalized but whilst holding the post he published none of his own work and once again there is no paper trail and this pattern predates his time at Harvard.
He majored in political science at Columbia University but when asked for his senior thesis he claimed to have lost it. Its subject was the Kennedy-Khrushchev conference and the diplomatic history between America and the Soviets and it later came to light that he was wrong about all its crucial elements.
So how are we to judge him when there are no written records, no signed legal papers, no research papers that were authored or co-authored by him?A search of the ‘HeinOnline’ database of law journals turns up nothing that can be credited to Obama in any law review anywhere or at any time. In spite of an apparent eleven-year teaching career in constitutional law at a top law school there is not one single article, published talk, book review, or comment of any kind that bears the name ‘Barack Obama’.
He misjudged the constitutionality of Washington D.C.'s gun control law which is somewhat surprising given his legal background. He believed the law to be constitutional and supported it but The Supreme Court disagreed and threw out the ban. Obama then sought to distance himself from his earlier opinion and blamed an "unnamed aide" for stating that he believed that DC ban was constitutional.
Obama misinterpreted the "Born Alive" bill that came before the Illinois State Senate when he served there.The legislation was intended to address the issue of babies who were born during abortion procedures. The legislation was clear and afforded babies that were born during an abortion the protection of the law and stated that they should be treated like any other baby that was born alive and prematurely. Obama spoke out against the bill saying it would not pass "constitutional muster" but three years later, in his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’, he wrote that it would have overturned Roe v. Wade. That he was so completely wrong is more than a little disappointing for a man who prides himself on being a constitutional expert.
He told the Teamsters union that he would end the federal oversight of the union in exchange for their electoral support which is an unusual commitment to have made given that union anti-corruption efforts have until now always been treated as a legal matter and left to the Justice Department.Was Barack Obama willing to lift this monitoring which is intended to prevent crime in order to gain votes?
When it comes to the selection of Supreme Court nominees Obama disagreed with fellow Democrats over the selection of Justices Roberts and Alito and voted against their confirmation in spite of their excellent legal credentials. He would apparently use an entirely different yardstick to the tried and tested one and stated, “We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges”.“
Can or should we be asked to follow a person that leaves no trail?
