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Review: Kaylene Johnson's "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down"

Enthusiasm for reform-minded, fiscally prudent, and socially conservative Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has moved beyond the "buzz" stage to the point where it's now rolling thunder.

On June 8th, after finishing several hours of internet research, I posted a long essay (with many photographs) entitled Would Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin be a grand slam as McCain's Veep? I'm not claiming any causal relationship, mind you, but consider the following events since then (in addition to my own short follow-up post on June 18th):

• On June 9th, Real Clear Politics reported that among her own constituents in Alaska, Gov. Palin "enjoys an incredible 82% positive rating, while just 10% don't see her in a good light."

• On June 22nd, Politico.com included Gov. Palin as one of "Three women who could join [the] GOP ticket," noting that "it’s her personal biography, which excites social conservatives, and reformist background that might most appeal to McCain."

• In a June 23rd letter, Gov. Palin directly confronted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on the federal government's boneheaded refusal to consider drilling for oil and gas on a tiny portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

• On June 24th, Rush Limbaugh played contrasting sound clips from Gov. Palin and Democratic nominee-presumptive Sen. Barack Obama in order to highlight the fact that Gov. Palin whips Obama hands-down on this issue, and that the Dems essentially have no energy plan other than to "Just say no!" Quote Limbaugh: "Amen! Here is a female Republican who is willing to gut it up!"

• On June 25th, Gov. Palin gave an extended interview to economist and CNBC pundit Larry Kudlow in which she confirmed herself as a thoughtful and articulate leader on national energy issues.

• And from his regular slot as a panelist on "Fox News Sunday" this morning, Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, was positively ebullient about the possibility of Gov. Palin being chosen as John McCain's vice presidential running mate:

  Republicans are much more open to strong women, and that's why McCain is going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket as vice president.... She's fantastic! You know, she was the point guard on the Alaska state championship high school basketball team in 1982. She could take Obama one-on-one on the court. It'd be fantastic! Anyway, I do think — I actually think that Sarah Palin would be a great vice presidential pick, and it would be interesting to have a woman on the Republican ticket after Hillary Clinton has come so close and failed on the Democratic side.

There's no denying that Gov. Palin is a hot new talent on the national political scene. But is there substance behind the sizzle?

In search of further details in order to answer to that question, I turned to Kaylene Johnson's just-released biography, "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down." After finishing it, I'm even more firmly aboard the Sarah Palin for Veep bandwagon.

As a long-time Alaskan writer and quite literally a neighbor of the Palins — the jacket cover informs us that she "makes her home on a small farm outside Wasilla," a suburban community north of Anchorage — Johnson has done a timely and competent service to the political junkies among us who hunger for basic factual information on our leading political figures.

To read this book, I set aside another biography that I'd almost finished, one that is also much in the news these days — Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, about which I'll blog at greater length between now and Election Day. Suffice it to say, for now, that although both books purport to cover the early lives of these two young politicians, Johnson's book contains more in the way of objective facts, pertinent anecdotes, and relevant information in 137 pages (plus a fine set of source notes and a serviceable index) than Obama managed to do for himself in 442 pages of vague, breezy, touchy-feely, and wholly unsourced (indeed, admittedly sometimes fictionalized) narrative.

Given the choice between brisk and factual, on the one hand, and deep and muddled on the other, I'll take brisk and factual any time.

Johnson's writing is blessedly free of angst and existential philosophizing. She doesn't need that — for she has, in Sarah Palin, a compelling tale to tell that's based on the remarkable accomplishments of a remarkably normal person. Indeed, although they're products of, respectively, the forty-ninth and fiftieth American states and both grew up outside the continental 48, Sarah Palin's personal history is as familiarly American as Barack Obama's is exotic and strange. And Johnson serves it up without mysticism or manufactured romance:

Born in Sandpoint, Idaho, on February 11, 1964, Sarah Louise was the third of four children born in rapid succession to Chuck and Sally Heath. The family moved to Alaska when Sarah was two months old. Chuck took a teaching job in Skagway. Her older brother, Chuck Jr., was two years old. Heather had just turned one, and Molly was soon to come. Chuck Jr. vividly remembers the days in Skagway when he and his dad ran a trapline, put out crab pots, and hunted mountain goats and seals. The family spent time hiking up to alpine lakes and looking for artifacts left behind during the Klondike Gold Rush....

In 1969, the Heaths moved to southcentral Alaska, living for a short time with friends in Anchorage, then for two years in Eagle River before finally settling in Wasilla. The family lived frugally. To help make ends meet, Chuck Heath moonlighted as a hunting and fishing guide and as a bartender, and even worked on the Alaska Railroad for a time. Sally worked as a school secretary and ran their busy household.

It's basically the Ward and June Cleaver family, albeit transplanted to the last American frontier. Sarah Palin didn't need to indulge in intercontinental travel and cosmic soul-searching to find out who her father was, or where her roots were, or where she fit into her own family and community. She knew where she and her family fit in. In an appendix, Johnson reproduces Gov. Palin's inaugural address, which included this simple but moving tribute:

I believe in public education. I'm proud of my family's many, many years working in our schools. I hope my claim to fame, believe it or not, is never that I'm Alaska's first female governor. I hope it continues to be, "You're Mr. Heath's daughter." My dad for years has been teaching in the schools and even today he's inspiring students across the state. So many students around this land came up to me not saying, "Oh, you're Sarah Palin ... you're running for office ... you're the governor." No, it's been, "Sarah Palin, wow! Mr. Heath's been my favorite teacher of all time."

With short exceptions for college stays in Hawaii and Idaho, Alaska forms the backdrop for most of Palin's story, but Johnson neither minimizes nor overplays its role. Growing up there meant that Sarah participated in hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing, and the like — but for the most part, her experiences could have just as easily been in any of countless small towns scattered across America.

As Bill Kristol noted today, she was a high school basketball player (and also ran track). "Sarah Barracuda," they called her for her competitiveness on the court — but Johnson gives us Palin's real life story in an entirely plausible account, rather than a Cinderella story crafted or staged by someone consciously trying to build or burnish a political résumé.

Indeed, until her senior year in high school, Palin was frustrated at being relegated to the junior varsity; she was a team captain, but not one of the team's two top scorers; and an ankle injury kept her out of most of the second half of that championship game. Her coach put her back into the lineup to seal the win against a heavily favored Anchorage team — whereupon she drew a foul and hit a free-throw to score the game's final point.

She startled friends and family when she decided to compete in the local beauty pageant, but for her, becoming "Miss Wasilla" in 1984 was all about snagging some college scholarship money. And Palin put her 1987 bachelor's degree in journalism (with a minor in political science) from the University of Idaho to work as a weekend sportscaster in Anchorage.

When Palin married her high-school beau, Todd Palin, in 1988, they eloped — snagging two residents of a nearby nursing home to serve as their witnesses for the civil ceremony at the courthouse in Palmer, Alaska. They started their family about the same time Todd took a blue-collar job with British Petroleum on the North Slope:

The Palins named their first child, a boy, Track, after the track and field season in which he was born. Sarah's father jokingly asked what they would have named their son if he had been born during the basketball season. Without hesitating Sarah answered "Hoop."

But by 1992, Palin "felt a yearning to try to make a difference in her community. Like her years playing basketball," writes Johnson, "she wasn't interested in sitting on the sidelines."

So did she become a "community organizer"?

Johnson doesn't use that term, and I doubt either the term or the notion ever occurred to Sarah Palin. Instead, she ran for the Wasilla city council, going "door to door pulling a wagon with four-year-old son Track and two-year-old daughter Bristol." The existing political establishment had expected a passive homemaker who'd support the status quo, but that was not to be:

After taking office, Sarah was dumbfounded by the inner workings of the city government. "Right away I saw that it was a good old boys network," she said. "Mayor Stein and [Councilman] Nick Carney told me, 'You'll learn quick, just listen to us.' Well, they didn't know how I was wired."

Within weeks, Palin had upset the status quo by voting against a pay raise for the mayor and an exclusive city-wide garbage pickup contract with Carney's company. But during her second term, she became convinced that she needed to throw the good-old-boy network out entirely — so she decided to run for mayor herself in 1996, and she whipped the long-time incumbent handily.

As mayor, Palin took a voluntary pay cut from $68,000 to $64,200, cut real property taxes and eliminated taxes on personal property and business inventory, and sponsored a $5.5 million road and sewer bond to promote new commercial development. In 1999, Stein ran against her again, but she whipped him by an even larger margin than the first time. By then, she was attracting state-wide attention, which resulted in her being elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors.

Former U.S. Senator Frank Murkowski was returning to Alaska to run for governor in 2002, and he encouraged Palin to run for lieutenant governor. She did, but the race quickly became a crowded one when three other well-established GOP state politicians who'd been considering running for governor instead opted to seek the second seat. Although she was outspent by the eventual winner by more than four to one, she finished a strong second, coming within 2000 votes and three percentage points of victory.

New governor Murkowski promptly appointed her to chair the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission — and there begins the tale of Palin as a reformer on a statewide stage. Johnson recounts how Palin tried, without success, to force fellow Commissioner Randy Ruedrich to comply with statutory ethics reporting requirements. Ruedrich, who was also the chair of the Alaskan Republican Party, apparently felt himself to be exempt from such concerns, and he also felt no qualms about billing his Commission expense account for political traveling or using Commission personnel and material to do party work. Moreover, rather than looking out for the public interest, he effectively turned himself into a lobbyist and public spokesman for a company that had secretly leased from the state certain underground rights to extract natural gas from coal seams under private property. Palin's written and oral complaints to Alaska's attorney general, Gregg Renkes, eventually forced Ruedrich's resignation from the Commission, but Renkes' office ordered her to stay mum and stonewall the press. Her further complaints to Murkowski were also ignored.

Frustrated, Palin resigned from the Commission. She was partially vindicated in the public's eyes, however, when Ruedrich negotiated a settlement of the ethics claims against him in which he admitted to three out of four alleged violations and paid a $12,000 fine. Palin then continued to speak out against what she perceived as ethical lapses on the part of both Attorney General Renkes and Governor Murkowski. Murkowski complained that Palin was trying to "create a sideshow" to further her own political ambitions. But as Johnson writes:

In her toe-to-toe face-off with the governor, Sarah once again refused to back down. She fired off a guest-opinion piece to the [Anchorage] Daily News. "It's said the only difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick," she wrote. "So, with lipstick on, the gloves come off in answering administration accusations."

After slamming Murkowski for "hiring his own counsel, paid for by the state, to investigate his long-time friend, confidant, and campaign manager [Renkes]," Sarah concluded by writing, "Despite those in Juneau who think otherwise, it's healthy for democracy to ask questions. And I'll bet there are hockey moms and housewives all across this great state who agree."

Two months later, Renkes resigned.

That meant two down, one to go. Based on reservations harbored by her oldest son, Palin passed up a 2004 opportunity to challenge Lisa Murkowski, whom her father, the governor, had named (in an act of unbridled nepotism) to fill an open U.S. Senate seat. But in 2005, she decided to challenge Frank Murkowski himself in the 2006 GOP gubernatorial primary. 

Johnson's biography is at its best in relating the granular details of Palin's underdog state-wide campaigns — first in the GOP primary, and then in a closely contested general election — as a reformer who'd impose fiscal conservatism and return ethics to state government. After winning the GOP primary without a run-off by capturing 51% of the vote (compared to Murkowski's 19%), Palin went on to win a three-way general election, garnering 48% of the vote to defeat Democrat Tony Knowles' 41% showing.

Getting oneself nominated, and then elected, to public office is one type of accomplishment. Indeed, it's about the only sort of accomplishment that Barack Obama can claim. But just as she did while she was a city mayor, during her first two years as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has actually demonstrated an ability to govern.

Some acts were symbolic: Among her first decisions in office was to list the corporate jet that her predecessor had acquired for sale on eBay, and she fired the executive chef from the Governor's Mansion because she and "First Dude" Todd believe they're perfectly capable of cooking for their own family.

But Johnson reports that Gov. Palin has also been successful in pushing through substantive reform legislation. At her urging, for example, the Alaska Legislature has repealed an oil and gas severance taxation system that Murkowski had negotiated behind closed doors with BP, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips, replacing it with a slightly higher tax structure negotiated transparently and at arms' length. Gov. Palin has also worked with the legislature to encourage these three big oil companies — and others who are not already so heavily invested in Alaska — to compete in developing a natural gas pipeline that will bring cheaper and more reliable energy to Alaska's own consumers and eventually permit cheap export of natural gas to the Lower 48 states. Palin has shown herself to be simultaneously pro-environment, pro-development, pro-competition, and emphatically outside the pockets of either the corporate powers-that-be or their traditional politician allies.

Johnson's straight-forward writing style complements her subject's own style. And if there is a dark side to Sarah Palin, this book doesn't tell it. However competitive she was on the high school basketball courts, one can't help but infer from the facts related in the book that Sarah Palin has left bruised ribs in her political wake. But her chief victims seem to have been the complacent, the spendthrift, and the ethically challenged members of her own political party, and they're laying low.

Neither in this book, nor in the many video clips I've watched her in, does Gov. Palin give any sense of being grumpy or vindictive, but Johnson's book includes an admission regarding one of McCain's defining characteristics that Sarah Palin does share — "what her father calls an unbending, unapologetic streak of stubbornness":

"The rest of the kids, I could force them to do something," Chuck Sr. said. "But with Sarah, there was no way. From a young age she had a mind of her own. Once she made up her mind, she didn't change it." ...

Later on, Sarah's father would enlist the help of people Sarah respected — especially coaches and teachers — to persuade her to see things his way. Yet he concedes Sarah was persuasive in her arguments and often correct. Later, when his daughter became governor, Chuck found it immensely amusing that acquaintances asked him to sway Sarah on particular issues. He says he lost that leverage before she was two...

... From the moment she began making her mark in politics, she was criticized for being too young, too inexperienced, and too naive.

Yet, time after time over the years, underestimating Sarah always proved to be a big mistake.

"New energy for Alaska" was Gov. Palin's gubernatorial campaign slogan. After reading Johnson's biography of her, I'm going to have to work hard to summon up new energy to return to the last few dozen pages of Barack Obama's autobiography. He is, without doubt, a complex figure — and I say that with worry, not admiration, because that complexity often translates into a troublesome slipperiness even in the portrait he carefully crafts of himself. By contrast, Johnson's book makes me more confident that with Sarah Palin, as with John McCain, what you see is pretty much what you'll get. That's rare in politics, but we need more of it. And I'm increasingly convinced that I would like to see her as the GOP's candidate for vice president this fall.

(Photographs from the book, as reprinted here with the generous, express written permission of Epicenter Press, are all copyright 2008 by Chris and Sally Heath, except the last one, which is copyright 2008 by Chris Miller/CSM, and those parties reserve all rights to these photographs; please don't republish them elsewhere on the internet without obtaining their express permission in advance.)

Hold oil speculators accountable while driving down the prices of crude oil and gasoline

This isn't rocket science. Instead, it's quite literally Economics 101.

Dems, including both Congressional leaders and their party's presidential candidate, Barack Obama, are all about "investigating" the role of "speculators" in the oil futures markets who, they claim, are responsible for driving up the cost of oil and, thus, the cost of gasoline at the pump.

Hearings are being scheduled and held. Legislation has been proposed.

This is worse than useless, because there is already in place a devastatingly efficient mechanism to punish any who've artificially inflated the current price of oil by reckless, collusive, or abusive trading in oil futures. It's a two-step mechanism:

(1) Start in a serious way to do what we can do to both reduce demand (i.e., conserve) and increase supply (i.e., drill and promote alternative energy sources).

(2) Let the market work.

The fundamentals of market economics will then cause the current price of oil to drop. Yes, it will drop today even if the oil whose production that Congress approves now from the outer continental shelf offshore and from the Arctic National Wildlife Preserves won't actually be produced for years yet. When the opportunities are opened up and the commitments are made, the market will indeed react based on its anticipation of future results. Only an economic idiot or a Democratic congressman can't understand that the market is reacting now to the absence of those future opportunities and commitments.

When the price drops, the wagers made by the speculators — who are heavily invested in the success of the do-nothing Democratic Congress — will come up snake-eyes. Those who've speculated will lose their shirts. Their leveraged purchases will bite them with a multi-fold and righteous vengeance. There's no need for hearings, no need for lawsuits, no need for citations or fines or newspaper exposes.

Just the brutal efficiency of the market, which — when permitted to function properly — punishes those who abuse its processes.

We don't know for sure how many market manipulators there are, or who they are, or how much of the current high prices are the result of their manipulation. Nor are we likely to track them down: Crooks hide their tracks, and the difference between a crook and an entrepreneur is often purely a matter of subjective judgment.

The market doesn't care; the market doesn't need tracks. The market passes its relentless judgments automatically, inexorably, and with the closest thing to perfect justice we're likely to see in our lifetimes — if, but only if, it's allowed by government to function normally, i.e., freed from government interference.

You want to purge the market of manipulative speculators? Let the markets work. Permit and encourage conservation to reduce demand; permit and encourage development (both drilling and alternative sources) to increase supply; and drive the price down using basic laws of economics that are more powerful than even Barack Obama on his best day when he's got a full gospel choir and both chambers of Congress singing with him in harmony.

Why didn't Obama publish anything in the law journal he edited?

"Obama kept Law Review balanced," according to the title of an article by Jeffrey Ressner and Ben Smith on the Politico website. By that, they mean that during his one-year term as president of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama gave final approval to the publication of articles by law professors, and shorter "notes" by student authors, that reflected a wide range of differing viewpoints.

That is tantamount to saying that he did his job acceptably well. It's mildly interesting, but not nearly as interesting as an Obama mystery that Ressner and Smith mention — and then leave completely unresolved!

[NOTE: Many weeks after I wrote this post, Smith and Ressner have published a new article entitled Exclusive: Obama's lost law review article, reporting that Obama actually did write an unsigned "case comment" for the HLR in which he analyzed an Illinois Supreme Court case which held that a fetus has no tort rights to sue its mother for money damages for injuries sustained due to the mother's alleged negligence. More details here. — Beldar, Fri Aug 22, 2008 @ 8:30pm.]

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Every law review attempts to foster its own credibility by developing and maintaining a reputation for objectivity and open-mindedness. Even though the teaching faculties at law schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia are overwhelmingly liberal in their own political persuasions, and even though they tend to espouse legal philosophies that reflect their politics, their respective schools' law journals, which are actually student-edited and -run, continue to publish articles written from other and contrary points of view — and to do so with at least enough regularity as to encourage such writers to continue submit their work for review and possible publication.

In my own days as a member and then an editor of the Texas Law Review (1978-1980), I was among the few political conservatives on the staff or editorial board. Some of the fiercest, sharpest, and most principled political arguments I've ever participated in took place there. But making persuasive arguments was what counted among this crew, both when we editors were informally arguing among ourselves over whether Jimmy Carter ought to use military force to free the U.S. Embassy captives in Tehran and when we were formally discussing whether to publish a particular professor's manuscript.

As for Ressner's and Smith's other reporting: That Obama was polite; that he chatted up the law professors he worked with; that he made them feel like he was improving their writing with his editing; and that he was on the lookout for rising young talents: These are all job requirements for any law review editor, at any law review, in any given year. Perhaps Ressner and Smith think that what's merely competent is actually quite exceptional. They certainly go on to show that they're clueless about the role of law reviews in legal scholarship generally:

In Obama's time, as it is today, the Harvard Law Review was one of the most important and distinguished legal publications in the world. Founded in 1887, it is the rare self-supporting legal publication compiled and edited completely by students, typically those attending their second or third year at the prestigious school.

No, guys, that's not rare. It's universal. That's the way it is at law schools all around the United States, and that's the way it's been at least since the early 20th Century. Having its most prestigious and important professional journals controlled and edited by students is something nearly unique to the legal profession. (My blogospheric friend Prof. Stephen Bainbridge is among more than a few law professors who've publicly suggested that this system is not just irritating, but nuts. And he may be right, but it nevertheless still is the current system.)

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There is at least one respect, however, in which what Barack Obama participated in at Harvard must have been very different from what I and others had experienced at Texas some years earlier. Ressner and Smith report that Obama "beat out 18 other contenders" to become president of the Harvard Law Review. Those would have been classmates of his, all of them about to enter their third and final years of law school. And that's a remarkably large number of competitors for the top slot — more people, in fact, than we had on our entire editorial board at Texas (even though Harvard and Texas are similarly sized and comparatively very large law schools).

What Ressner and Smith describe at Harvard — and I've read other, similar descriptions of the HLR and of Obama's election as its first black president — make me believe its editorial board selection was remarkably, overtly political as compared to most other law journals. How could it be otherwise, when it apparently depended on a vote among all of one's direct (same-year) peers and competitors who together made up the journal's membership?

At Texas, by contrast, second year students applied in writing to the outgoing editorial board (which was composed of graduating third-year students) for whatever board slot or slots they sought. The outgoing board then made its selections with, as in all other things, the editor-in-chief (the job title used by most law reviews instead of "president") having the final say. At least in my year, there was remarkably little that was contentious in the process. The outgoing book review editor, for example, correctly perceived in me a kindred spirit who would be well suited to matching up newly publish legal books with prominent faculty authors around the country, and suggested I apply to fill his slot. (We actively solicited book reviewers, in contrast to articles, which generally were submitted to us, unsolicited, by law professors.) Several other of my classmates who were particularly good at mentoring were likewise nudged toward applying for positions as "note editors" who'd be working with the following class' new members. Our managing editor, in turn, was encouraged to apply for that slot by the outgoing board based on her drill-sergeant effectiveness.

There was an ample basis for the outgoing editors to make these evaluations: Besides the applications, the second-year students had been doing "scut work" at the direction of the editors — including huge amounts of "cite-checking" (source verification) and galleys proof-reading — throughout the previous year. Most importantly of all, however, second-year members were required, upon penalty of being kicked off the Review, to produce, on deadline, a publishable quality "student note." At Texas and most other top 20 law journals, such student notes tend to be not much different, either in scope or length or even quality, from the articles submitted by aspiring young law professors hoping to publish to promote their tenure prospects. We'd moved away from the earlier practice of having students write shorter, more limited "case-notes" that typically focused on a single new judicial decision, and instead encouraged more ambitious writing that would genuinely add something creative and new to the legal literature.

It was quite typical at Texas (and, I think, at most other major law reviews) that each new editor-in-chief, in fact, would be the student who, as a second-year member, had produced and published the very best student note. In the class ahead of me, my own class, and the class behind me at Texas, there was a wide-spread consensus on whose notes were the best. It is inconceivable to me that any of the three of them would have been selected to be editor-in-chief if they hadn't written a publishable note at all. And indeed, the quality of their respective notes became the source of the each new editor-in-chief's credibility as first among equals, final decision-maker, and the only editor permitted to use a blue pencil for his copy-editing (which no other editor would dare erase or alter without close consultation).

In fact, there were three ways to become a member of the Texas Law Review in the first place: Those who'd been in the top five percent of their first-year class were automatically offered membership at the beginning of their second year. (Some who "graded on" this way nevertheless declined membership, typically because they weren't willing to commit to writing a publishable-quality note or to run the risk of failing to produce one on time.) A roughly equal number of other slots went to the winners of a grueling research-and-writing competition for second-year students. And rarely but occasionally, a student would earn an invitation by writing and submitting, all on his own, a publishable-quality student note.

Occasionally someone would write a publishable quality note that didn't actually get published. Someone might spend six months, for example, researching and writing on a topic that seemed very timely and appropriate when the student had first proposed it at the beginning of his second year, when he or she was a brand new member; but then an unexpected court ruling or new statute might suddenly moot the topic, or change the field so dramatically that what had been written by the student no longer was particularly valuable. Indeed, to try to avoid just this sort of calamity, the topic approval process was itself very detailed, and it included a "preemption check" by other students to try to determine whether there were any such pending cases or statutes lurking in the works that needed to be considered.

Otherwise, though, at Texas and, I believe, most other major law reviews, the rule for members was (and I think still is): "Publish or perish, up or out." If you didn't produce a publishable-quality note on deadline, your name was stricken from the membership list on the masthead, you had no opportunity to become an editor, and — worst of all — you became ethically obliged to call back all those employers who'd extended you job offers in part based on a résumé credential that you were no longer entitled to claim.

No one wanted to make those telephone calls.

(My own student note is abstracted here, by the way; and yes, it, along with my grades and sparkling personality, was a key in my becoming the book review editor on the 1979-1980 TLR editorial board, getting my judicial clerkship with Judge Carolyn King of the Fifth Circuit, and then getting a job at Houston's Baker Botts.)

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With which background, perhaps you can better appreciate the most peculiar thing in Ressner's and Smith's article on Obama (boldface mine):

One thing Obama did not do while with the review was publish any of his own work. Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said Obama didn't write any articles for the Review, though his two semesters at the helm did produce a wide range of edited case analyses and unsigned "notes" from Harvard students.

How remarkable is this for Harvard? I have no first-hand information, obviously. But among the legal celebrities whom Ressner and Smith quote in their article is Susan Estrich, who they describe as "the USC School of Law professor who served as Michael Dukakis' campaign manager in 1988 — and who broke ground as the first female president of the Harvard Law Review 14 years before Obama took the reins" (emphasis mine, brackets by Ressner and Smith):

Estrich believes that Obama must have had something published that year, even if his campaign says otherwise. "They probably don't want [to] have you [reporters] going back" to examine the Review.

Oh, pish-posh. If Obama had actually authored one of the unsigned student notes that was published, he surely would admit to it — it's another objective credential, and he and his campaign certainly brag about his supposed constitutional law expertise at the drop of a hat. Given that he never published anything while an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School later, it would be his only written evidence (besides his magna cum laude degree) of genuine academic excellence in the law. Thus, Estrich's comment leads me to believe that the Harvard Law Review, too, had a "Publish or Perish" requirement — but it's one that Obama didn't meet for reasons that are entirely unclear, and that he's now "scrupulously managing his biography" to obscure.

My bologna detector tells me there's more to the story here. So which of his former co-members or -editors will be the first to squeal on him? Or is there the Rule of Omertà among them?

Beldar on WaPo on Obama's "scrupulous manag[ement] of his own biography"

In my last post, I wondered when the WaPo will get around to writing about Barack Obama with any genuine objectivity. An article in today's issue actually starts off promisingly:

In the opening weeks of the general-election campaign, Sen. Barack Obama has moved aggressively to shape his campaign and offered a clear road map for the kind of candidate he is likely to become in the months ahead: an ambitious gamer of the electoral map, a ruthless fundraiser and a scrupulous manager of his own biography in the face of persistent concerns about how he is perceived.

I actually think that's a helluva lede — especially the hint that there's something, well, interesting about what Obama has chosen to highlight, and what he's chosen to obscure, in his own biography.

The problem is: No follow-up. No examples, no meat to support the sizzle. Nothing to drive home to you the fact that: "Yes, indeed, this candidate has things about himself that he wants you to know, but also things he'd rather remain shrouded in mist."

Just go look, for example, at the biography on his campaign website. What's mostly missing that you'd expect to see on any résumé submitted as part of a job application?

It's dates.

There are only five years mentioned, despite the fact that he's 46 years old: 1961 (he was born); 1983 (graduated from Columbia); 1985 (moved to Chicago); 1991 (law degree from Harvard); and 2004 (elected to the U.S. Senate).

Like me, gentle readers, some of you have been in the position of making hiring decisions before. Some of you have a reasonable sense of when you're being snowed. And some of you would immediately look just at this list of years and say, "Well, for example, what the heck were you doin' between 1983 and 1985, young man, and why didn't you see fit to mention it on your résumé?"

Do you know? Here's one of two remaining serious candidates for the presidency. Do you, prospective voter, know enough about him to know what should have been filled in that blank?

I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to find out, if you're in the mood for internet sleuthing. Just like the fact of his smoking habit, it's out there somewhere, if you care to dig. Nor is it something that reflects particularly badly on the candidate, in my own opinion.

But then, my opinion isn't what Barack Obama is trying to shape. I don't see anything wrong with the fact that he went to work in New York in a very conventional job — if not actually, physically "on" Wall Street, then certainly in the business world that he now takes pains to establish that he's always flouted and defied. His deliberate omission of that fact, however, may be a story worth telling.

Unless you're a mainstream media journalist who gets a tingle up and down your leg when you listen to Barack Obama speak. Unless you're in the tank, even if you're in denial about being in the tank. In which case, you can tell yourself that you've done your job as a hard-hitting investigative journalist by merely hinting, instead of actually delivering. "He manages his biography!" you can shout. (Then shut up about the details he's left out, okay? Let's not disrupt "the narrative.")

John Kerry also wanted to scrupulously manage his own biography. In his version, he was a spectacular war hero who volunteered for and served two full tours in heavy combat in Vietnam, and all of the men who served with him loved him and, indeed, held him in awe. But thanks to a few individuals who knew otherwise, including many of those who served with him and absolutely did not hold him in awe, at least some voters took a closer look, and found that it wasn't necessarily so, or at least not in the same way that the candidate claimed.

Yay for the internet! And thank the Lord there are still over four months until the election. The subject of Barack Obama's biography, and what in it he'd rather you not focus upon, will be, in case you haven't already figured it out, a recurring theme on BeldarBlog until November.

Beldar on WaPo on Houston

Okay, I'm a Houston booster. Houston has been berry, berry good to me, and I admit to having a chip on my shoulder about how unfairly it's usually portrayed by the national media. (To Hollywood, it simply hasn't existed since Terms of Endearment, Urban Cowboy, or Apollo 13.)

So when I read this WaPo article about how Houston is faring in the age of $4+/gallon gasoline, I was prepared to find something to bristle at and denounce. Maybe it's just that if you live and work in Washington, D.C., you don't have much room to complain about humidity and mosquitoes; and surely the WaPo writers are used to people with healthy, even over-sized, egos. But in any event, I found nothing in particular to get mad about.

Now if only they could apply that same objectivity to Barack Obama!

Read more >>  Options >> 

McClellan, Conyers, WaPo, and AP vie for prize for "Most Disingenuous" in Plamegate testimony and "news articles" that never mention the name "Armitage"

You're watching absolutely false conventional wisdom being repeated over and over again, folks, until only us few with more than 50 functioning neurons and the willpower to resist propaganda actually remember the truth.

Without a transcript, I can't be certain that no one mentioned Richard Armitage's name at any point during the hearing. But if neither Conyers, nor McClellan, nor anyone else did, that itself would have been newsworthy!

You cannot write this story with a shred of journalistic integrity without using the name "Armitage." It can't be done.Nevertheless, I firmly expect that by this time tomorrow, most or all of the other members of the mainstream media will have qualified for this particular "Most Disingenuous" prize along with the AP and WaPo.

Question for the weekend: Will Mr. Armitage write the AP and WaPo demanding a correction that gives him due and just credit as the leaker?

Legal, but offensively cocky: Obama rips off official presidential seal for his podium, and adds the motto "Vero Possumus"

Yeah, sure, I'd defend to the death Obama's technical legal right under the First Amendment to mangle national icons, burn flags, yada yada yada. It's a free country, and that freedom includes the right to engage in political expression that is crass, tasteless, and irredeemably cocky.

And one of the perquisites of being an incumbent president who's running for re-election is that, well, you actually are the POTUS, so you're entitled to speak to audiences from behind a podium that bears the official presidential seal. No one meets that description this year, however.

Nevertheless, the junior senator from Illinois, who's yet to complete his first term in the United States Senate, apparently feels entitled to rip off the most familiar elements of the official Seal of the President of the United States for his campaign use — and then to combine it with some of his own campaign artwork:

 

According to the NYT Politics Blog (bold-face mine):

At a discussion with a dozen Democratic governors in Chicago on Friday morning, each of the governors was identified with a small name plate but Senator Barack Obama sat behind a low rostrum to which was attached an official-looking seal no one had seen before....

Just above the eagle’s head are the words “Vero Possumus,” roughly translated “Yes we can.” ...

Us God-loving, bitter, clinging gun-owners in the fly-over country have an expression for the kind of arrogance required to appropriate the seal of a public office to which one hasn't quite yet been elected: "He's dang sure gotten too big fer his britches," we'd say.

In response to which, someone might ask: "Can you folks usually find a way to deal with young fellas who're too big fer their britches?"

To which the answer — which I'm sure is spoken confidently and frequently on at least the West Texas prairies of my own birth, and perhaps elsewhere — is surely: "Vero Possumus!" Which, out here in fly-over land, roughly translates to: "You bet yer road-kill possum butt we can!" (I'll spare you the photographs of the possums, with or without the surrounding seal.)

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UPDATE (Sat Jun 21 @ noonish): Ann Althouse wins this year's award for "pithiest post" on this subject, in which she expresses her own views entirely through subject tags. (And in her comments, she generally agrees with my legal evaluation in the title of this post and in my own comment below.)

Other reporting, this time from the N.Y. Daily News (h/t Power Line):

Asked to explain the new seal, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, "It's a mix of presidential politics and a call for hope and change."

Snarked John McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, "I think we can all agree that we need presidential candidates that are serious enough not to play make-believe on the campaign trail."

"It's laughable, ridiculous, preposterous and revealing all at the same time," Bounds said.

Yup.

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UPDATE (Sat Jun 21 @ 11:30pm): I finally remembered what the Great Seal of Obama reminds me of. It's those Royal Delft plates from Holland. Perhaps Michelle can have them make up the new White House china.

 

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UPDATE (Mon Jun 23 @ 6:20pm): The Obama campaign has reportedly consigned the Great Seal of Obama to the same memory hole as Michael Dukakis' tank hat. Good luck to them with that. (H/t: InstaPundit, and thanks for the link, Prof. R.)

Palin leads Pajamas Media veep poll

As of this moment, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — whom I've previously written about at length as a potential grand slam home run as a vice presidential nominee for John McCain — leads Mitt Romney by a narrow margin, 19% to 18%, in a straw poll being conducted by Pajamas Media. (H/t: InstaPundit.) Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are the only two others currently polling in double digits, at 12% and 10% respectively.

Listening to the news this week (including the Dems flailing around with their insistence that "we can't drill our way out of this," and Obama's arguments that what the energy markets really need are a stiff windfall profits tax), and then filling my car this afternoon, I couldn't help imagining Gov. Palin taking Sen. McCain on an cross-Alaskan early-summer tour. It would includes already developed oil and gas properties, to show how that can be done in an environmentally respectful fashion, and then the incredibly remote, incredibly non-scenic mud-flats in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) that have been proposed for exploration and potential drilling. It's the kind of trip that could explain a change in position on the Senator's part. And unless I miss my guess, she's the kind of advocate and leader who might find a way through his stubbornness — and potentially onto the ticket along with him. Hence, I was happy to cast my straw vote for her tonight in this poll.

(Note: There are random prizes. But PJM discloses in the fine print that "[b]y entering into this contest you will be placed on the Pajamas Media email list and will receive the Pajama's Media Daily Digest. You will have the ability to opt-out." I wish there were an opt-out check-box on the voting page itself, but I trust PJM not to sell or abuse my email address — heck, PJM CEO Roger L. Simon has it already anyway, from our prior correspondence — and the inconvenience of opting out later is, for me anyway, justified by my desire to boost Gov. Palin's chances.)

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UPDATE (Thu Jun 19 @ 5:00pm): McCain says he's willing to re-evaluate his position against drilling in ANWR! Gov. Palin, it's time to extend an invitation!

Scratch a liberal, uncover a communist

U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), speaking to the press today (my transcription from TIVO'd coverage on the Fox News channel during Neil Cavuto's show, about 10 minutes ago):

So if there's any seriousness about what some of our Republican colleagues are saying here in the House and elsewhere about improving the number of refineries, then maybe they'd be willing to have these refineries owned publicly —  owned by the people of the United States. So that the people of the United States can determine how much of the product is refined and put out on the market. To me, that sounds like a very good idea.

Ah yes, Congress is once again going to invest itself into repealing the laws of world-wide supply and demand. In the name of "the People," we're going to switch to a command economy, wherein Washington will decree that prices will drop, supply will be created out of nothingness, and we'll all live happily ever after.

The Dems are well into the stage of "irrational exuberance" which foretells the pop of their political bubble. When a Congressmen on the House Ways & Means Committee can propose nationalizing the energy industry without realizing that voters may notice that "Hey, that's communism!" then they're well and truly drunk off of their own fumes. If only they will continue down paths like these, it may turn out that John McCain is the luckiest political candidate in the history of the world. I'm sensing more and more parallels between the 2008 campaign and the 1972 campaign.

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UPDATE (Wed Jun 18 @ 5:55pm): AllahPundit has a link to the video along with his own reaction (which roughly parallels mine).

Did Michelle Obama, channeling Rev. Wright's racist paranoia, condemn south Chicago girls and young women to unnecessary and preventable STDs and cervical cancer?

To stem the political hemorrhaging it was causing, Sen. & Mrs. Barack Obama have withdrawn from membership at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But to what extent did what they heard while they were members affect their activities outside the church over the last several years?

Recall these paranoid, racist statements of Rev. Wright, their former pastor, as he accused the United States government of developing and spreading HIV/AIDS specifically to commit genocide against the black population:

MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz's book, "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola," whoever wrote that question? Have you read "Medical Apartheid"? You've read it?

(UNKNOWN): Do you honestly believe that (OFF-MIKE)

WRIGHT: Oh, are you — is that one of the reporters?

MODERATOR: No questions...

(CROSSTALK)

WRIGHT: No questions from the floor. I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven't read things, then you can't — based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the — one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non-question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

Now consider this segment from today's New York Times, in an article on the campaign's attempt to re-brand Michelle Obama (bold-face mine):

By 2001, Mrs. Obama, married for nine years and the mother of two daughters, had taken a job as vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She soon discovered just how acrimonious those affairs were....

She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

"She’ll talk about the elephant in the room," said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.

The New York Times reports this without much comment, buried near the bottom of its article, as if it's not particularly revealing or controversial. But it made my jaw drop. Has yours yet?

If not, consider more carefully: Here's the wife of the Great Unifier, the Great Conciliator, the Great Educator who's going to bring America to a post-racial future. She's supposedly a community activist working for the benefit of poor neighborhoods whose teenagers are disproportionately at risk for sexually transmitted diseases. She has an opportunity to reverse, through education, decades of racial distrust and to simultaneously protect her teen-aged female constituents against "cervical cancer and other diseases in females caused by certain types of genital human papillomavirus (HPV)[, a class of viruses] ... which are responsible for 70% of cervical cancers and 90% of genital warts." So Mrs. Obama strikes a mighty blow to promote ignorance, to prevent vacination, and to permit preventable STDs and cervical cancer.

Yes, the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiments were awful. Yes, there is a huge amount of racial mistrust and misinformation lingering because of them, as evidenced by Rev. Wright's pronouncements. But Tuskegee isn't the rule, it's the awful exception from an era in which we no longer live.

What kind of Luddite is this Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer and mother of two young girls? All such modern vaccination programs are voluntary — there's at least an opt-out provision, even when legislation has been proposed to add this vaccine to the mandatory list of vaccinations for public school attendance — and they require the genuinely well-informed consent of the participants. Surely someone like Michelle Obama and her husband (with his commitment to community education, in coordination with people like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn) could ensure that accurate information was provided in a meaningful format to promote informed choices. Indeed, it seems to me that she was uniquely positioned to strike a blow against bigotry, against ignorance, and in favor of education, science, and both racial and medical healing.

So: Why choose not to educate? Why not at least allow an opportunity for this scientific breakthrough to protect the health and the very lives of these at-risk girls and young women?

This is shameful behavior. I can't understand or explain it, other than as a function of the exact sort of racist paranoia that Rev. Wright has been preaching. It sounds as though Michelle Obama bought big-time into the very worst of Rev. Wright's screed — and that she actively practiced what he preached, to the detriment of the very people they were purportedly helping and protecting. I'm aghast.

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UPDATE (Wed Jun 17 @ 6:00pm): Tom Maguire's reaction is very much like mine:

In a different and better world the community affairs director for a hospital would use her college education and neighborhood roots to educate and reassure the community that her hospital was not actually interested in recreating ghastly medical misadventures from the past. In this world, it looks like the Sister Grim is less interested in resolving these grievances and more interested in nursing them.

Tom also links this RAND news release from 2005 regarding the extent of conspiracy paranoia among blacks and its resulting deterrence of condom use and promotion of STDs.

Compare the more libertarian yet scientific and compassionate position of Dr. Ken Alexander of the Pediatrics Department of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine:

Dr. Alexander, a proponent of the HPV vaccine in young women, cautions lawmakers about proposed legislation that would require the HPV vaccine in the sixth grade. While stating that he does believe that teenaged girls should be immunized, he expresses his belief that this view is one that should not be forced upon the public but rather decided on the family level.

Regardless of whether you support mandatory vaccination (with opt-out rights) or merely more widely publicizing the vaccination option to families, it's hard to deny that here, Michelle Obama, who's dogmatically pro-choice on abortion rights, acted to take away choices from these girls and young women and their families.

The question in my mind is: Does she believe Rev. Wright's paranoid, racist fantasies? Or is she simply exploiting and continuing their currency among her constituents? Either is unacceptable, but the latter would put her on, or at least very near, a moral plane with the initiators of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments themselves.

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UPDATE (Thu Jun 19 @ 5:15pm): When I picked up my middle two teens today, Sarah and Adam, I confirmed that both were familiar with the HPV vaccine, and that Sarah has been inoculated. I then told them the sad, sordid tale of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, a story they hadn't heard before, and that they reacted to with appropriate revulsion. But then I told them — as neutrally as I could — about what the NYT has reported on Michelle Obama's involvement in the HPV vaccination program at the University of Chicago hospital. My daughter's immediately reaction — unprompted by me — is that Michelle Obama's denial of medical prevention and treatment options to her hospital's patient population is as outrageous as the decisions made by the sponsors of the Tuskegee experiments. (Sarah will be a high school senior next year, and her politics in general much more closely match her mom's than mine: They were both Hillary Clinton supporters, for example.)

Barack Obama specifically pointed to Rev. Wright's comments about HIV/AIDS and Tuskegee when he disassociated himself from Rev. Wright, and he acknowledged that his pastor's views on those subjects were a legitimate topic of political interest. So what about his wife's views and actions on these subjects?

Ironically, the June 2 cover of TIME magazine is devoted to an article entitled "The Truth About Vaccines: Worried about autism, many parents are opting out of immunizations. How they're putting the rest of us at risk." (That story focused on childhood vaccines, not specifically on the HPV vaccine.) But another article touted on the cover is: "Will Michelle Obama hurt Barack in November?"

So when will the mainstream media put two and two together and realize that these questions are perhaps linked?

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UPDATE (Thu Jun 20 @ 5:15pm): James Taranto'sBest of the Web column today includes some statistics on the dangers that the HPV vaccine can prevent, and also reads the facts reported in the NYT article as "suggest[ing] that girls in Chicago were denied potentially lifesaving vaccinations because Michelle Obama pandered to racial paranoia instead of standing up for the truth."