Info on Obama's academic past starting to trickle out

I'm mean, really. Who woulda thunk it would be harder to gin up college transcripts than Hawaiian birth certificates?

 

So privacy laws are a cop-out?
Should anyone who runs for President not be protected by them?
Actually Presidents don't typically release them. Bush's were leaked.

 

Yes, privacy laws are a cop-out. The school is bound by privacy laws. The candidate is not. Like I said, there are a ton of fields where part of the application process is giving them your college transcripts. I've had to do supply my college transcripts on at least two occasions. That being the case, the only argument you're left with is the Presidency isn't all that important of a job.

 

If he released his transcipts, the world would know that he checked the yes box on the question "were you born in Kenya?" that is a standard part of all U.S. college applications.

 

Can you name one other President who released his transcripts?

Would you also say that Hawaii's laws about who can see the original birth certificate are also cop-outs?

 

Harvard Law School typically graduates with honors students with bad grades.

Columbia typically takes transfers with bad grades.

 

I thought Clinton released his.

 

Where is Ronald Reagan's college transcript?

 

Clinton never released transcripts. He was a Rhodes Scholar. Kinda like being editor of the Harvard Law Review. What more do you need to know?

 

Yale Law School doesn't have grades. If it did, Clinton's would have, I think by his own admission, been terrible. He barely went to class. It was just a credential for him, a signal.

My suspicion, like Zeke said, is that his high school and college grades were more than OK, as he attended Georgetown University and was a Rhodes Scholar.

I get accused a lot on here of being an education elitist and credential-obsessed, and that's probably true to a degree and I've brought it on myself, but I think it's fair to say that Georgetown doesn't take dummies, and neither does Oxford or Yale Law School. And Clinton is a white male, so you can't use that one.

As far as Obama's grades go: There is a weird culture among law students where they just don't talk grades with one another. It's not like undergrad where you and your friends constantly talk about what you got in this, that, or the other class. You kind of get some idea about how people are doing because of things like law review, honors diplomas, or which law firm someone ends up at, but the particulars are held pretty close to the vest. I know that it's been decades since he was at Harvard, and you would think that the statute of limitations on that has passed, but I wonder if it would still be uncomfortable to him to do so.

I do remember that Kagan's came out as part of the vetting process for the Supreme Court, and people flipped a gasket because she got a B or a B+ as a first-semester 1L, and then later took a class as pass/fail. I remember Al Gore got flayed for getting an 81 - which may well have been an A on the grading curve - during his one semester at Vanderbilt.

In other words: Unless Obama had the top grade in the class, at the largest, second-most prestigious law school in America, in every single class he took, people would still destroy him. It's a no-win proposition.

 

I don't get it. You can disagree with Obama, but that doesn't mean that you can't give an inch about anything to do with the guy. He's smart, OK? He was a mediocre student in high school who transformed himself into a great student as an adult. It happens.

This false equivalency stuff is silly:

"I disagree with Barack Obama about tax policy." =/= "Barack Obama was a poor student and is not a smart individual."

Come on. Some of you guys are better than that. Leave that garbage to lesser message boards.