Jack & Jill Politics

So Donald Trump’s new attack on President Obama is on his school records. Trump said to AP that he “heard (Obama) was a terrible student. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

Yes, even white people like MSNBC’s Ed Schultz who have hesitated to call the birthers racist are ready to push back. Barack Obama was the first black president of the Harvard Law review and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law in 1991. So…both of those things are evidence of good grades at least in law school. But of course Harvard must be involved in a huge conspiracy, right?

Here’s what Trump said:

“I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard. We don’t know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”

Ari Melber of the Nation had this to say:

By charging that Obama was not admitted based on merit, Trump is suggesting that Obama was admitted because he is black.

Launching an investigation into Obama’s birthplace in 2011 is not really objective journalism – it’s an overreaction to conspiracy theories masquerading as fact-checking.

In G.O.P. politics, attacking racial minorities as the underachieving beneficiaries of affirmative action is a very old move.  Sen. Jesse Helms produced the most notorious example, an ad against his black opponent, Harvey Grant, which blasted affirmative action for taking jobs from deserving white people and giving them to minorities.  Even that dark salvo, however, was putatively linked to jobs and active policy debates.  Trump is not so smooth. He is blatantly attacking Obama’s teenage qualifications for college — a topic so obscure, it was a non-issue in Obama’s exhaustive, two-year-long presidential campaign.  Coupled with the rage of the Birthers, Trump’s adopted conspiracy crowd, the mogul looks more like he is auditioning for a talk radio gig than the presidency.

Still, racial dog whistles only work when a lot of people play along.  Otherwise a coded attack – aimed at the racists but clinging to deniability – curdles into public, blatant racism.  (That’s bad in politics and business, so it would restrain even a business candidate like Trump.)  So far, the press has been quite delicate when confronting Trump.

I believe that Trump is showing very savvy racism. I’ve heard resentment over college affirmative action from even liberal friends. It’s a huge source of racial resentment. The Donald is cannily attacking one of Obama’s strengths — his obvious intelligence — while simultaneously implying that just as Obama didn’t deserve to get into Ivy League schools, he also doesn’t deserve to be president. Trump is asserting quietly that Obama only gets respect as president just because he’s black. Can’t say he’s not strategic.

But folks, if that wasn’t bad enough, Trump is actually diving deeper into the crazy than it might appear on the surface. Here’s the new conspiracy theory that the crazy birther wing of the GOP and Tea Party is currently into: they think that Muslim extremists & Black Panthers campaigned and paid for Obama to go to Harvard as part of a sinister plan to insert him into America’s elite, positioning him to become president. (sigh)

Chile, you’ve got to give today’s bigots credit for imagination and creativity. Our grandparents’ racists mainly stuck with calling us lazy, shiftless, criminal niggers. Gotta get up early to keep up with this new generation of ig’nants who manage to state incredibly racist things while saying in the same breath that they aren’t racist.

Celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld & Robert DeNiro are leading the way – Trump must be castigated and ostracized in explicit terms for his cynical exploitation of racial resentment. And the media must do their job in highlighting all of Trump’s lies and bigotry. Only then can we call ourselves a civilized society.

UPDATE:

rikyrah here – I’m here to update with a post I found last night at Balloon Juice:

This Should Leave A Very Large Mark
by John Cole

Ouch:

Leaving aside the fact that Obama, who went on to graduate Harvard Law magna cum laude, seems like he was probably a very good student, Mr. Trump might need a refresher course in how unqualified people actually do manage to get into the prestigious Ivy League Universities .

Let us take, as an example, the story of a student so obviously unqualified, so transparently unworthy, that a book was written about what his admittance into Harvard said about the sorry behavior of supposedly elite colleges.

That student—that dull, below-average student who somehow made his way into Harvard—was Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Kushner’s father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, bought Jared his Harvard acceptance. It cost him $2.5 million. (Kushner later went to jail for tax evasion and witness tampering, so it was also, technically, dirty money that bought Trump’s daughter’s husband’s entry into the Ivy League.)

Wall Street Journal education writer Daniel Golden’s book “The Price of Admission” explores the Kushner donation at length. An official at Kushner’s (expensive, private) high school told the author: “There was no way anybody in . . . the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought, for sure, there was no way this was going to happen.”

But it did.

And that is how things actually work at “elite” schools.

Our meritocracy at work.