GOP candidates vetted extensively, but when will media vet Obama?
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 10:18AM Elite media goes to great pains to vet Republicans—outlets like Politico have delved two decades in the past to examine aspects of GOP presidential candidates’ records.
A potential president should be vetted, in the interest of knowing what made the world’s most powerful leader’s head.
That same elite media has not, however, vetted President Barack Obama.
Various members of media have read his books and used material from those to support or rebut claims.
By vetting, I don’t mean the ongoing interest in the birth certificate matter. That is not what I’m after. I do on occasion appreciate the president’s humor about the matter.
What would be interesting to me as a writer: Obama’s college records from Occidental, Columbia and Harvard.
Perhaps some letters he surely wrote to constituents about issues when Obama served in the Illinois State Senate, with any personal info about constituents redacted.
Emails? Speeches? News releases? Visitor logs? Records of gifts? Speaking engagements and speeches? These are part and parcel of a public official’s life. Surely some of these records should be on hand.
I did locate an essay that Politico posted. Attributed to Barack Obama in March, 1983, while he studied at Columbia University, the essay “Breaking the War Mentality” appears in a PDF file version of the magazine Sundial.
That essay takes the stance many liberals take—anti-militarism, anti-war. Nothing wrong with that, but the article is a window into the mind of a young man who, like former US President Bill Clinton, never served in the military. The essay contains the style and grammatical errors you might expect in a young college student. I found that ironic—I remember taking English classes at my university and if you made one or two grammatical errors, you could kiss a passing grade goodbye.
The essay doesn’t bear the voice I heard, however, when I read Obama’s books. As he matured, Obama’s writing skills apparently morphed to a lofty often poetic style with long excursions into his consciousness—what I call the “me” syndrome liberals so love. The confessional challenges me because I usually find it very dull.
As an aside, I note that applies to films as well. When a friend raved about Eat,Pray,Love I told her I appreciated her take but it would be impossible for me to sit through that film. I use this example because the aesthetic is a subjective matter. Others have raved about the president’s writing style and I respect our difference of opinion.
For a US president, Obama has vast gaps in his personal records. It is doubtful elite media will be interested in those gaps because most in that quarter lobbied heavily for Obama’s election.
Still, that doesn’t stop a person from being curious about a president who decided to remake the country via ideology.
In 2008 Judicial Watch said:
During a campaign stop last fall, Obama at first claimed he did not have any records of his eight years in the Illinois state legislature. “I don't have — I don't maintain — a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn't have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records.
The website Snopes has quite a bit of material defending claims about Obama’s records; some of the arguments are laughable.
My point here is not to stoke the birther flames first lit by the left.
My point is to inform voters that you are not likely to see Obama or any other Democrat vetted with the ferocity applied to conservative candidates.
Elite media has shown little interest in the president’s current records too—the White House visitor logs are a good example of that lack of interest.
My broader point is supported by the lack of data about the formative young adult years of a man who ultimately became our president, and incidentally, took war measures in direct conflict with the ideas he posited in that Sundial essay in 1983.
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(Commentary by Kay B. Day/Nov. 2, 2011)
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