Now what happens to the stereotype-breaking inspiration?

"Super Awesome Sylvia was a role model to girls in science. Then he realized he is a boy" (WaPo).

This is the story of Super Awesome Sylvia, an ingenious little girl who made robots, or so everyone thought.

At age 8, Sylvia Todd put on a lab coat and started a web show. A gaptoothed little kid with a pony tail and soldering iron, a rare sight in the boy's club of amateur inventors....

It got Sylvia invited to the White House Science Fair in 2013, when President Barack Obama tried it out and told its shaky-legged, 11-year-old inventor that it was great to see girls in tech. Then came reporters, magazine profiles, even book deals. A story in the New York Times.... By middle school, Sylvia was giving speeches all over the world....

This is the story of Zephyrus Todd, a 16-year-old boy who prefers art to science, and knows a lot more about himself now than when people called him Sylvia and assumed he was a girl. It's about how Zeph got stuck inside Super Awesome Sylvia, “trying to be that person,” as he puts it....

"Being a good citizen, being an activist, involves hearing the other side and making sure that you are engaging in a dialogue because that’s also how change happens."

"The civil rights movement happened because there was civil disobedience, because people were willing to go to jail, because there were events like Bloody Sunday, but it was also because the leadership of the movement consistently stayed open to the possibility of reconciliation and sought to understand the views, even views that were appalling to them, of the other side.... I tell [my daughters], I want you also to be able to listen. I don’t want you to think that a display of your strength is simply shutting other people up, and that part of your ability to bring about change is going to be by engagement and understanding the viewpoints and the arguments of the other side... And so when I hear, for example, folks on college campuses saying, ‘We’re not going to allow somebody to speak on our campus because we disagree with their ideas or we feel threatened by their ideas,’ I think that’s a recipe for dogmatism and I think you’re not going to be as effective.... [We] have these values of free speech. And it’s not free speech in the abstract. The purpose of that kind of free speech is to make sure that we are forced to use argument and reason and words in making our democracy work. And, you know, you don’t have to be fearful of somebody spouting bad ideas. Just out-argue them. Beat ’em. Make the case as to why they’re wrong. Win over adherents. That’s how things work in a democracy"

Said President Barack Obama.

"Bees are good."

Says the President. 

"They won’t sting you, they’ll be OK."

"The United States has one big advantage... our Muslim populations — they feel themselves to be Americans."

"And there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition, that is probably our greatest strength. Now, it doesn't mean that we aren't subject to the kinds of tragedies we saw at the Boston Marathon. But that, I think, has been helpful. There are parts of Europe in which that's not the case, and that's probably the greatest danger that Europe faces, which is why as they... work with us to respond to these circumstances, it's important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems, but there also has to be a recognition that the stronger the ties of a... Frenchman of North African descent to French values, French republic, a sense of opportunity — that's gonna be as important, if not more important, in, over time, solving this problem."

President Obama (via Jaltcoh).

"Much of the time, the law is settled and plain. But life turns up new problems..."

"... and lawyers, officials, and citizens debate the meaning of terms that seemed clear years or even months before. For in the end laws are just words on a page — words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye."

Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" (2006), page 118.

I ran across that quote after blogging about the book in the previous post. I'd searched my Kindle, not for anything about law — though I found the law quote interesting enough to make a new post — but because I'd searched the book for "solitude" — thinking I might find something apt for that other post — and I kept reading.

"Solitude" does appear in the book, once, as Obama is describing life as a senator in Washington, while his wife and daughters remain back home in Chicago:

Chuck Todd thinks Obama should do a town hall meeting, maybe with Bobby Jindal or Rick Perry.

This came up during a conservative radio show that followed the sedate interview Todd did with the President the other day:

I actually think he would benefit from just simply doing some town halls and not White House-screened town halls with supporters, but doing, you know, going back, essentially letting some folks vent, letting some folks vent, handling the vent a little bit....

Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich did that joint town hall back in ’96, in ’97 in New Hampshire. It was a big, it was a good moment, frankly, for both of them. At the time, it ended up helping Clinton more than helping Newt, but it was sort of, that’s another way you could do this.

Todd says Clinton wasn't "afraid" to do that kind of "political theater," but Obama? "It’s not that President Obama is, it’s just not, well, I mean, if you went to law school with him, you know." Ha. Todd has trouble finding his way out of that sentence so he throws it over to the radio host, Carol Platt Liebau, who'd earlier mentioned that she "was on the Harvard Law Review with him, and when criticized, he really did used to bristle a bit." And this awkward little dialogue happens:

CPL: Yeah.
CT: I mean, that’s not what he, that’s not his…
CPL: Comfort zone.
CT: …comfort zone. He’d rather be in a lecture hall.

And CPL moves on to the next topic.

"Obama needs to stop lecturing predominantly black audiences, some supporters say."

Writes Vanessa Williams in The Washington Post.

Obama has been making this point — and stirring controversy — since he was a candidate in 2008. Jesse Jackson Sr. was incensed by what he saw as Obama’s “talking down to black people,” yet it was Jackson who was criticized. Many in the black community believed that Obama’s chastisements were necessary to make himself politically palatable to white voters.

The president’s most recent such remarks — there were only a few Sunday, but they were widely reported — triggered a debate on blogs and social media that, in part, asked why Obama continued his lecturing.

To be fair, Jackson was criticized because he added — with a brusque cutting gesture — "I want to cut his nuts out." The metaphor of brutal violence made it easy to discount Jackson's message at the time.

Obama: "I am constrained... by a system that our Founders put in place."

Context:

“You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.”

As a lawprof, I read that to mean that he is not constrained. He's juggling a few ideas, but what he's getting at is: The Founders put into place a system that would be populated by elected officials, who are to act for the sake of the people and as the people want. If what the people want our government to do is control guns, then it is within the power of government to do it.

That's the constitutional argument he has in mind. It's an idea of constitutional government as a political system, within which rights are only another manifestation of what the people want. And, in the ultimate scary twist on the idea of rights: Government is not to be regarded as in need of limits, because the government is us. Anything we — the government — want to do is never tyranny, but freedom.

"Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets..."

"They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing," says Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, "the top Republican on the intelligence committee," quoted 2/3 of the way down in a NYT article that forefronts Obama's professorly thoughtfulness as he takes responsibility for the "final moral calculation" in deciding whether to take advantage of an opportunity to kill somebody on the list al Qaeda kill list.

John B. Bellinger III, a top national security lawyer under the Bush administration, said that was because Mr. Obama’s liberal reputation and “softer packaging” have protected him. “After the global outrage over Guantánamo, it’s remarkable that the rest of the world has looked the other way while the Obama administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, including killing at least some civilians,” said Mr. Bellinger, who supports the strikes.

The take-no-prisoners approach avoids dealing with the problems — which include, for Obama, political problems — of detention and interrogation. The NYT interviewed 3 dozen of Obama's "current and former advisers" and says:

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing.

Is there really a paradox here? He has chosen not to close Guantanamo, but to make it a low-profile political issue by never sending anyone there, and to build his reputation as tough on terrorism by regularly blowing somebody away. The careful "moral calculation" in the individual cases isn't reexamining the general policy; it's about the risks of screwups:

“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said [William M.] Daley, the former chief of staff. “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”

"As a (presumably) grown man, Barack Obama wrote a memoir in order to promote himself."

"He chose to highlight his dog-eating experience. He calculated that the incident would help portray him as worldly, adventurous, open-minded, and multicultural. But how could he have predicted nearly 20 years ago, when he wrote his story of race and inheritance, that Americans would find it would only paint him as submissive, self-satisfied, and out of touch with mainstream American culture?"

A comment from Meade, on a post from a few days ago, responding to one Kwach, who had trouble understanding what I was saying about Obama and the concept of eating what you're told. She said:

Because a young boy was exposed to a foreign culture (including unusual food) and didn't balk at trying it, he grew up to be ... what? Someone who has no will? And then he married a woman who would tell him and all the children in America what to eat... Does this childhood lack of will extend to anyone who spends time in a foreign country and doesn't refuse to try the local cuisine, or is it possible that some people eat things I wouldn't dream of (escargot and goat meat, for instance) not because they are mindless automatons but because they're open-minded or even curious? Is it possible that some children are open-minded and curious? Or even obedient to their parents, as we say they should be?

Read my post again Kwach. I didn't say that Obama had/has no will.  I said that as an author he willfully deprived us of any words on the subject of his will. He says nothing about the degree of compulsion he felt when he "learned" from Lolo "how to eat." Our erstwhile law professor was a student, taking instruction. We don't know how he felt. He keeps that from us. And now, as President, is he a will-less instructor? Does government coerce or does it merely teach... with more or less persuasive incentives... nudges if you will like.

"Students Laugh When Obama Tells Them 'You Inspire Me.'"

Hey, those students inspire me! They know how to detect bullshit.

Newt + Obama = the largest possible "how smart they think they are" minus "how smart they really are"...

... according to Dan Drezner.

"I think they're both actually reasonably intelligent guys, but I think both of them have a much higher opinion of themselves than they actually are."

Okay. Hmmm. Can you think of any other pair of individuals with a greater self-esteem/merit gap when it comes to intelligence?

In my experience — and I'm old, so it's long — people who make a noticeable exhibition of their smartness are not the most intelligent people. They're not the dumbest people. But the smartest people are strategic about displaying intelligence. That's how they outsmart you.

"Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?"

Says an ad in the Austin Chronicle:

"Are you a stripper, an escort, or just a 'young hottie' impressed by an arrogant, entitled governor of Texas? Contact CASH, and we will help you publicize your direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, 'family values' hypocrite and fraud."

Ick. Reminds me of Rush Limbaugh, the other day:

I got one of these e-mail things... "Where are all of Obama's former girlfriends?" It's a takeoff on where are all of the students Obama taught who claim to have been inspired by him when he taught law at the University of Chicago.

Where are all of the former classmates of Obama who can tell wonderful stories about their experience with Obama on campus or in the classroom? And it's interesting because those people haven't surfaced. There aren't any ex-girlfriends that have admitted it. Students that have been inspired by Obama as a professor, they haven't come forth. Media hasn't dug 'em up. It is interesting from the standpoint that the guy has not been vetted yet. Look what they're trying to do to Michele Bachmann, what they're planning on doing to Perry and so forth.

Should we dig into this sort of material?
	No. It's sleazy and more or less irrelevant.
	Yes. Let's sift through everything and then take it for what it's worth.
	Only conservatives deserve this kind of research.
	Only liberals deserve this kind of research.
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"What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?"

Maureen Dowd observes that "Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the 'hobbits'":

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

That term, "hobbits" (for tea partiers), comes from the Wall Street Journal and John McCain. I'm not sure what hobbits — the actual literary characters — have to do with "towel-snappin" and "whipping" anybody "into submission."

Dowd is not kind to President Obama:

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.

Kill you?! The hobbits?

From that Wall Street Journal article:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

Sorry, but I don't remember all that "Lord of the Rings" stuff enough to understand that. Mordor is a place, right? Yes. "Mordor was the realm of the Dark Lord Sauron. It was a terrible land of darkness and fear, inhabited by Orcs and other evil creatures." Does that make Obama the "Dark Lord"? I understand the Journal's hope that the Tea Party will go back to their modest home towns after they do whatever they think is their mission in Washington, that "terrible land of darkness and fear."

"What the academy is doing, as far as I can tell... is largely of no use or interest to people who actually practice law."

Said Chief Justice John Roberts, in a quote that sprang to mind when I read this from Gordon Smith (via Instapundit):

[Some old lawprof once said:] "To become a great law professor, one must write a casebook, a treatise, and a Restatement ... Seavey never wrote a treatise."

... It is impossible to imagine anyone giving Scott's advice to a young professor today. The sort of doctrinal synthesis that lies at the heart of casebooks, treatises, and Restatements is not highly valued among today's law professors, even though it has real-world value.

What is the measure of a great law professor today? The highest achievement of a law professor today is creating a new concept or theory that is used widely by other academics in the field....

Lawprofs injecting other lawprofs with theories. It sounds unsanitary, but it's a closed system, so what could go wrong? It's not as if a law professor is going to break out and grasp massive power in the actual real world. Imagine a lawprof as President! It's absurd!

Aw, come on. Seriously. Barack Obama wasn't a law professor law professor. Did he ever try to create a new concept or theory for other lawprofs to use in the sickly circulatory system of academia? Absolutely not. He was always organizing and operating in the political world.

Obama has written a children's book.

"President Obama's picture book for kids, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters (Knopf, $17.99), pays tribute to 13 Americans whose traits he sees in his own children. The 31-page book, for kids ages 3 and up, is filled with lyrical questions for Malia, 12, and Sasha, 9, opening with, 'Have I told you lately how wonderful you are?'"

The clock on the mantle ticks, Teddy Roosevelt is a faded image of military readiness, the VP bows his head in (pseudo?) prayer...

... and the grim ladies in coral and turquoise look to their leader, Barack Obama...


(Enlarge.)

... who seems to be making a very precise point. Look at his hands:



And let's get a closer look at those BP executives (BP CEO Tony Hayward, BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP General Counsel Rupert Bondy):



Svanberg, especially, seems capable of overmatching the President's determination.

But, of course, they are all posing. Including the usually lethargic Janet Napolitano — at the right, turned from the camera, dressed in electric blue — who seems roused for action. Not as roused as Teddy Roosevelt and his horse... and think about how difficult it would have been for a horse to pose for a painting like that. It's all phony of course, all the way down to TR and the horse he rode in on.

Obama diverts himself and tells us to quit diverting ourselves.

1. "With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," he said today.

2. He's golfing again. He knows how to do that. Is it empowering? Is it emancipating?

Hypocrisy?
	Yes. He'd like to lay down a lot of rules that only apply to other people.
	Yes. He thinks what he likes is worthwhile, but what he doesn't care about seems like a waste.
	No. Golf is outdoor exercise, quite unlike the various high tech screens people fiddle with.
	No. Unlike the people he's scolding,he doesn't need another "tool of empowerment."
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Rush Limbaugh keeps mocking Obama for being too much of a professor.

And I agree with a lot of this mockery. So don't get me wrong: I like Rush Limbaugh. I listen all the time. But that means I catch some things that you may not notice. And I caught a couple of ironies in yesterday's show.

First, he's twice played this clip from the Rodney Dangerfield movie "Back to School":



And yesterday he says that it shows "an economics course with an Obama type professor, an arrogant, conceited snob who has no understanding of what really happens in the business world... who thinks he has all the answers."

So Obama doesn't know what goes on in the real world, and the evidence of what goes on in the real world is... a Hollywood movie. Irony #1.

Later, after this putdown of professors, he's talking with a caller about the subject of "the Big Lie" (a concept from Hitler's "Mein Kampf"):

RUSH: Well, see that's the nature of the Big Lie. You tell something --

CALLER: You're right.

RUSH: -- so audacious that nobody could possibly think they'd make it up.

CALLER: No. No. Well, Hitler used to do that. Goebbels was great for that, just tell a bigger lie and bigger lie --

RUSH: Hitler didn't need Goebbels. Hitler was the architect of all this stuff. Goebbels, he just implemented it all. He didn't need Bormann. He might have needed Rommel --

CALLER: -- started it all (crosstalk)

RUSH: -- and he might have needed Christoph Waltz, and Hitler might have needed Bormann.

CALLER: Yeah, that's right.

RUSH: But Goebbels made movies out there....

Rush and the caller are suddenly acting like a couple of know-it-all history professors. What the hell does Rush know about who Hitler needed? Irony #2.

"We need a Commander in Chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern."

Look at her, sneering at law professors!



Ha ha. I enjoyed Sarah Palin's contempt there. (And good for her, saying "lectern," instead of, like most lawprofs I've heard, "podium.") She's not contemptuous of law professors, generally. Just law professors out of place.

And that's kind of the way I feel about Sarah Palin. The question is: What is the right place for her? I think she does really well observing national politics, commenting, critiquing, and campaigning. Campaigning for others, though, I think. In office, maybe she's as out of place as a professor of law posing as Commander in Chief.