No, he can’t. The nutbags will always be able to come up with some stupid shit they can label “questions”.
Only the nutbags themselves can end it, and it wouldn’t even take a phone call to do it. What do you think are the chances of that happening?
It’s been around for a couple of years and it’s not going to get traction. It’s a standard irrelevant political grumble and is no different from millions of other irrelevant complaints that get made about every politician. (When Obama was a candidate for president and a fairly new presence in national politics, his educational history might have been an issue. (Even then, absent something very serious it’s a stupid thing to base your vote on.) He’s the president now. Who cares what his grades were in college? Do you imagine that millions of voters would change their opinion of him based on his grades?
That’s keeping in mind again that he graduated magna cum laude. He was somewhere in the top 10 or 11 percent of his class, but not the top 1 percent. If his grades ever do come out, anybody who believes he scraped his way through grad school or got something he didn’t deserve because of affirmative action is likely to be disappointed.
I imagine that millions may think that he’s covering something up if a) it’s a ‘presidential best practice’ to reveal them (ie, have we seen them from our other recent presidents?), and b) he continues to take his principaled stand when there’s really no good reason to… unless of course there is a good reason and there’s something embarrassing in there.
While I agree it’s mostly silly - anyone who doesn’t know what this president is all about hasn’t really been paying attention, and I doubt they would vote in the midterms. But politics and reason don’t always overlap 100%.
The whiff of scandal and coverup is his choice, and it’s a foolish, unnecessary one, IMHO.
We have not seen other Presidents release their college transcripts. That’s not correct. We’ve seen transcripts, but they were not put out by the Presidents, they were found by others.
Foolish is taking any of there right wing witch hunters seriously. I think those who find this hunt useful are few and they should be embarrassed. You do not respond to people who are sniping at you. You legitimize it and they will continue with something else. They deserve no recognition. They have been playing this silly game for over a year and a half. They have an echo chamber that agrees this is valid. Only it is not. Perhaps you guys can tie him to Whitewater next.
I was tempted to say that this is the height of absurdity.
But then I remembered the Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya business.
So at best, this is number three on the absurdity list.
The only people who think he’s covering up his grades are the ones who think he’s hiding his birth certificate. It’s not going to become a larger issue. It’s been on the back burner for a while and it’s never going to come to a boil. Most of the public has no reason to give a shit. Seriously now: if you hate his policies, you don’t give a crap how he did in college 20-plus years ago. And if you like him, you also have no reason to care.
I think this was explained upthread. They are not usually made public. To the degree we’ve seen the grades of other presidents and candidates, it’s because they were part of other files that became public.
There is a good reason: the demands are never going to stop, so it’s better to ignore them. Giving in would send the message that he takes these complaints seriously and is willing have someone waste time dealing with them, which would prove this is an effective tactic for going after him. As such the requests would only increase. I’m in favor of disclosing any relevant information about a president or a candidate, but I don’t see the relevance of Obama’s college or law school grades.
There’s no whiff of scandal. You are interpreting this as important when it is not. It’s something people who don’t like him use as a reason to complain about him or dismiss his intelligence. Good grades don’t make a genius, but if you want to call Obama stupid, you can’t do it based on his Harvard grades. This reminds me of the campaign: some people were so wrapped up in the day to day elements of the campaign that they didn’t see how stupid some of the arguments were. This is too stupid to take seriously.
Here’s the late conservative blogger Dean Barnett on Obama’s college years:
Barnett then goes on to contrast this with Obama “inept” campaign. The piece was written in late 2007, and we know how that worked out. Still, he acknowledges that Obama’s Harvard results were the real deal.
Here’s World Net Daily insinuating that Obama has not been forthcoming about his time at Harvard because he’s an Islamic sleeper candidate, and that he only got into Harvard and became law review president because of affirmative action. This is from September 2008. So you can see this stuff has been going around for years, like I said. There’s no reason to treat it seriously now.
While looking for other examples of Grader nuttery I found this brief New York Times article about Obama being elected president of the law review.
That is all the more reason for Obama to want this “issue” to continue – insofar as the Republican leadership lacks the spine to publicly refudiate the whackadoodles, independents are less likely to shift toward them.
How many of our desperately important “independents” are really Republicans too embarassed to admit it?
I found this piece which seems to back that up
Of course, the next logical question is, why is the WaPo digging up Gore’s transcripts and not Obama’s, etc. But leaving that aside, it appears you’re right, it’s not a best practice to reveal them as candidate/politician. Or maybe it is
Of course this was 2 years ago, and it hasn’t been a problem so far, which argues for your position.
I guess we’ll have to see if this ends up getting traction. While the reflexive Obamabot response in this thread has been “no way”, I don’t think anyone can reasonably know for sure.
PS And I don’t buy the ‘if he does, he validates the question’ line of thinking, either. His birth cert was questioned, he circulated the copy on the internet, and that satisfied most people (not the kooks, but they aren’t voting Dem anyway). He took it (mostly) off the table. That’s what he ought to do here.
Not only that, it creates a precedent that would lead to “relevance creep”, by which anyone can at any time decree that any kind of records of any OTHER actual or potential candidate or officeholder are fair game for a demand to be made public, and that if not, it must be because there’s something to hide, which is backwards – the person demanding the information should be burdened with proving that there’s a valid reason they need it.
(Plus I strongly suspect they’re not looking for evidence of lousy grades, but maybe fishing for any “It’s Whitey’s Fault 101” or “Seminar on the Obvious Superiority of Socialism 650B” coursework)
Way to raise your cred, man.
I am sure they tried to get Obama’s. I believe the reason they found Gore’s was posted upthread.
Unless I’ve forgotten something I think have similar information about Obama’s records and McCain’s. Searching around the 'net and past threads here, I saw that Obama had a 3.3 GPA at Columbia, where he did his last two undergrad years. And we know McCain was ranked 895 out of 899 at the Naval Academy. McCain didn’t go to graduate school because he was in the service. Obama did, and we know he graduated magna cum laude. So we have a pretty clear picture of how he did there relative to his peers.
The cites I provided show that there have been mutterings about this for at least two years. It unquestionably did not get traction during the campaign. Why would it matter now?
(Assuming you actually want an answer, that it’s not a hypothetical…)
My guess, if it does end up mattering (note: I’m arguing that it COULD matter, which means it’s a RISK, which is why I’d release them to take it off the table)… anyway, if it does end up mattering, it could be that indy’s are far more disillusioned with him (and his party) now than they were in 2008. He doesn’t have the veneer of kryptonite that he had 2 years ago, and I think the coming beatdown in November will bear that out.
He had the lowest approval rating ever for a president after one year, back in January. The Democrats are disillusioned with him (although the lefty press is doing their best to rectify that), the GOP hates his expansionist government, and the Independents aren’t big fans of the deficit. And of course it’s only been getting worse.
In my opinion, too big of a risk. Unless of course there’s fire where there is smoke.
All I would say in response is that I think you’re misreading the political scene if you think this really poses a risk to him with the economy being where it is and the Gulf of Mexico being as petroleum-flavored as it is. And that you’re misreading the attitudes of the people who think Obama is hiding something.
(bolding mine)
So what are you trying to say here? Your first cite offers agreement with **Marlee23 **that transcripts are not commonly released. Then you seem to imply something else (“it is”) although my bolded section of your cite doesn’t contradict the original assertion.
Your “Oh, I have Obama’s best interests at heart, really I do” manner of addressing the subject rings rather hollow.
Why don’t you start a thread in ATMB proposing that instead of the mods banning trolls, we all respectfully respond to their posts just in case someone comes in and thinks that the act of banning them might cause some people to think we are all covering up the truth of the troll topic of your choice. See how that goes.
I’d hope this crap is never even on the radar. There are real problems, and spending any effort at all on this and the next one and the one after that is a worse use of the President’s time than Jimmy Carter doing the tennis court schedules.
Just because they aren’t commonly released doesn’t mean that they don’t get into the public domain. The cite I presented showed that they have, regularly, since, 1999. The fact that the media hasn’t dug up Obama’s yet means… well, you can draw your own conclusions on that one.
As for his best interests: I’m probably one of very few moderates on this board, politically, on an SDMB that’s clearly laden with lefties (which is not necessarily a bad thing). I’d like to think I can look at this objectively. And since this is Great Debates, seems to me that my opinion should count as much as anyone’s here, especially since I’ve backed it up with more cites than anyone else in this thread.
The only reasonable refutation (is that a word?) I’ve seen in this thread is that releasing the records would set a bad precedent, that if you give an inch they’ll take a mile, etc. Given the history of the last decade, combined with his stated desire to run the most transparent administration in our lifetimes; well, you tell me which claim rings hollow.
Go back and look at the approval/disapproval chart again. Do I think he’s done a poor job as president? You bet, especially fiscally. This puts me in line with a plurality of Americans (if not Dopers). Do I believe that a smarter politician would have taken this issue off the table, rather than run the risk that it damages his party in Nov? Yup.
It means nobody’s gotten a hold of them and his people never released them.
Even if he’d run as transparent an administration as the one he talked about, it would still be ridiculous to make a his college grades an issue. They’re just not important.
And the problem is that everybody has already heard this song before. This is exactly the same as the birth certificate issue. There was no debate about his birth certificate until he himself made it public. Does that give you any insight into this issue? There was a rumor that his middle name was Muhammad, so he put his birth certificate online to dispell it. The next thing you know, there’s a whole swarm of people who have suddenly become experts on Hawaiian birth certificates, and until the men in white coats with the butterfly nets show up, they will argue that he was not really born in Hawaii. They argue that despite the two birth announcements that ran in local newspapers right after he was born, the fact that his mother was a citizen, and in spite of the birth certificate he put online himself, that the document proves the exact opposite of what it means and the exact opposite of the reason he made it public. Then the media started covering the issue, which made it self-sustaining and it did not go away no matter how thoroughly it was established that his birth certificate was real.
So this has to be asked: who do you think is going to change their opinions about him based on releasing his grades from Harvard?
But that’s the point: the issue isn’t on the table. People are pissed off about the economy, about unemployment, deficits, the wars, and so many other things, and you think this is an issue of consequence that is going to hurt Obama and the Democrats in November - and that if he released his grades it would go away forever? You’re kidding yourself.
No, you keep bringing it up, you tell us what conclusions are to be drawn. Otherwise I’m going to conclude that this whole transcript issue is just another disingenuous backhanded attack that anyone who is actually a moderate would reject out of hand.