Obama's White House is a Harvard Frat House

Obama's White House is a Harvard Frat House
by Michael Prell
09/03/2011

William F. Buckley famously said “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2,000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.”

By contrast, President Obama would rather America be governed by the faculty of Harvard University than by the first 2,000 people in any American phone book. Least of all; the business pages.

Case in point: the President’s much-anticipated “jobs plan.”

While most Americans struggle to find a job, let alone take a vacation, President Obama crafted his jobs plan from the cloistered and rarefied golf courses and beaches of Martha’s Vineyard. While there, the President found time to pick the brain of his self-described “mentor” – Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree​.

You know, Charles Ogletree – the reparations crusader who represented Anita Hill against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his Senate confirmation hearings. He is the “mentor” our President consults to craft his “jobs plan” to save American jobs: a mentor whose career path took him all the way from being a student at Harvard Law School to being a tenured professor at Harvard Law School.

Being tenured means: he can never lose his job for anything. Not even plagiarism.

Charles Ogletree has “written” six books. I can tell you from personal experience that writing books is hard work. Ogletree’s 2004 semi-personal memoir “All Deliberate Speed” apparently wasn’t coming along speedily enough for his publisher. So the Harvard professor parceled out the work of writing his memoir to at least two of his assistants. Nice work, for an author, if you can get it.

But laziness wasn’t the Harvard Law professor’s only problem. Unfortunately, one of his assistants lifted six paragraphs “almost verbatim from another professor’s work,” and Ogletree’s other assistant failed to catch it. As reported in The Harvard Crimson, “when the draft returned, Ogletree did not realize that it was not his material, he said in the statement. But Ogletree said he was closely involved in most of the drafting of the book due to its personal nature.”

Harvard Law…personal memoirs…accusations of plagiarism…where have we heard this before? Perhaps Mr. Ogletree was more of a mentor to Barack Obama​ than we know.

This article is not plagiarized. And it is not about plagiarism. It is about the difference between the wisdom of the American people when it comes to jobs, and the cloistered worldview of Ivy League professors who can never lose their jobs—not even for plagiarism.
When given the choice between listening to the wise council of the American people, or to the elite and narrow worldview of Harvard faculty members, Barack Obama consistently chooses to slam the book shut on the American people, and heed the council of his Harvard pals.

Like Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein; Obama’s hand-picked “regulatory czar.” Earlier this year, Sunstein “refused to participate in the effort to identify job smothering regulations.” But not to worry. While Obama’s Harvard regulatory czar smothers real American jobs under piles of regulations, the regulation business itself is booming. As reported in Investors Business Daily, “If the federal government’s regulatory operation were a business, it would be one of the 50 biggest in the country in terms of revenues, and the third largest in terms of employees, with more people working for it than McDonald’s, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.”

Here are some other Harvard advisors in President Obama’s White House. Harvard President and former chief Obama economic advisor Larry Summers, who declared in 2009 that “the recession is over” and “predicted that job growth would begin as early as this spring [2010].” Fellow editor of Harvard Law Review David Ogden went on to become Obama’s Deputy Attorney General, where he helped create jobs for Mexican gun runners through “Project Gunrunner,” otherwise known as “Fast and Furious.” Former Harvard professor John Holdren, now Obama’s “science czar,” wrote that wealth redistribution is “absolutely essential” and recommended that a “massive campaign” be launched to “de-develop” the United States. And, of course, we have Elena Kagan, past Dean of Harvard Law School, whom President Obama placed on the Supreme Court. The knock on Kagan during her confirmation hearings was that she had a “limited body of academic work” and “appears to have gotten tenure…based on a single article.”

What are the odds that I could get tenure based on this single article?

About the same as President Obama finding the solution to America’s job problems by consulting his Harvard frat buddies, rather than the first 2,000 people in any American phone book.