Obama ducks calls to release his collegiate transcripts
By Dave Boyer The Washington Times Monday, May 28, 2012
washingtontimes.com
When President Obama gave the commencement address last week at the Air Force Academy, he congratulated the cadets for excelling at one of the most demanding schools in the country.
But decades after Mr. Obama completed his own college course work, his academic performance is still a mystery. Before and after his election as president, Mr. Obama has refused to release his college transcripts from his days as an undergraduate and a law school student.
Most presidents’ academic records are made public by the time they reach the highest office in the land, either with their consent or by someone else digging them up.
“There’s no reason why people shouldn’t know,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who focuses on the presidency. “At this point, it’s pretty moot — perhaps amusing if it turned out that he didn’t do very well.”
But whenever Team Obama is asked about the president’s college performance, officials dodge the question, obviously with Mr. Obama’s blessing.
The White House press office refers such questions to campaign officials, who in turn refuse to provide any information. The Obama campaign didn’t respond to questions for this article.
Another stonewaller in recent presidential politics was Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee in 2004, who refused to release his college transcripts during the campaign against President George W. Bush.The Democrat finally relented in 2005, six months after he lost the election, revealing that he had received four D’s in his freshman year, including a political science course. It also turned out that his grade-point average at Yale University in the 1960s was nearly identical to Mr. Bush‘s, despite the media’s portrayal during the campaign of Mr. Kerry as the more intellectual candidate and the common image of Mr. Bush as dumb.
The years-long secrecy about Mr. Obama’s college records has led to accusations that he is trying to hide something — for example, grades that might have justified neither his transfer to Columbia University in 1981 from Occidental College, a small school in Los Angeles where he was on a scholarship, nor his acceptance into Harvard Law School in 1988.
Donald Trump opined without proof four years ago that Mr. Obama benefited from affirmative action, prompting accusations of racism against Mr. Trump. |
