''Growing up in a white family in the least black state of America without "Dakota" in its name, he contributed less "blackness" to the cultural stew than I would have growing up in Newark. Still, Obama looked sort of black, even as he lived white, and that proved enough for the easily satisfied. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," said the inimitable Joe Biden.''
That the Nobel Committee awarded Barack Obama its Peace Prize after nine months of frequent-flier dithering – and that Obama accepted the prize – shocked no one who has followed the wondrous career of this presidential prodigy.
There is a sentence in "Dreams From My Father," the 1995 memoir penned for Obama after five years of well compensated dithering, that captures the essence of his preposterously lofty expectations.
The year is 1988. Obama is a community organizer in Chicago. He tells us he is making $13,000 a year. Although Iran guards its nuclear secrets less zealously than the Obama camp guards their man's grades and LSAT scores, we do know that Obama did not graduate with honors from Columbia University
.
That much said, he tells his street friend "Johnnie" that he has decided to go to law school: "The minute I told him the schools to which I'd applied – Harvard, Yale, Stanford – he had grinned and slapped me on the back."
Harvard, Yale, Stanford? Oh, to be Obama! After graduating from college with honors, I had contemplated going to law school myself.
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Although I did not take the LSATs, I had done sufficiently well on my GREs that at least a few friends asked me to take their LSATs for them. I'd have done OK.
And yet when I contemplated my law schools choices, they came down to Albany Law School, Seton Hall and Newark Rutgers. For all of the obvious glamour and prestige of these choices, I was not sure I could afford any of them.
True, I had not gone to Columbia as Obama had, but I had at least thought of going to Princeton. If, however, thinking about peace could win Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, thinking about Princeton did not get me admitted.
In fact, when I told the guidance counselor at my all-scholarship New York City high school about going to Princeton, he actually laughed. "How are you going to afford that?"
Michelle Obama did go to Princeton. "Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren't good enough for an Ivy League school," writes Christopher Andersen in "Barack and Michelle," "Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway." Oh, to be an Obama!