Posted by
Bert Chapman on Friday, February 22, 2008 9:24:20 AM
Democrats often enjoy lambasting what they see as the obsessive secrecy and "overreaching power" of the George W. Bush Administration. They frequently proclaim how they favor openness and transparency in governmental activity and political discourse. In actuality, though, Democrats can be as secretive as the most paranoid dictator in seeking to conceal from the public writings or actions that reveal their often ugly beliefs.
A recent example of this is Michelle Robinson Vaughn who is now known as Michelle Obama-Barack's wife. She received her undergraduate degree in sociology at Princeton University in 1985. At least some Ivy League universities require their undergraduates to write a senior thesis as a condition of meeting requirements for receiving their degree. Michelle Obama's thesis is called "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community" which is available in Princeton's Mudd Library. Normally, such theses are available to Princeton and other users who wish to read them in the library. The senior thesis of Princeton undergraduate and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on the Italian Constitutional Court is actually freely available on the Internet. However, if you pull up the catalog record for Michelle Vaughn Robinson's thesis at
http://libweb5.princeton.edu/theses/thesesid.asp?ID=9867 you will get an entry telling you that this document is restricted until November 5, 2008 which just happens to be the day after the presidential election.
It would be nice to read what our potential first lady was thinking about at this time in her life. What were her views on the situation of blacks at Princeton in the mid 1980s? Public access to some theses and dissertations is restricted because of intellectual property reasons.
Those surely do not apply here. On the other hand, is Michelle Obama trying to hide something from us? Does this thesis contain incendiary rhetoric that might be politically radioactive to Barack Obama's presidential aspirations? Could they be injurious to his "audacity of hope" political rhetoric? There are some claims that Michelle Obama's thesis has decried "endemic racism" in American society and other victimology rhetoric of the radical left. If so, does she still adhere to such viewpoints today? Her husband proclaims that he wants to move beyond past racial politics and create a "post-racial America." Does Michelle feel the same way as he purportedly does? This is a woman who just recently proclaimed she only recently began to feel proud to be an American. Is there any relationship between her newfound patriotic pride and the success of her husband's presidential candidacy? Michelle Obama should make her undergraduate thesis publicly available in print and electronic format so all Americans can read it on the Internet.
This same lack of transparency also plagues Hillary Clinton. Public access to records about her participation in the Clinton Administration's health care reform task force remain sealed in the Clinton Presidential Library and are publicly inaccessible. Why is this so? Why don't the American Library Association, ACLU, and other press and political organizations who claim they are for public access to information denounce Hillary Clinton's secrecy? What is Hillary trying to hide since health care is an important public policy issue and she has stressed its importance to her throughout her political career? Hillary's undergraduate thesis at Wellesley College "There is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model" can, apparently be viewed at this institution's library but is not available on the Internet. This work is her hagiographic analysis of the radical leftist "community organizer" Saul Alinsky. Does Clinton still adhere to her radical chic views she is believed to have espoused in this work and in her early legal career? Has she really evolved into a more centrist Democratic? Wellesley College should make this report freely available on the Internet so Americans can have a more complete understanding of our first potential female president's youthful intellectual thinking.
Americans should be very cautious when either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton claim they favor transparent and open government. The examples I've mentioned above demonstrate that both of these individuals have a penchant for secrecy and deception that makes a mockery of their claims of favoring political honesty or openness.