Going to the Videotape

Apparently there is a video out now from Andrew Breitbart's team that shows a young Barack Obama extolling a Harvard professor named Derrick Bell. Bell, who died last year, was notable for being the first tenured African-American professor at Harvard's law school. Bell had a few, ahem, interesting notions, and was known to be a fan of Louis Farrakhan.

You can see the videotape here. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I'm not sure I'm going to bother, though. The tape dates back to 1990, when Obama was a student at Harvard Law School. You need to know two things about Harvard Law:

• It has been a controversial law school, because they have used something called "Critical Legal Studies" in their curriculum. CLS takes an essentially Marxian (not Marxist) view of the world.
• As a result, Harvard Law has not been as highly regarded as other top law schools. This was especially true at the time Obama was a student there.

Does the tape tell us anything we didn't already know about Barack Obama? Not really. That he came from a place that took a dim view of America, and was an acolyte of someone who took an especially dim view of America, is not especially surprising. You can find hard-core leftists all over academe, because it's one of the places where such muddled thinking is celebrated.

What will decide Barack Obama's fate is his performance in office. We now have a 3+ year sample of his work. I have a feeling most people have a pretty good fix on who he is now, which matters a lot more than who he might have been 20+ years ago.