Patterico's Pontifications

8/18/2012

Obama Supports Affirmative Action in Court

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 1:42 pm



Don’t look at what people say. Look at what they do:

On Monday, the Obama administration, along with most of the higher-education and business establishment, weighed in with amicus briefs in support of racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin. Given Barack Obama’s mixed messages on affirmative action in the past—he has said his own daughters do not deserve a leg up in admissions and that he understands the resentment toward preferences by whites who do not feel particularly privileged—there was a modest hope that he would break with longstanding Democratic Party orthodoxy to promote a better kind of affirmative action that looks at gaping economic inequalities in our country rather than just counting skin color. He blinked, however, and filed a brief that is unlikely to do anything to change the minds of Supreme Court justices and may do real damage to the president’s own re-election chances.

The administration’s brief with the Supreme Court argues that even though the University of Texas at Austin was able to achieve substantial racial and ethnic diversity without using race—by giving a preference to low-income students and automatically admitting students in the top 10 percent of their high school—Texas was right to restore racial preferences in the freshman class beginning in 2005 so that the university would better reflect the state’s demographic breakdown.

Blah blah blah in favor of centrism — and then, when the rubber hits the road, give us leftism.

Four more years of this?!


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