James Taranto:
For it seems to us that Obama’s generalities about success being undeserved are absolutely true in one particular case: that of Barack Obama. Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.
Let’s run through the list of Obama’s achievements.
“The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today,” the New York Times reported Feb. 6, 1990. Obama himself understood his election to be a product not of unusual ability but of luck: “It’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks,” he told the Times. “You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance.”
He was lucky to be privileged and he was lucky to be black. But for the former, in his own telling, he never would have had the opportunity. But for the latter, his election would scarcely have been noticed outside Harvard Yard. In an interview with the Times, Peter Yu, Obama’s predecessor as law review president, used apophasis to raise the possibility that the honor was undeserved: “Mr. Yu said Mr. Obama’s election ‘was a choice on the merits, but others may read something into it.’ ”
In 1995, Obama published an autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” substantial portions of which turn out to have been fictional. Just how substantial has become clear since David Maraniss published his heavily reported biography, but it had not gone unnoticed before, as evidenced by this 2008 piece from the New York Times’s Janny Scott:
