A longstanding conservative meme is that President Obama wasn't "vetted" during the 2008 campaign, and several conservative organizations have undertaken big projects to remedy that. The Washington Examiner posted its effort, "The Obama You Don't Know," Thursday; it follows Breitbart.com's "The Vetting." Today's major revelations include that Obama was only a moderately popular professor, and he didn't hang out that much with his colleagues at the University of Chicago in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Obama's background is an important and worthy journalistic pursuit. And anyone setting out to fill in any gaps remaining in the historical record of a sitting President should be lauded, in part because there are so few gaps remaining. Because it's not hard not to notice that the element that all these vetting projects have in common is that the results are a little boring. For instance, in contrast to Time magazine's gushing report that once Obama arrived at the University of Chicago in 1992, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students," the Examiner finds that his rock stardom faded quickly. Sure, in Obama's first two years, he was the top-ranked instructor, with a rating of 9.7 out of 10 from students. "But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily." The sad stats:
1997: Obama's student rating falls to 7.75. He is ranked 23 of 40 lecturers.
1999: Just 23 percent of students said they'd retake Obama's class on racism. Obama was the third-least-liked law lecturer.
2003: Just one-third of students recommended his class.
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