The New York Times put together a fumbling attempt at a gotcha piece yesterday, trying to peg Barack Obama as either a liar or entirely too forgetful. The story's argument seems to be that because he doesn't talk much about living in New York or about his college experiences overall, he must be hiding something. However, Obama does spend a good deal of his memoir discussing his first two years at Occidental College. He just doesn't talk about his time at Columbia much, which I'd wager is a move to counteract the impression that he's just another Ivy Leaguer political insider -- not an attempt to hide some big secret. After all, he's been pretty up front about some potentially scandalous details from his past, noting his cocaine and marijuana use offhandedly and recounting stories that most other politicians would rather not have brought to light.
The article is especially odd because a lot more is known about Obama's early days than those of many other candidates. Everyone knows Hillary Clinton was head of the Young Republicans in her college days at Wellesley, but that hasn't become much of an issue. Nor should it. What the candidates did in college (and in the few years immediately thereafter) is generally unimportant and uninteresting, and it's a distraction from policy discussion and evaluation of everything they've accomplished in their adult and political lives. Sam brought up the question of whether candidates' marriages matter earlier this week, so I throw this one out there: Do candidates' undergrad years matter?
--Kate Sheppard
