It's been weird to watch conservatives whine about the media coverage of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell's senior thesis, in which he called working women "detrimental" to the family, described the Supreme Court's decision legalizing contraception for married couples as "illogical," and said government policies should be tailored to favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators."
The "college thesis as Rosetta Stone to hidden radicalism theory" was a large part of the GOP's case against Obama during the election, and the weirdest part about it was that it wasn't even the president's thesis that proved he was a dangerous radical -- it was his wife's thesis. As Mark Steyn wrote in his cover story for National Review:
The thesis is dopey, illiterate, and bizarrely punctuated, but so are the maunderings of many American students. What makes Miss Robinson's youthful opus relevant is that the contradictions it agonizes over have dominated her life. Indeed, her apparent bitterness at a society that has given her blessings she could not have enjoyed anywhere else on earth seems explicitly to derive from her inability to live either as an “integrationist who is ignorant to [the] plight” of “the Black lower class” or a “separationist” embracing its hopelessness and “desperation.” Instead, she rode her privileged education to wealth and success and then felt bad about it. That's why she talks about money — her money — more than any other contender for first lady ever has: It's like an ongoing interior monologue about whether she sold out for too cheap a price.
Keep in mind, this is Steyn's abstract analysis of how Michelle Obama, writing about the difficulties of being black at a pretigious Ivy League University, proved that she was a radical who hated her country (or as Steyn put it, she subscribed "to the Reverend Wright’s world view, albeit without the profanity and accompanying pelvic thrusts.") This isn't in the thesis. This is what conservatives extrapolated from her writing.
Meanwhile, McDonnell's thesis expresses, in no uncertain terms, his belief that the government should look with disfavor upon the LGBT community and working women. That isn't an "interpretation." It's what he said. The conservative response has been to dissemble wildly. Here's Ramesh Ponnuru:
McDonnell's 1989 views on working women are also probably being distorted. In the section of the thesis at issue, he is arguing that government assistance for child care go to parents whether or not they use commercial day care. “Further expenditures” on subsidies for day care, he wrote, “would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching a status-quo of non-parental primary nurture of children.” Maybe he was saying that working women as such were “detrimental” to the family. But from my skim of the thesis I don't see that message anywhere else in it—and remember that McDonnell wasn't trying to finesse anything in it.
McDonnell literally says that the "dynamic new trend of working women and feminists" is "ultimately detrimental to the family," but Ponnuru doesn't "see that message." Meanwhile conservatives were perfectly happy parsing the alleged "subtext" of Michelle Obama's thesis in order to "prove" she was a bitter radical who hated America.
Conservatives are the ones who have argued that decades-old academic work is proof positive of people's "real views" even if they have to invent those views through strained interpretation. But now that a conservative candidate whose radical views require no abstract interpretation is a victim of this argument, conservatives are frustrated. But they're the ones who created this monster in the first place. We're all going to have to live with it, and it's going to be miserable.
-- A. Serwer
