Obama and the Constitution; He Has His Doubts

(Update: Please read The Obama “thesis” hoax.)

I missed this first time around.  Brian Lancaster at Jumping in Pools reported on Obama’s college thesis, written when he was at Columbia.  The paper was called “Aristocracy Reborn,” and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein–who wrote about it for Time–was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote:

“… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

That’s quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate.  I wonder if the prof–and I’d like to know who the prof was–made an appropriate marginal comment, something about historical context, about the Constitution’s revolutionary status in the history of freedom, and about the separation of powers in order to make the creation of any “shackles” as difficult as possible.

Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write.  Maybe he’d like to parse “the so-called Founders,” for example.  I’d like to know what he thinks of those words today.  And what about the rest of the thesis?