The Obama Exams

The New York Times managed to locate several years worth of exams and model answers to exams that Sen. Barack Obama gave. I've started to review them, and for the most part, it's boiler plate constitutional law and fact patterns. Nothing that really should surprise anyone who has gone to law school.

One area that lecturers and professors in law school often find humor is in the names of people and places in the fact patterns. In the course of reviewing the first set of exams (1997), I thought the name of the school in Part II was odd. He called it the Ujamaa School.

So, I did some more digging.

Ujamaa was the concept that formed the basis of Julius Nyerere's social and economic development policies in Tanzania just after it gained independence from Britain in 1964. In 1967, President Nyerere published his development blueprint titled the Arusha Declaration, in which Nyerere pointed out the need for an African model of development and which formed the basis of African socialism. Ujamaa comes from the Swahili word for "extended family" or "familyhood" and is distinguished by several key characteristics, namely that a person becomes a person through the people or community. For Nyerere, an African "extended family" means that every individual is in the service of the community.[1] Thus, Ujamaa is characterized by a community where co-operation and collective advancement are the rationale of every individual's existence. According to Ujamaa, personal acquisitiveness is prohibited, thus allowing the distribution of wealth through society horizontally rather than vertically.

Obama was using terms and names that he was familiar with. That shouldn't be surprising. It is becoming abundantly clear that his background is completely drenched in socialist teachings - a background he's desperately tried to keep from public view or spin into something that is more innocuous.

It would also appear that Ed Whelan had gotten wind of some of Obama's exams two months ago, but it didn't get nearly the level of attention the Times is now getting.

And Mark Levin has been all over Obama's socialist ties from the get-go.