A CMC Alumna on Obama's Legal Team...

Today, the White House announced 22 new legal hires for its legal team.  The announcements were made by White House counsel Gregory Craig and deputy counsel Cassandra Butts. 

Her name is Rhonda M. Carter and she is now the Executive Assistant to the Deputy White House Counsel. Here is how the National Journal describes her CV. 

Prior to joining the White House, Ms. Carter was the Assistant to the General Counsel at the Presidential Transition Team. Earlier in her career, Ms. Carter served as the Special Assistant for Domestic Policy at the Center for American Progress. Ms. Carter began her career at the University of Washington in Seattle where she was the Program Coordinator for the UW Student Support Services TRIO program. Ms. Carter earned her bachelor's degree at Claremont McKenna College.

Ms. Cassandra Butts, Carter's boss, was a classmate and friend of Mr. Obama's at Harvard Law School. She served as senior vice president for domestic policy at the Center for American Progress, an exceptionally far left group. (No, Ivy League nepotism to see here folks. Move along.)

I found Ms. Butts remarks concerning Obama at the Harvard Law Review particularly revealing in that it shows the degree to which others were willing to go to bat for him. File this under the Inkblot Presidency. Currently, Obama's tenure at the Law Review is one of the least cited. You can read about that and other things about Obama's time on the Law Review here. 

And for him personally, what does [the Law Review] mean? Ordinarily, it means Supreme Court clerkships and all of those things.

I was as close to Barack as anyone in law school. He'd never expressed an interest in being president of the Law Review. It wasn't something that he talked about. Frankly, he was drafted by his colleagues on the Law Review to run. They made the case why he should run and why they thought that he could lead the Law Review. And they thought that he would be able to bring together the factions that had developed as a result of the divisions, the ideological divisions on the Law Review, on the left and the right. ...

I often joke with people that I'm a government major so that I might know my enemy. I am very skeptical of the many Claremont students who say they plan to enter politics. I take the John Lerew approach, who despite not winning in Colorado, gave some solid advice of making a difference in your community in the private sector before you enter government. The career bureaucrat who knows only facts and figures is the greatest enemy of liberty. Still, more Claremont students involved in Washington cannot hurt the reputation of the school in its steady climb to national recognition, much though I wish those numbers were increasing in the private, rather than the non-profit, sector. 

Michael Wilner, PR of the School, Continues

Virtually every time Michael Wilner CMC '11 writes something, he's doing the bidding of the P.R. department.

Today's supposed "breaking" news announcement is that the endowment has had a loss of 30% between July and December, 2008.

Forgive me for not being shocked. Forgive the Forum for writing that it occured during the Fall of 2008. It occurred during the last two quarters. The first quarter was slightly worse than the last.