Breitbart’s last tape: Bombshell or dud?

“That’s all you got?” said Julian Brookes in RollingStone.com. One of Andrew Breitbart’s last acts, before his untimely death two weeks ago, was to promise his legion of fans a bombshell piece of videotape from Barack Obama’s college years that might, the conservative media mogul strongly suggested, cost the president his re-election. Well, the tape is finally here, and despite breathless coverage from Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere, “it’s a total dud.” It shows a 30-year-old Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, praising and then hugging professor Derrick Bell, a controversial black legal theorist who made national news by taking a leave of absence to protest the lack of racial diversity among Harvard law professors. Obama’s support for Bell is not just old news, said David Graham in TheAtlantic.com. Breitbart’s supposedly explosive footage was included in a PBS biography of Obama that aired in 2008. Breitbart may be gone, but clearly his “tendency to overhype nonstories” lives on.

This tape won’t bring down the president, said Charles Cooke in NationalReview.com, but it isn’t nothing, either. The young Obama is caught on tape urging a crowd of his fellow students to “open up our hearts and minds” to Bell’s ideas—ideas that were, Bell himself would probably agree, “quite literally un-American.” The leading proponent of “critical race theory,” Bell believed that every aspect of U.S. society, from our Constitution to our courts to our very culture, was “an intractably racist tool of white hegemony,” and that the whole system would effectively need to be destroyed before it could be fixed. Now, “Obama may well have changed his mind” since his college years, as many of us do, but the news that he once applauded such radical, anti-American sentiments is hardly insignificant.

Bell had some “undeniably radical” views, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com, but we know for a fact that Barack Obama doesn’t. Whatever grainy footage may surface from the early 1990s, Americans have had “a thousand days and nights of watching Obama be president,” and what they’ve seen is “a pretty reasonable and conciliatory guy whom they basically like.” In fact, the right-wing hysteria over this utterly inoffensive piece of videotape says far more about the “intolerant and paranoid values system” of the Republican base than it does about the president himself. Besides, said Maya Wiley in The Nation, the assertion that Obama must share all of Bell’s views because he praised him in a speech 20 years ago is a “profound attack on our national values of dialogue and debate.” If any idea is radical and un-American, it’s that one.

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