Shelby Steele keeps being wrong about Barack Obama.
The tag-line under Shelby Steele’s astonishingly condescending and utterly dim-witted (and fact-challenged) op-ed assault on Barack Obama reads:
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author most recently of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win” (Free Press, 2007).
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
Shelby Steele: "But if the old bowing and boyish president is receding, a new and more ominous president is emerging." "Bowing and boyish" turning into "more ominous". Grab yer guns white folks, the nigrahs is commin' an' they's upitty!
Back in the 1980s, I used to read Steele's essays, later collected in his book, The Content of Our Character. Their general theme was opposition to affirmative action, but they were not primarily political; rather, they thoughtfully and perceptively addressed the psychological motivations for and effects of affirmative action on black and white people, and were persuasive to open-minded supporters of affirmative action. It is too bad that, since then, Steele has become a reactionary ideologue and not worth reading.