Statute of Limitations

Donald Trump is currently arguing that Barack Obama would never have gotten where he is today without affirmative action. He was a lousy student at Occidental, Trump says, and then he got into Harvard. How could that be, asks Trump? Now, set aside for a moment the fact that that would be an argument in favor of affirmative action. But anyway, the current leader in polls to oppose the incumbent President in his re-election bid is arguing more or less that his opponent is unqualified to become President, because he only got his elite education because of affirmative action.

There's something wrong with this argument. It should've been made four years ago. Back then, it was a distinctly open question whether or not Mr. Barack H. Obama was qualified to be President. You could argue that two years in the Senate wasn't enough to prepare him, or that we had no evidence of his executive judgment. Or that he had somehow managed to present himself as intelligent etc. to the voters of Chicago and then won an election against, uh, Alan Keyes, and so we had no particular reason to think there's anything remarkable about him. On the other side, people could've argued that his policy ideas were good, or his speeches revealed an intelligent thinker, or whatever. But that was four years ago.

Today, I think it's pretty obvious what makes Barack Obama qualified to be President: he won a Presidential election. Hell, he got the highest percentage of the population to vote for him of anyone who wasn't already President in history. And then he's spent four years actually being President. So it is no longer a matter of qualifications. It is a matter of performance. Setting aside for the moment the question of the quality of the Republican nominee, the basic question facing people in 2012 is "do you want Barack Obama to continue being U.S. President?" For obvious reasons, the kinds of arguments you make in answering that question should be almost entirely based on his record as U.S. President. It's not an insubstantial record. He's done lots of stuff. He's handled foreign policy crises, he's cut legislative deals, he's made judicial appointments. He's done the things Presidents do. So if you want to argue he'd be a bad President, argue that he's been a bad President. And I'll argue that he's been a good President (and also that you are Donald Trump, so it really doesn't matter what kind of a President Obama is...)

Bayesian statistical thinking basically follows a principle where you start with a certain a priori assumption about the state of affairs, and then as you accumulate more data your idea of what the universe is like becomes less and less based on the a priori assumptions and more and more based on the data. Trump is making arguments about what our a priori assumptions about Obama's competence should have been, back when they were important. But there's so massively much data about Obama's competence to be President by this point that it scarcely matters at all what those assumptions were. They've been swamped, overridden by the things we know about Obama as President. So okay, Mr. Trump, maybe Barack Obama was an affirmative-action baby. But that just means we should expect him to be a lousy President; if he is actually a good President, it's certainly not a reason to vote against him regardless.

Unless you're just being racist for racism's sake, which, of course, you are, but that's sort of beside the point.