Here . Card of course is no liberal, so it's interesting to see his take. Certainly feel free to weight the relevance or importance of his view as you see fit. Also I have to admit I'm posting this partially for Ender, since Card is most known as the author of Ender's Game ;-)

On Wright and what it means for Obama, he strongly condemns Wright's statements but agrees with Obama not disowning his friendship with the man:

my disdain for Wright's preaching is strong. However, I'm not in his church so it's none of my business. There are plenty of other black preachers telling their congregants the same lies and giving them the same excuses – but there are plenty of white preachers telling lies to their congregations, too.

[...] The real issue is: Should we be suspicious of Obama because of Wright's teachings? Obama has made it plain that he rejects Wright's racially divisive teachings. But he is tied to Rev. Wright by bonds of friendship that transcend doctrines.

[...] I think Obama's behavior has been impeccably correct and completely honorable. Obama wants to be president of all the people of America, white and black. But he's not going to suck up to angry white people by repudiating one of his closest friends. Good for him. Isn't it actually quite refreshing to have a candidate behave that honorably?

On the differing attitudes of Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton towards releasing their college theses:

All during the time Hillary was first lady (not president, despite her claim of experience), Wellesley College kept her senior thesis under lock and key. They invented a rule that anyone could access any senior thesis except one by a sitting president or first lady.

Princeton University was prepared to extend the same favor to Michelle Obama when people asked for her senior thesis – without even waiting for her to become first lady. But when reporters asked the Obama campaign about this, they did what Hillary should have done 16 years ago: They simply provided the press with a copy of her thesis.

Card on Michelle Obama's thesis: he finds it to be approached in a scientific fashion, certainly with some shortcomings but revealing scholarship and intellectual curiosity. The immediate relevance here is that he repudiates those who characterize it as racially divisive:

let's lay one canard to rest right now. The only way you could read Michelle Obama's paper and think she was being even the tiniest bit racially divisive is if you want that to be the opinion people get about her. In short, only Hillary supporters could find anything wrong with this paper.


[..] On point after point, her analysis was incisive; yet she also introduced most of the major doubts that her study could arouse. In short, she had a true scientific attitude, with ego almost entirely removed from the process. From this thesis, I see the youthful Michelle Obama as smart, honest, open-minded, humble and determined to find out the truth regardless of consequences.

Now that Hillary's thesis is no longer kept secret by her former college, Card has some thoughts on it as well:

Then I read Hillary's conclusion, and I was stunned. It's not just that her opinions are all over the map, usually without any kind of evidentiary justification. It's that she can't seem to write a paragraph that makes any kind of point. [...] And then it all comes clear. There's only one consistent theme that is expressed throughout Hillary's paper. It's all about how smart she is, how superior to everybody and every group she mentions. She can mock this and that because she stands on a higher plane than they do.

Instead of being an earnest seeker after truth, like Michelle, Hillary writes as if she knew "the truth" and if the reader is smart, the reader will know it too. But in the pages that I read, Hillary shows no competence whatsoever at rational analysis, at self-questioning; she writes pretentiously, but very, very badly. [...] It's not that she's dumb, it's that she's glib and assumes that whatever she happens to believe is the smart thing.

This last criticism, of course, matches exactly the problem that many non-Hillary fans have with her actions, from the way she justifies her mistaken vote for war with Iraq to the way she mishandled her campaign by ignoring smaller states and overspending in the initial stages. It's not that she's dumb -- she's obviously very intelligent and capable. It's that she's glib -- she's too quick to assume instead of research, she doesn't question herself, she surrounds herself with incompentent yes-men and Clinton-before-party hacks. She doesn't re-evaluate her conclusions or learn from her mistakes (to take the examples above, witness her vote on Kyl-Lieberman where she makes the same mistake she made with Iraq with Iran, and her continued mishandling of her campaign which has faced hostile media questioning due to her entirely voluntary exaggerations). In her college thesis, Card claims she shows "no competence whatsoever at rational analysis, at self-questioning." Certainly people can mature since college, as Card makes a point of noting. Based on her own record, how much has Hillary learned?