Although  a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of  Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before  this week.  Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack  Obama, the writer and thinker.

Obama  was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized  Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies.  Specifically, Chen had  argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed  beneficiaries.

The  response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and  grammatically challenged.  In the very first sentence Obama leads with his  signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his  inability to make subject and predicate agree.

"Since  the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote  Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process  works."

If  Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits  ... have."  Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could  have won it on this on one sentence alone.  He had vindicated Chen in his  first ten words.

Although  the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the  subject-predicate error at least two more times.  In one sentence, he  seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries  both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other  half are selected ... "

Another  distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space.   Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this  sentence:

"No  editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on  the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no  editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind."  Huh?

The  next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper  flaw in Obama's political philosophy.

I  would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in  this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even  insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success  might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow  undeserved.

Obama  would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four  years later.  Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following,  everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of  words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.

Unaided,  Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose.  The phrase "our concern  in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more  profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the  wrong word.

Scarier  than Obama's style, however, is his thinking.  A neophyte race-hustler  after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would  "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in  inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed  beneficiaries.

In  the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three.  The partners  at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way.  In 1988, they hired her out of  Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something.  It did  not.  By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to  the mayor.  By 1993, she had given up her law license.

Had  the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the  disaster to come.  Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle  frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a  person who did not test well."

She  did not write well, either.  Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis  at Princeton as "dense and turgid."  The less charitable Christopher  Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake;  the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb.  This  is because it wasn't written in any known language."

Michelle  had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius  School.  Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her  highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and  the profs finessed her through.

In  a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law  Review.  Although his description of the Law Review's selection process  defies easy comprehension, apparently, after  the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified  candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly  differ."  These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above  average.  Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may  take race or physical handicap into account."

To  his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's  affirmative action policy."  This did not strike him as unusual as he  "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic  career."

On  the basis of his being elected president of Law Review -- a popularity contest  -- Obama was awarded a six-figure contract to write a book.  To this point,  he had not shown a hint of promise as a writer, but Simon & Schuster, like  Sidley Austin, took the Harvard credential seriously.  It should not  have.  For three years Obama floundered as badly as Michelle had at Sidley  Austin.  Simon & Schuster finally pulled the  contract.

Then  Obama found his muse -- right in the neighborhood, as it turns out!  And  promptly, without further ado, the awkward, passive, ungrammatical Obama, a man  who had not written one inspired sentence in his whole life, published what Time  Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American  politician."

To  question the nature of that production, I have learned, is to risk the abuse  promised to Mr. Chen's theoretical employer.  After all, who would  challenge Obama's obvious talent -- or that of any affirmative action  beneficiary -- but those blinded by what Obama calls "deep-rooted ignorance and  bias"?

What  else could it be?