RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary gets to the left of Obama on Arctic oil exploration.With the media transfixed by Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s will-he-won’t-he candidacy, some revealing policy news in the presidential campaign is being overlooked. Take Hillary Clinton’s decision to get to the left of President Obama on oil drilling in the Arctic.

The Obama Administration late last week gave final approval to Shell’s project to drill in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea—seven years and billions of investment dollars since it won the lease in 2008. Mrs. Clinton wasted no time using Twitter to express her opposition. “The Arctic is a unique treasure. Given what we know, it’s not worth the risk of drilling,” she explained in fewer than 140 characters, which sounds like the amount of thought she put into the decision.

The College Board’s about-face on U.S. history is a significant political event.

In this summer of agitated discontent for American conservatives, we can report a victory for them, assuming that is still permitted.

Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and exams, published new guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. They read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the sins of capitalism suffused the proposed guidelines for teachers of AP American history.

As of a few weeks ago, that tilt in the guidelines has vanished. The College Board’s rewritten 2015 teaching guidelines are almost a model of political fair-mindedness. This isn’t just an about-face. It is an important political event.

The earlier guidelines characterized the discovery of America as mostly the story of Europeans bringing pestilence, destructive plants and cultural obliteration to American Indians. The new guidelines put it this way: “Mutual misunderstandings between Europeans and Native Americans often defined the early years of interaction and trade as each group sought to make sense of the other. Over time, Europeans and Native Americans adopted some useful aspects of each other’s culture.”