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June 4, 2008

Man in the News

Barack Obama: Calm in the Swirl of History

By MICHAEL POWELL

Correction Appended

He gives the appearance of a strikingly laid-back victor, this presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

On the day before the night he made history, Barack Obama shot hoops at the East Bank Club in Chicago, and called the odd superdelegate or two. Then he and his wife, Michelle, kissed their daughters goodnight and, with a half dozen of their best friends, rode to Midway Airport to catch a flight to St. Paul to claim his prize. He sat on the plane, legs crossed, chuckling, chatting, giving little hint of what roiled within.

Mr. Obama has written of his “spooky good fortune” in politics, and vaulting ambition and self-possession define his rise.

He turned down a prestigious federal appellate court clerkship while at Harvard to work as a community organizer. He wrote an autobiography at the age of 33, and another 11 years later. He brushed aside a liberal mentor who stood in his way in Illinois. After just two years in the United States Senate, he announced that he would run for the presidency and then upended a Democratic Party powerhouse.

On the cusp of becoming the first African-American to capture a major party nomination, Mr. Obama remains a protean political figure, inspiring devotion in supporters who see him as a transformative leader even as he remains inscrutable to critics.

He has the gift of making people see themselves in him and offers an enigmatic smile when asked about his multiracial appeal.

“I am like a Rorschach test,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.”

He is a liberal who favors regulating Wall Street and stanching housing foreclosures, negotiating with foreign enemies and disengaging from the war in Iraq. He speaks eloquently about America’s divisions of race and class, and says the old rhetoric of racial grievance has exhausted itself.

But his insistence that he can bridge the nation’s ideological chasms without resorting to partisan warfare leaves some with the nagging sense that he makes it sound too easy, and that his full measure as a politician has yet to be taken.

He has stumbled and fumbled more than once. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton confounded him, pushing him back on his heels, his irritation too apparent. He falls in love with his words and perhaps his celebrity, acknowledging after Texas that he had become too dependent on arena politics and too aloof in smaller settings.

He is a deliberative fellow in a manic game. When his now-retired pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., offered incendiary views on race and politics, Mr. Obama was slow to recognize how quickly Mr. Wright’s words inflamed voters’ doubts about him.

Michelle Obama, who is also a Harvard-trained lawyer and whose fires often burn hotter than those of her husband, pointedly advises Mr. Obama to forswear the cerebral and embrace the visceral. As Republicans attack him as unknown and untested, Mr. Obama could recall her advice in the months to come.

He was raised literally and metaphorically offshore, in Indonesia by his white mother and in Hawaii by his white grandparents. He is very much an American but tends to view the incongruities of politics with the distancing eye of an outsider.

A Life Examined

One of the curiosities about Mr. Obama is his professed lack of interest in the writers who pore over that life, trying to deconstruct his fractured family and geography. He claims not to read profiles that pile high in his plane.

“It just encourages the narcissism that is already a congenital defect for a politician,” he says. “I find these essays more revealing about the author than about me.”

The same might be said of Mr. Obama’s autobiography, which is less a straightforward chronicle than a carefully framed coming-of-age narrative. He describes himself as a young man adrift, although few friends recall thinking him so lost. And he just might have overstated his youthful experimentation with marijuana.

(Last November, an Iowa voter asked if he, unlike Bill Clinton, had inhaled. Mr. Obama looked puzzled. “I never understood that line,” he said. “The point was to inhale.”)

He carries a reputation as a Natural, and insists on calm. He did not interview each prospective campaign aide, but he laid down a rule: No drama kings or queens welcome. He confides in only a handful of advisers, particularly David Axelrod, the campaign guru with the appreciation for Chicago-style politics, and rarely displays public agitation about the measuring stick of his profession, electoral wins and losses. Told in February that he had won the caucuses in Maine, an overwhelmingly white state that he had expected to lose, he nodded, mumbled “That’s great,” and turned back to a phone call.

He jokes with his Secret Service agents and carries his own bags off planes and buses. (In this fishbowl world, a candidate knows he is being studied; carrying your own bags can be good manners, good politics, or both.) He jogs to the stage with the cocky ease of a jock.

He favors moderate tastes, preferring organic tea to a tumbler of gin, salmon to steak, a fruit plate to fries. He jokes about tossing back a beer, but his tippling amounts to a swig or two, most often to try to prove to television cameras that he is a “regular guy.”

But his greenness as a candidate also shows. His debate performances tend toward the erratic, authoritative one moment, defensive and diffident the next. He waxes incandescent at rallies, but in the 18-hour days leading up to primaries, he can sound aloof and querulous before smaller audiences. Condescension can creep in. He suggested, for example, that his youthful travels to Asia and Europe had left him more knowledgeable than Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain about foreign affairs.

“When I speak about having lived in Indonesia, having family that is impoverished in Africa, knowing the leaders is not important,” he told a crowd. “What I know is the people.”

At a fund-raiser in San Francisco, he speculated unhelpfully about the psychic hold that guns and religion had on the white working class.

His ache for time lost with his daughters feels palpable. On his plane recently, he described the nightly calls home. Malia, 9, is loquacious, rattling off every detail of her day. Six-year-old Sasha, whom he has nicknamed Cool Breeze, goes monosyllabic.

How was your day? “Fiiiine,” Mr. Obama mimics her uninterested voice.

But the campaign has allowed this ambitious man just 10 days home last year.

So the contradictions pile up. He is a watcher and a wanderer who found a home in Chicago where he fashioned his adult identity, not least as a black man. He is an idealist who pursues the national spotlight with the intensity of a bloodhound and finds the top prize almost within grasp. Yet he holds tight to the belief that he can draw a curtain of normalcy about his family.

For months, he tried to keep his old e-mail address and cellphone number until friends convinced him he was nuts. “We were like, ‘Barack! Give it up!’ ” said Cassandra Q. Butts, a senior vice president at the Center for American Progress and a former Harvard classmate. “He asks: ‘Why don’t you call?’

“I tell him, ‘Hey, Barack, you’ve got a few things going on, right?’ ”

Making His Way

Friends talk of his sixth sense for career timing as if there were a Barack-the-immaculate-pol quality to his rise. But he is no accidental political tourist.

He studies his chosen world like a Talmudist, charting trends and noting which rivals are strong and which weak. His politics are liberal but his instincts are accommodationist; he cultivates older, powerful mentors, Democratic and Republican, and he made his peace with the Chicago Democratic machine.

“You don’t go from being a community organizer to running for president in 15 years unless you have a lot of ambition,” said Paula Wolff, a Chicago Republican and a mentor. “He likes to listen carefully, and naturally you assume that’s very smart of him.”

If there is an art to seeking advice, Mr. Obama holds a master’s degree. He favors a hand on the shoulder, a whisper in the ear. In 1996, when he pondered a race for the Illinois Legislature, Jean Rudd, a mentor in the foundation world, took him to lunch with a prominent lobbyist. The appetizers had no sooner arrived than the lobbyist framed the question: Why would a Harvard-educated lawyer want to step into a hellhole like that? You’ll leave your wife behind, you’ll be in the minority party, you’ll be treated like dirt. Mr. Obama chuckled and asked questions. The lobbyist later became an adviser.

Abner J. Mikva, the former judge, asked Mr. Obama, fresh out of Harvard, to apply as his clerk. Mr. Obama declined, preferring to labor as a community organizer. But, characteristically, he later befriended the older man.

The judge recognized his talents, but oh that speaking style. Too many ers and uhs, too Harvard and not enough South Side. Mr. Obama did not argue the point; he began paying attention in church.

“He listened to patterns of speech, how to take people up the ladders,” recalls Mr. Mikva, now 81. “It’s almost a Baptist tradition to make someone faint, and, by God, he’s doing it now.”

When he gained election to the Springfield statehouse, Mr. Obama taught himself poker; politics happened around card tables. Then he took up golf. He hit one shank after another. “He was no Tiger Woods,” said State Senator Terry Link, an older white Democrat. Eventually Mr. Obama learned to drive and putt — and found a new place to conduct politics.

All of which sounds disarming, but there is a glint of steel. With his eyes on the State Senate in 1996, Mr. Obama told a former mentor that he would not stand down and let her reclaim her seat. And he used technicalities to bump rivals off the ballot until he ran unopposed. His operatives slapped down attempts to rerun primaries in Michigan and Florida; a recent party compromise on counting delegates from those states worked to his advantage.

An old Chicago hand notes that Mr. Obama seems to have read his Niccolò Machiavelli.

An 11-Year Path

Once, months ago, Mr. Obama preferred novels, meaty chews by John le Carré, E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth that transported him far from the cacophonous here and now.

“Fiction kind of took me out of myself and what we were doing every day,” he noted as he sat in his campaign plane, waiting to fly to another rally at a far-too-early hour.

And lately?

He motions at the platoons of Secret Service agents and staff members taking their seats. “I’m lucky if I get through a chapter of anything,” he says. “I have come to realize the secret to sleeping on the road is to get very, very, tired.”

He returns to Chicago and his Hyde Park home as a celebrity. Neighbors cross the street to shake his hand and point from afar. Mr. Obama rolls his eyes.

“Look, I don’t want to sound too noble: The first time you’re on the cover of Time magazine and the crowds are cheering, that’s not bad, right?” he says on the airplane. “But one thing I’ve learned about myself is that the surface glitter, the vanity element of this campaign, becomes less satisfying as I go along.”

That sounds too easy. He does not evince Bill Clinton’s animal need to work a rope line until every sweaty hand is shaken. But he has taken just 11 years to run the course from state senator to the first black presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, and holds thousands spellbound, and that suggests an ambition that runs swift and powerful. As a banker who plays basketball with Mr. Obama notes, he starts off quietly but he is known for talking a little smack if his shots are falling in.

It is not easy to sort out. The Obamas’ friends are black and white, upper-middle class to wealthy, University of Chicago law professors and historians and lawyers and foundation types. When the news media calls, they put the shovel only so deep in the ground of revelation.

You return to that question again: You really don’t read profiles of yourself?

Mr. Obama was sitting on his campaign plane a few months ago as it began the rumble down yet another runway to yet another campaign stop. He shakes his head but it sounds hard to believe; this introspective candidate ignores all those words? A reporter reads aloud from the novelist Darryl Pinckney’s essay in The New York Review of Books. Mr. Obama, the novelist writes, “comes across as someone who stored away for future consideration practically everything that was ever said to him, and who had a talent for watchfulness, part of the extraordinary armor he developed at an early age.”

Mr. Obama nods. That’s intriguing. But he prefers his own riff, which not incidentally trains the eye not on him but on his crowds. “I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me."

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

Correction: June 5, 2008
A Man in the News article on Wednesday about Senator Barack Obama misstated the name of a club in Chicago where he played basketball on Tuesday. It is the East Bank Club, not the Back Bay Club.

 

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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Senator Barack Obama arriving in Billings, Mont., on Tuesday in a stop on his way to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Eight years ago, he did not even have a floor credential

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August 27, 2008

The Long Run

Once a Convention Outsider, Obama Navigated a Path to the Marquee

By JEFF ZELENY

CHICAGO — The Democratic National Convention is akin to a longstanding family reunion. And eight years ago, Barack Obama was not on the guest list.

He was drained of money and confidence, fresh from a punishing defeat in a Congressional primary race here. Even the Illinois delegation did not have room at the party’s gathering in Los Angeles for Mr. Obama, then a 39-year-old lawyer, who had annoyed some state Democrats for not waiting his turn to seek a higher office.

Never mind all that. Mr. Obama bought a plane ticket and headed west anyway.

He persuaded a clerk at the car rental agency to overlook the unpaid balance on his credit card, and he made his way to the festivities. He was not a delegate — not even close to being a superdelegate — and without a floor credential he had all the sway of the junior state senator that he was.

“I have no memory of him there,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, recalled in an interview the other day. “It was a disastrous trip for him.”

As Mr. Obama makes his way on Wednesday to his own celebration in Denver, his evolution as a politician can be seen as a narrative centered on his party’s conventions, how he managed to navigate the politics of both Chicago, his adopted hometown, and the nation to accomplish this dizzying rise.

When party activists gathered in Chicago to nominate Bill Clinton to a second term in 1996, Mr. Obama was making his first run for political office, but he did not have enough clout to get full access to the convention. Instead, he concluded that high-dollar breakfasts and dinners seemed to lock voters out of the system, grousing to a reporter, “The convention’s for sale, right?”

Four years later, a lone news account of his visit to California is when he dropped by a reception at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was at a gathering of Illinois Democrats, where Mr. Obama praised the state’s senior senator. An Associated Press article reported: “ ‘Dick Durbin is not only the most popular Democrat in the state,’  gushed State Senator Barack Obama of Chicago, ‘but the most popular politician in the state.’ ”

By 2004, it was other Democrats who were doing the gushing.

After winning a crowded primary to fill an open United States Senate seat in Illinois, his race quickly became one to watch as Democrats fought — unsuccessfully — to take control of the Senate. If elected, he would become the only black in the Senate and only the third to win election since Reconstruction.

Shortly after Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, he campaigned in Chicago with Mr. Obama. Impressed by his ability as well as the diversity he would bring to the national party, Mr. Kerry invited Mr. Obama to play a premier role at the convention.

For Mr. Obama, the keynote speech at the FleetCenter in Boston would provide the flint for his national ambitions. But he was still seen as little more than a rising Democrat who, perhaps one day, would find a place in the party hierarchy.

“Nobody knew who I was,” Mr. Obama said this week, thinking back to the last convention. “Even up to the time that I walked on the stage, where they were handing out Obama signs, people were thinking, what is this?”

Though Mr. Obama’s Senate campaign had been chronicled before the convention address, few people anticipated how pivotal his big moment on the podium would be. The Tuesday night it was delivered, on July 27, 2004, the broadcast networks did not carry the address. He could be seen only on cable television and on stations in Illinois.

It was the first time Mr. Obama had used a teleprompter, which worried some of his advisers. But he more than pulled it off.

“When he was giving the speech, you knew that something was going to change,” said David Axelrod, who at the time was the senior strategist of Mr. Obama’s Senate race and now is playing the same role in his presidential campaign. “He was treated with a little deference.”

Mr. Obama suddenly found himself being followed by a pack of photographers. He begged for a moment of peace when he stepped into the portable toilet outside the convention center in Boston. Aides said Mr. Obama soon realized that his remarks had been heard by more than just party activists.

“We got close to the FleetCenter and a group of Boston cops walked over to shake his hand, having heard the speech the night before,” said Robert Gibbs, the communications director for the Senate race, who now is a top adviser to Mr. Obama. “It was a whole new level of recognition than only a few hours before.”

Not everyone took notice, though. While he arrived in Massachusetts on a chartered jet provided for an appearance on “Meet the Press” on NBC, two days before his speech, he headed back to Illinois on a $285 ticket on ATA Airlines.

Because of his last name, airport security workers frequently pulled him aside for extra screening, said Jim Cauley, his campaign manager at the time. And sure enough, the new star of the Democratic Party was pulled out of the line and asked to stand shoeless while an agent passed a wand over him.

This year, there will be no such delay.

When Mr. Obama arrives in Denver on Wednesday, his campaign slogan and name are emblazoned on the side of his chartered 757 jet. The front cabin alone is larger than the car he struggled to rent eight years ago this month.

As he wrote in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” he was frustrated by his lack of access. “I ended up watching most of the speeches on various television screens scattered around the Staples Center,” he wrote, “occasionally following friends or acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong.”

So he left one day before Al Gore accepted the party’s nomination. This time? Mr. Gore is one of the leading warm-up acts for Mr. Obama. He will be seated in Invesco Field when Mr. Obama is on the stage accepting the party’s nomination.

The Long Run

Obama’s Organizing Years, Guiding Others and Finding Himself

Barack Obama at the Developing Communities Project, 2004.

 

 

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July 7, 2008

The Long Run

Obama’s Organizing Years, Guiding Others and Finding Himself

By SERGE KOVALESKI

CHICAGO — The year was 1985 and Gerald Kellman, a community organizer, was interviewing an applicant named Barack Obama to work in the demoralized landscape of poor neighborhoods on this city’s South Side. He liked the young man’s intelligence, motivation and acutely personal understanding of how it felt to be an outsider. He also remembers that Mr. Obama drove a hard bargain.

“He challenged me on whether we could teach him anything,” Mr. Kellman recalled. “He wanted to know things like ‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’ ”

Mr. Obama’s three-year stretch as a grass-roots organizer has figured prominently, if not profoundly, in his own narrative of his life. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Obama called it “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” an education that he said was “seared into my brain.” He devoted about one-third of the 442 pages in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” to chronicling that Chicago organizing period.

In recent days, Mr. Obama has imbued those years with even greater significance, invoking them last week as inspiration for his plan to deliver social services through religious organizations. He told a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Saturday that as a community organizer he “let Jesus Christ into my life” and “I dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works."

It is clear that the benefit of those years to Mr. Obama dwarfs what he accomplished. Mr. Kellman said that Mr. Obama had built the organization’s following among needy residents and black ministers, but “on issues, we made very little progress, nothing that would change poverty on the South Side of Chicago.”

When he ran for the Senate in 2004, Mr. Obama told members of the community organization that had employed him that “when I left to go to law school, I couldn’t tell exactly whether I had gotten more out of this than the people I was working with.”

During that time, Mr. Obama found a home at the center of the country after spending most of his first 23 years in Hawaii and Indonesia. He also both lived and worked extensively for the first time in an African-American community. At a very local level he learned to bring people together around causes and to mobilize them with his words.

“I got the distinct impression that he was selling something he believed in, and I was going to buy it,” said the Rev. Samuel Strachan, a minister Mr. Obama brought into his organization.

For Mr. Obama, who had been drawn to Chicago by the recent election of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor, perhaps the greatest benefit of his time on the streets of the South Side was coming to terms with his place in black America.

“All of a sudden Barack finds himself in one of the most complex African-American communities in the United States and he discovers an energizing capacity to connect with the people in these neighborhoods,” said Gregory Galluzzo, a community organizer who worked with Mr. Obama.

“He is experiencing blackness in Chicago on both sides of the spectrum, from residents of public housing to Harold Washington,” Mr. Galluzzo added. “His identification with these people begins his political journey.”

A Unique Life

Before graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Mr. Obama had written to civil rights organizations and to black elected officials looking for work. No one wrote back.

He worked brief stints at two different jobs, but unemployed two years later, Mr. Obama answered an advertisement for a Chicago grass-roots organizer. With the devastating demise of the steel industry, Mr. Kellman was trying to work with blacks in the city and whites in the suburbs to salvage manufacturing jobs. Mr. Kellman, who is white, was looking for a black organizer to assist him.

Mr. Kellman said that based on the résumé, he had not been sure Mr. Obama was black. The name Obama and the fact that he had grown up in Hawaii, made him think Mr. Obama might be Japanese.

In fact, Mr. Obama, the son of a black father and white mother, was on a search for racial identity. In his memoir, Mr. Obama reflected on the grainy, black-and-white images of the civil rights struggles that his mother showed him when he was a boy and how they reminded him “that I wasn’t alone in my particular struggles.”

He wrote that membership in the black community had to be earned “through organizing, through shared sacrifice,” adding, “I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.”

At their first meeting, Mr. Kellman had some concerns about whether Mr. Obama had the stamina for such grueling, frustrating work. “Barack looked good, but would he burn out?” he said.

Still, Mr. Kellman was impressed, believing that Mr. Obama’s background had taught him about being an outsider. “These kinds of experiences help people relate to others who are outsiders of the system,” Mr. Kellman said. “On a compassion level, this is important.”

Mr. Kellman offered him the job on the spot. And Mr. Obama accepted, for a starting salary of $10,000 a year, plus $2,000 to buy a car.

Avoiding Confrontations

Loretta Augustine-Herron recalled sitting at her kitchen table with Mr. Obama for several hours one afternoon at her home near a housing project.

“He was not in a hurry, and I told him about what I did working with Girl Scouts and volunteering at school as a room mother and for block clubs in the neighborhood,” she said. “He wanted to know what made me tick, what my goals were and how things impacted the stability of my family.”

Ms. Augustine-Herron said that long afterward, Mr. Obama recalled details of their talk, like her oldest daughter’s service in the Air Force.

The small organization Mr. Obama worked for, the Developing Communities Project, was influenced by the thinking of Saul Alinsky, a Chicago native regarded as the father of community organizing. Mr. Alinsky viewed self-interest as the main motivation for political participation.

Mr. Obama saw it more broadly. “In his view, figuring out who you are and then getting that person to think about what he or she is going to do with it is the first step toward empowerment,” Daniel Lee, a fellow organizer, recalled. “He told me this was an extension of his own journey in struggling to find his identity.”

Mr. Obama shunned Mr. Alinsky’s strategy of using confrontation tactics like pressuring public officials and business leaders by picketing their homes.

“I think it was strategic that he would not have fallouts with people he disagreed with because he realized that he had to work with them not just on one particular issue, but on other issues down the road,” Mr. Kellman said.

Mr. Obama did adhere to the Alinsky principle of meticulously planning for meetings with people in power. The roles of the residents were scripted and the organizer was a quiet, inconspicuous presence.

One of the larger meetings Mr. Obama helped set up was at a church where about 600 people turned out to talk with officials about water contamination. He stood in the back holding a clipboard that had a diagram with the names and talking points for each of the residents. He also had arranged backups in case someone became too nervous to speak.

“People are asking Barack for instructions and he is giving them their roles and giving encouragement to people who had cold feet,” recalled Harold Lucas, who was a fellow organizer.

Afterward, Mr. Obama held an eval‎uation session with 20 or so residents, and one tenant led them in prayer.

Mr. Obama faced skepticism from Baptist and Pentecostal pastors unwilling to use their influence to help him organize their members. His group had consisted almost entirely of Catholic churches, and its top officials were white and Jewish.

“Barack had to get beyond the accusation that he was working for Catholics and Jews who were trying to make money off the community,” Mr. Kellman said.

Mr. Obama wrote that a minister suggested it would be helpful if he belonged to a church, and he joined the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s congregation after hearing a sermon about faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Wright’s sermons have been an issue in the campaign.

In his paramount achievement, Mr. Obama persuaded a number of these pastors to enlist their churches as members of the Developing Communities Project. Fortunately for Mr. Obama, a new wave of younger pastors was replacing the older guard.

“He was interested in finding out what I thought could be done in the community about issues like public safety and employment, rather than giving me some long-winded spiel,” said the Rev. Alvin Love, the pastor of Lilydale First Baptist Church. “We were looking for ways to get involved, and Barack gave us a mechanism to do that.”

Mr. Obama asked him to attend a meeting with other ministers. “Fifteen churches were represented there, and we started making plans to mobilize around issues like drugs, violence and job training,” Mr. Love said.

Wrangling Over Asbestos

In a stirring scene from his memoir, Mr. Obama describes an organizing success at Altgeld Gardens, a badly neglected housing project.

Mr. Obama wrote that one day an Altgeld parent handed him a newspaper advertisement soliciting bids to remove asbestos from Altgeld’s management office.

Mr. Obama recounted that he helped arrange a bus trip to the housing authority headquarters where residents had demanded a meeting with the executive director and a pledge that residential units would be tested for asbestos. As television cameras rolled, the residents were promised testing and a meeting.

“I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way,” Mr. Obama wrote. It was the kind of action that “hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on.”

What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue.

“Barack based the Altgeld campaign on the Wells model,” Mike Kruglik, an organizer who helped train Mr. Obama in Chicago, remembered. “He said, ‘Why can’t we do this at Altgeld?’ ”

Around the same time, The Chicago Reporter, aided by a community organizer named Linda Randle, published an article about asbestos problems at Wells.

In an interview, Ms. Randle said that she and Mr. Obama had formed a coalition to deal with asbestos.

“It was not one person that made the difference,” Ms. Randle said. “It was everyone coming together.”

Hazel Johnson, an environmental activist at Altgeld, said that she started to raise the asbestos issue with the housing authority in 1979, but that it had failed to act. Ms. Johnson and Ms. Randle pointed out that only some of the asbestos was removed from pipes at Altgeld, but not until 1989, a year after Mr. Obama left for Harvard. (An Obama campaign spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said, “The book is meant to be an autobiography about Obama’s experiences, not a history of social and environmental activism in Chicago.”)

Meanwhile, the residents’ meeting with the housing authority’s executive director was a debacle, an illustration of the setbacks faced by Mr. Obama and other organizers.

The crowd of about 700 residents grew irritable in the stifling heat and booed the director when he arrived an hour and 15 minutes late, according to people who were there, as well as newspaper accounts.

The meeting became even more raucous after the director indicated that the agency still did not have a plan to remove the asbestos. The director abruptly left 15 minutes into the meeting after a resident wrestled with him for the microphone. Angry tenants followed him out the door, chanting, “No more rent!”

Later that night, Mr. Obama called Johnnie Owens, whom he would hire as a community organizer. Never had Mr. Obama sounded so downcast or frustrated, Mr. Owens said.

“Barack basically talked about how tough it was to generate real results through organizing and that it was embarrassing to him to have the residents out of control,” he recounted.

“He wondered if he had done a good enough job preparing them for the meeting,” Mr. Owens said. “He sounded angry at himself. He was questioning the whole methodology.”

Mr. Obama had risen to executive director of the Developing Communities group, but the demanding hours, small victories and low pay took a toll on him, and he decided to leave.

“ ‘We are not making large-scale change, and I want to be involved in doing that,’ ” Mr. Kellman said Mr. Obama had told him.

Mr. Kellman said Mr. Obama spent his final months in Chicago making sure the organization had enough money, staff members and church members to survive after he left.

Mr. Obama had mused to friends in Chicago about one day working for unions or becoming a preacher, a journalist or even a fiction writer. While there, he wrote short stories based on people he had encountered. “The stories were beautifully crafted and evocative,” said Mr. Kruglik.

But Mr. Obama decided on law school instead. Shortly before Mr. Obama left for Harvard, about 60 people attended a farewell reception for him at Altgeld Gardens. He told associates that he intended to return to Chicago once he earned his law degree to pursue a career “in public life.”

 

 

 

The Long Run

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart

Courtesy Obama Campaign

NOT AFRAID TO PROVOKE Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years. Former students say he tested many of the ideas of his presidential campaign in the classroom.

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July 30, 2008

The Long Run

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart

By JODI KANTOR

CHICAGO — The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.

At a formal institution, Barack Obama was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and “The Godfather” the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his precise views.

Mr. Obama, now the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spent 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. Most aspiring politicians do not dwell in the halls of academia, and few promising young legal thinkers toil in state legislatures. Mr. Obama planted a foot in each, splitting his weeks between an elite law school and the far less rarefied atmosphere of the Illinois Senate.

Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status.

Standing in his favorite classroom in the austere main building, sharp-witted students looming above him, Mr. Obama refined his public speaking style, his debating abilities, his beliefs.

“He tested his ideas in classrooms,” said Dennis Hutchinson, a colleague. Every seminar hour brought a new round of, “Is affirmative action justified? Under what circumstances?” as Mr. Hutchinson put it.

But Mr. Obama’s years at the law school are also another chapter — see United States Senate, c. 2006 — in which he seemed as intently focused on his own political rise as on the institution itself. Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was well liked at the law school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage. The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates over “whether to drop a footnote or not drop a footnote,” said Abner J. Mikva, a mentor whose own career has spanned Congress, the federal bench and the same law school.

Douglas Baird, another colleague, remembers once asking Mr. Obama to assess potential candidates for governor.

“First of all, I’m not running for governor, “ Mr. Obama told him. “But if I did, I would expect you to support me.”

He was a third-year state senator at the time.

Popular and Enigmatic

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

The school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment given its location on the South Side. Its sleek halls bordered a neighborhood crumbling with poverty and neglect. In his 2000 Congressional primary race, Representative Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther running for re-election, used Mr. Obama’s ties to the school to label him an egghead and an elitist.

At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field.

His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law. Mr. Obama improvised his own textbook, including classic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.

Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers.

“Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?” Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994.

For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

A favorite theme, said Salil Mehra, now a law professor at Temple University, were the values and cultural touchstones that Americans share. Mr. Obama’s case in point: his wife, Michelle, a black woman, loved “The Brady Bunch” so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots.

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching eval‎uations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)

Challenging Assumptions

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said.

But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled.

In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation. Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the post.

“I think he thought they were good and worth trying,” said David Franklin, who now teaches law at DePaul University in Chicago.

But whether out of professorial reserve or budding political caution, Mr. Obama would not say so directly. “He surfaced all the competing points of view on Guinier’s proposals with total neutrality and equanimity,” Mr. Franklin said. “He just let the class debate the merits of them back and forth.”

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.

The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town.

“I’m not sure he was close to anyone,” Mr. Hutchinson said, except for a few liberal constitutional law professors, like Cass Sunstein, now an occasional adviser to his campaign. Mr. Obama was working two other jobs, after all, in the State Senate and at a civil rights law firm.

Several colleagues say Mr. Obama was surely influenced by the ideas swirling around the law school campus: the prevailing market-friendliness, or economic analysis of the impact of laws. But none could say how. “I’m not sure we changed him,” Mr. Baird said.

Because he never fully engaged, Mr. Obama “doesn’t have the slightest sense of where folks like me are coming from,” Mr. Epstein said. “He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues.”

Leaving the Classroom

As Mr. Obama built his political career, his so-called groupies became an early core of supporters, handing out leaflets and hosting fund-raisers in their modest apartments.

“Maybe we charged an audacious $20?” said Jesse Ruiz, now a corporate lawyer in Chicago. Mr. Obama was sheepish asking for even that, Mr. Ruiz recalls. With no staff, Mr. Obama would come by the day after a fund-raiser to stuff the proceeds into a backpack.

Mr. Obama never mentioned his humiliating, hopeless campaign against Mr. Rush in class (he lost by a two-to-one margin), though colleagues noticed that he seemed exhausted and was smoking more than usual.

Soon after, the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not taught since.

Now, watching the news, it is dawning on Mr. Obama’s former students that he was mining material for his political future even as he taught them.

Byron Rodriguez, a real estate lawyer in San Francisco, recalls his professor’s admiration for the soaring but plainspoken speeches of Frederick Douglass.

“No one speaks this way anymore,” Mr. Obama told his class, wondering aloud what had happened to the art of political oratory. In particular, Mr. Obama admired Douglass’s use of a collective voice that embraced black and white concerns, one that Mr. Obama has now adopted himself.

In class, Mr. Obama sounded many of the same themes he does on the campaign trail, Ms. Callahan said, ticking them off: “self-determinism as opposed to paternalism, strength in numbers, his concept of community development.”

But as a professor, students say, Mr. Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next.

So even some former students who are thrilled at Mr. Obama’s success wince when they hear him speaking like the politician he has so fully become.

“When you hear him talking about issues, it’s at a level so much simpler than the one he’s capable of,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was a lot more fun to listen to back then.”

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July 30, 2008,  11:11 am

Inside Professor Obama’s Classroom

By Jodi Kantor

We’ve asked four legal experts to take a look at then-Professor Barack Obama’s course materials and offer some insight into what they say about Mr. Obama’s teaching methods, priorities and approach to the Constitution.

Please use the comment section of this post to ask questions about Mr. Obama’s course materials and the related article.

Pamela S. Karlan | 6:20 p.m.: John Eastman’s second post, along with a number of the readers’ comments, prompts me to make the following points.

The first is about titles. John is 100 percent right both about the fact that “professor” is often used as a courtesy title to refer to law school teachers whatever their formal rank. (Students usually call every teacher either “Mr.” – or “Ms.” – X or “Professor X.” I’ve never heard a single one call a teacher “Lecturer X.”) He’s also 100 percent right that it would be very, very rare for anyone to have been appointed in recent times to a regular tenured position at a school like Chicago without any scholarship at all.

That being said, titles like “senior lecturer” differ from school to school. They’re sometimes used for long-term appointments for people of great professional distinction who come to the academy, later in their careers. And some schools even have positions accompanied by the title “professor” that do not require prior publication experience. For example, here at Stanford, we have the Warren Christopher Professorship of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy. It’s been held by two very distinguished people – Allan Weiner, who has decided to stay on at Stanford as a Senior Lecturer, actually, and who is now writing very interesting and important scholarship – and by William Taft IV, who has served, among other posts, as general counsel and deputy secretary in the Department of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, and the U.S. Department of State’s legal adviser, the highest legal position in the department. But neither Allan nor Will was given the Christopher Professorship because of traditional scholarly publication.

*****

Jodi Kantor | 3:48 p.m.: Several readers have asked questions about Mr. Obama’s status at the school. Let me clarify: he started teaching as a lecturer, meaning as a member of the adjunct faculty. But in 1996, he was promoted to senior lecturer, which in Chicago’s parlance, made him a professor.

When the law school tried to hire Mr. Obama after his failed 2000 congressional race, it was for a tenured job, according to Daniel Fischel, the dean at the time. In our interview, I asked him if he meant “tenure-track,” and he said no. “He would be hired as a tenured professor,” he explained. The faculty would vote, but Mr. Obama already had their support, he added.

Accordingly, a reader asks: “I’d like to know how unusual it is for an elite law school like Chicago to offer a tenured position to a professor who has not produced any academic writing.”

Now over to John Eastman, for an answer:

One of the comments challenges Ms. Kantor’s use of the term, “professor,” to describe Barack Obama’s position at the University of Chicago Law School. Chicago uses the formal title of “lecturer” for adjunct professors, and it was in that capacity that Senator Obama was first affiliated with the law school. He was at the time affiliated with a law firm, and there is nothing unusual in law schools, even elite law schools such as Chicago, tapping into local law firms for adjunct faculty. Nor is there anything unusual in students referring to adjuncts and “lecturers” as “professor.”

What is unusual is the University of Chicago’s “promotion” of Senator Obama to the position of “senior lecturer.” As the law sSchool correctly points out on its Web site, that title is used for such long-established legal scholars as Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, both of whom continued to teach after their appointment to the United States Court of Appeals. Both were (and remain) extremely prolific scholars as well as teachers, and the “senior lecturer” title was acknowledge of that status and their judicial “day job.” Barack Obama never achieved such a scholarly stature—indeed, it does not appear that he engaged in legal scholarship at all. And to my knowledge, the title of “senior lecturer” has never been applied to someone who was basically an adjunct professor.

Even more unusual is Chicago’s claim that Barack Obama was offered a fully tenured position. The University of Chicago is one of the most elite law schools in the country, and it would be extremely rare for the law school to offer a tenure-track position to someone without any legal scholarship, much less one with tenure. The course materials and examination questions prepared by then-Professor Obama demonstrate a deep and nuanced command of the law, but for that to have resulted in an offer to the tenured or even tenure-track faculty, the normal course (indeed, nearly the only course) is for that command of legal subjects to have first manifested itself into published articles.

Perhaps then-Professor Obama’s observation of the way other legal scholars such as Robert Bork and Lani Gunier had had their work distorted for partisan political purposes counseled him against publication of his scholarly views. Too bad for us, and for the legal academy more generally. The chilling effect on true and important scholarship that has resulted from the last few decades of obnoxious confirmation fights is quite evident in Senator Obama’s prior silence.

*****

Jodi Kantor | 3:37 p.m.: We’ve been talking today about Mr. Obama’s voice as a professor, and now, thanks to WBEZ in Chicago, we can actually hear that voice.

In a follow-up to our article, the Chicago public radio station has posted audio of a 2001 appearance in which Mr. Obama discussed Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, landmark cases that upheld, respectively, slavery and segregation.

*****

Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, an expert on voting issues and a former clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun, concludes that “it’s hard to tell whether Professor Obama is simply playing it close to his vest – that is, he has strong views but thinks the classroom isn’t an appropriate place for revealing them – or whether his views fall within the mainstream of the constitutional law professoriate, which tends to be moderately liberal on individual rights issues.”

Examining the Course Materials

Pamela S. Karlan | 1:30 p.m.: Three preliminary reactions to this really interesting story.

1. In thinking about what inferences we might draw about a President Obama from a Professor Obama, we’re handicapped a little by a distinctive aspect of the University of Chicago Law School’s constitutional law curriculum. Unlike most other first-tier American law schools, Chicago separates into two separate courses what are often referred to as the “structural” and “individual rights” provisions of the Constitution. (This is probably more a function of the fact that Chicago uses three shorter terms each academic year, rather than the more conventional two longer ones, so each course covers a bit less territory.)

So the course that Professor Obama taught did not examine many of the issues that have come to the forefront of constitutional debate during the last eight years – such as the president’s inherent powers under Article II of the Constitution to disregard limitations placed on his authority by Congress or other aspects of what’s referred to as “separation of powers” (the checks and balances among the three branches of government).

The only slight hint we get about the war on terror, for example, comes from one question about handing out limited supplies of an anti-biological weapon drug, and there we’re focusing on individual rights, not the government’s powers.

2. Looking at the exams for the Constitutional Law class, one of the most striking features to a law professor is how conventional they are. If you put Professor Obama’s exam questions in a pile with the questions asked by me or my colleagues – or if you asked one of us to prepare model answers to his exam questions – you would not be able to guess which ones he prepared and which ones were prepared by full-time legal academics.

There are at least three inferences I draw from this. First, Senator Obama has a first-rate mind for legal doctrine and could have been a first-rate academic had his interests gone in that direction. He would have been most unlikely – even beyond the fact that his values differ – to have bought into the legal work underlying many of the current Administration’s policies, such as the incomplete “torture memos.”

Second, Senator Obama has a sensitivity to role. By this I mean that he doesn’t appear to have used his classroom as a platform for pushing his own pet theories of constitutional law. He seems to have taught “down the middle” in a way that gave the students the tools to be fine constitutional lawyers but didn’t require them to agree with his position. By contrast, I’ve seen other constitutional law professors’ exams and model answers where a student who disagrees with the professor’s idiosyncratic approach or policy preferences would have found it hard to do well.

Third, and perhaps related, precisely because the examinations and the model answers are so conventional, it’s hard to tell whether Professor Obama is simply playing it close to his vest – that is, he has strong views but thinks the classroom isn’t an appropriate place for revealing them – or whether his views fall within the mainstream of the constitutional law professoriate, which tends to be moderately liberal on individual rights issues.

3. The syllabus for Professor Obama’s Racism and the Law class is an interesting one. The materials are not particularly surprising, but seem relatively well thought-out. But their focus, as well as the focus of the exam questions, tends to be almost entirely on blacks and whites, with only one session devoted to the distinctive issues surrounding Native Americans – and that session being primarily historical – and relatively little attention devoted to questions that arise with respect to Latinos.

That’s not surprising as a matter of law school syllabi – the black-white paradigm remains dominant. And the syllabus is fifteen years old. But it’s interesting that Senator Obama, despite having spent many years in Hawaii, where a number of very interesting questions about multiracial groups and indigenous people have been playing out, hewed so closely to the black-white line. I would imagine if he were teaching such a course today, he might have ranged further afield.

Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, writes that Mr. Obama’s exam questions seem to be designed to “ferret out the student’s understanding, but also the cracks and fissures in the Supreme Court’s current approach to the Constitution.”

Randy Barnett | 12:15 p.m.: While the course materials themselves do not tell us very much about Senator Obama, the candidate, what they do tell us about Obama, the teacher, is generally favorable. I was particularly intrigued by his 1994 syllabus on “Racism and the Law.” The materials assigned were balanced, including several readings by Frederick Douglass, who many modern race theorists have come to disparage as insufficiently radical (as Obama would know), along with an exchange between Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy on the one hand and Charles Cooper (who is now on Senator McCain’s advisory committee) and Texas law professor Lino Graglia on the other. All three essays appeared in the conservative/libertarian Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy as part of a 1991 symposium on “The Future of Civil Rights Law” and were initially presented at the Federalist Society’s 1990 National Student Symposium held at Stanford. The articles were published during Obama’s third year as a law student so it is not surprising that he would be aware of them. And they would have been fresh at the time they were assigned.

I was struck by Obama’s list of possible discussion topics for his seminar. They comprehensively and concisely identified most of the issues of “race and the law” that were then being widely discussed. What particularly impressed me was how even handed were his presentations of the competing sides the students might take. These summaries were remarkably free of the sort of cant and polemics that all too often afflicts academic discussions of race. Were this not a seminar on “racism and the law” I doubt one could tell which side of each issue the teacher was on. And indeed, even knowing it was written by Senator Obama, one cannot be sure which side of each issue he really took. Whatever position he held, however, Obama could clearly see and dispassionately articulate the other side.

The exam question and answer keys manifest a keen comprehension of then-prevailing Supreme Court Due Process and Equal Protection Clause doctrine. There is no doubt that his students were taught “the law” (such as it was), not merely the teacher’s viewpoints. His exam questions were nicely designed to ferret out the student’s understanding, but also the cracks and fissures in the Supreme Court’s current approach to the Constitution. What they did not show, however, were any insights on how he thought Supreme Court doctrine could be improved.

Indeed, if one is looking to these material to learn more about Senator Obama’s own views of either “racism and the law” or the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, one will be disappointed. He either was skillful at concealing his own take on these issues both in these materials and in the classroom (as reported by his former students) or he held no deep commitments on what one would think were matters of central concern to him. While this latter possibility would make him a flexible politician, it is bound to disappoint his most vehement supporters and detractors alike. In the end, while they confirm‎ that the former president of the Harvard Law Review is a smart guy, and an exceptionally fair-minded teacher, they tell us little about his core beliefs on the very sensitive issues covered by these courses. Nor perhaps should we have expected them to.

*****

The next post is from Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of constitutional law at Yale and a former clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer, who compliments the quality of Mr. Obama’s exam questions.

Akhil Reed Amar | 11:51 a.m.: Barack Obama’s exam questions and answers engaged me on several levels.

First, As a constitutional law professor, I came away impressed — dazzled, really — by the analytic intelligence and sophistication of these questions and answers. A really good exam — an exam that tests and stretches the student, while simultaneously providing the professor with a handy and fair index to rank the class — is its own special art form. Composing such an exam is like crafting a sonnet or a crossword puzzle. We don’t have Obama’s answer key every year; but the questions themselves are in many instances beautifully constructed to enable students to explore the seams and plumb the depths of the Supreme Court’s case law. I am tempted to use variations of several of these questions myself in some future exam. (I won’t say which, lest I tip my students off.) When I read Jodi Kantor’s piece, I was very interested to hear that the University of Chicago Law School was willing to offer Obama tenure. In these materials I see why.

Second, as a student of history, I couldn’t help thinking of Lincoln. Not just because we have a skinny guy from Illinois who is largely self-made and who can write a great speech — I knew that already. Lincoln was a brilliant lawyer, who did his own thinking and writing and cut to the essence of hard legal issues with amazing incisiveness. Lincoln understood the Constitution and its deepest structures as well as or better than any of the Justices on the Supreme Court of his day. These materials helped me see Obama in a similar light.

Which brings me to the last level — the moral level. Like Lincoln, Jefferson and Madison were also brilliant. But Jefferson and Madison lived and died as slaveholders and did much less than they could have done to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction. Nixon had a keen legal mind, but a large moral blind spot. Lincoln had a rare combination of moral depth and legal brilliance. Make no mistake, he was a politician who understood how to tack and trim. But he was a politician with a strong moral compass and a deep understanding of the rule of law. Similarly, there is a great deal of moral seriousness in Obama’s legal materials. They are not just about technical and technocratic legal questions. Some of the great mysteries and tragedies of human life and American society — involving marriage, divorce, childbearing, cloning, the right to die with dignity, infertility, sexual orientation, and yes, of course, race — are probed in these materials in ways that encourage students to think not just about law, but about justice, and truth, and morality.

*****

First up, John C. Eastman, Dean and Donald P. Kennedy Chair in Law at Chapman University and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas:

John C. Eastman | 11:11 a.m.: Although Senator Obama’s teaching position at the University of Chicago Law School overlapped my own time there as a student, I did not have occasion to take one of his classes—I tended to register for the classes of the full-time tenured faculty rather than those taught by adjuncts such as Mr. Obama—but I am not surprised to see the intellectual diversity for which Chicago is famous reflected in then-Professor Obama’s course syllabi and examinations. The syllabus from the 1994 “Current Issues in Racism and the Law” course is particularly instructive. While at many law schools, such courses are frequently taught by critical race theorists who focus largely on one side of a complex legal and policy debate, then-Professor Obama’s course included, quite appropriately in my view, readings from across the ideological spectrum, from Derrick Bell and Malcolm X to Chuck Cooper and Lino Graglia.

I was particularly pleased to see a reading from the classic work by Vattel, one of the leading international law theorists in all of human history, The Law of Nations. What is more, it is evident from the sampling of proposed topics for group presentations contained in the syllabus that this spectrum of authors was included for more than mere exposure. Rather, it appears that then-Professor Obama was leading his students in an honest assessment of competing views regarding some of the most difficult legal and policy issues our nation has ever faced—a refreshing change from what passes for debate about contested questions in our political classes these days. My one criticism of the course is his recommendation that students read Derrick Bell’s summary of some landmark (if notorious) Supreme Court decisions. Cases such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, The Slaughterhouse Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson, and in particular the strong dissenting opinions in those cases, cry out for careful study of the original materials, not a secondary summary.

Only occasionally do then-Professor Obama’s decidedly personal views come across. He refers to Justice Scalia’s approach to assessing fundamental rights as “cramped,” for example. But on the whole, this is a body of course materials that is as would be expected of Chicago Law Professors.

****

Original Post | July 29:

An excerpt from the syllabus for Barack Obama’s 1994 Current Issues in Racism and the Law seminar.

In the course of reporting an article on the 12 years that Barack Obama spent teaching law at the University of Chicago, we unearthed some of Mr. Obama’s old class materials: the syllabus and assignments for his “Racism and the Law” seminar, as well as a set of his constitutional law exams and a partial set of memos he wrote about the answers.

The documents let us hear his voice as a professor, asking students to wrestle with hot-button topics like cloning and reparations. He tells students what he wants and interrogates them on what they have learned. In his little asides about gym visits and his wife, Michelle, we hear hints of his professorial style.

But the documents also offer clues about his thinking. They show us whose writings he wanted students to explore, from Malcolm X to Robert Bork. He framed complex legal, moral and political issues for his students, and in the case of post-exam memos, answered a few problems for them. Those memos also contain a few references to still-sitting Supreme Court justices.

We’re posting the documents here, and inviting you to offer your insights. Since the exam questions in particular involve hard-to-parse issues of constitutional law, we have asked four legal experts, of diverse ideological backgrounds, to lead our inquiry. John Eastman, Randy Barnett, Pamela S. Karlan and Akhil Reed Amar have already looked through the documents, at our request, and on Wednesday we will post their assessments here.

Some of the questions we’ve asked them to consider: Based on what you see here, how does Mr. Obama’s teaching measure up? What do the courses he taught, and the way he taught them, tell us about his interests, beliefs and priorities, including his approach to the Constitution?

We will be integrating reader questions and comments into the discussion, so please post yours below. Everyone is welcome: readers, constitutional law professors, former students and colleagues of Mr. Obama’s. (As for the documents, if you’re not a lawyer, you will probably find the “Racism and the Law” syllabus a more satisfying read than the constitutional law exams.)

2003 Final Exam

2002 Final Exam

2001 Final Exam

2000 Final Exam

1999 Final Exam

1998 Exam

1997 Final Exam | Answer Memo

1996 Final Exam | Answer Memo

Reporting was contributed by Adrian Florido.

Note: In a previous version of this post, student answer memos were posted in addition to Mr. Obama’s memos.

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