Berkeley Bubble

As a graduate of Harvard Law School, I was struck by the New York Times’ recent article, “In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice,” that provides a revealing look at Obama’s years as an unknown civil rights organizer to law student turned overnight sensation who managed to get elected as President of the Harvard Law Review. While Obama has not revealed much about his years at Harvard Law in his own personal memoirs, the Times article provides interesting first-person recollections of Obama from his former classmates.

Perhaps what is most interesting about the Times article is a revealing look at how Obama’s conciliatory, harmonizing approach was apparent during these early years:

He proved deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race. He developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., another Harvard law professor and a mentor of Mr. Obama, said, “He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts.”

Perhaps this type of leadership-by-consensus, grounded in well-reasoned analysis of policies and issues, is what we need in this chaotic, conflicted era of post-Iraq invasion uncertainty. When it comes to articulating, and then implementing and executing a new and coherent vision of foreign policy in the Middle East that restores peace, stability, and the United States legitimacy abroad, Obama may be the Democrats best shot–in a general election, he would not necessarily face the ideological baggage that may sink other candidates among independents and moderates. Whether he can get through the primaries is a whole different story.

The article is a fascinating read. Here are some interesting excerpts:

Mr. Obama declined to comment about his time at Harvard. He arrived at the law school in 1988 with a well-inked passport — he had grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia, son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother — and years of community organizing experience in Chicago, making him, at 27, an elder statesman among the students who had tested and term-papered their way straight there.

Mr. Obama spent much of his time alone, curtailing his dating life after his first summer, when he met his future wife, a Harvard Law graduate named Michelle Robinson who was working in Chicago. He often played pickup basketball, replacing his deliberative off-court style with sharp elbows and aggressive grabs for the ball.

Along with 40-odd classmates, he won a precious spot on the law review at the end of his first year through grades and a writing competition. But the next year, when other students implored him to run for the presidency, he demurred; he wanted to return to community work in Chicago, he said, and the credential would be no help. Late in the process, he finally agreed, saying he might be uniquely able to heal the review’s partisan divisions.

And here’s more on Obama’s election to Harvard Law Review:

The election was an all-day affair with the ego-crushing drama of a reality TV show. Inside Pound Hall, the editors picked apart the intellectual and social skills of the 19 contenders, eliminating them in batches. At the last moment, the conservative faction, its initial candidates defeated, threw its support to Mr. Obama. “Whatever his politics, we felt he would give us a fair shake,” said Bradford Berenson, a former associate White House counsel in the Bush administration. The two finalists were invited back into the room. But before the winner could be announced, Mr. Mack, a black student who had rejoined the editors after being eliminated, lunged toward Mr. Obama, so moved by the barrier that had just fallen that he embraced him tightly, tears streaming down both men’s cheeks.

Newspapers and magazines swarmed around the first black student to win the most coveted spot at the most vaunted club at one of America’s most prestigious institutions.

Obama appears to be an ardent and careful, patient listener intent on absorbing a wide variety of ideas and opinions before making and reaching decisions on issues, as this excerpt highlights:

Another of Mr. Obama’s techniques relied on his seemingly limitless appetite for hearing the opinions of others, no matter how redundant or extreme. That could lead to endless debates — a mouse infestation at the review office provoked a long exchange about rodent rights — as well as some uncertainty about what Mr. Obama himself thought about the issue at hand.

In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice.

Instead, they wonder how the style of leadership they observed on campus could translate to another kind of historic presidency.

“The things that make law school politics fractious are different from the things that make American politics fractious,” said Ron Klain, who preceded Mr. Obama at the law review and later served as Vice President Al Gore’s chief of staff. Mr. Klain has watched the senator’s rise.

“The interesting caveat,” he said, “is that is a style of leadership more effective running a law review than running a country.”

I never had the opportunity to serve on Law Review while at HLS, though I did get a chance to serve as the President of the Law School Council (a body that no doubt was not and still is not considered to be as prestigious as the Law Review) where I had an opportunity to work on a host of academic and other issues affecting the law school community. My personal impressions based on conversations with those who did serve on Law Review is that it is, as Klain intimates, not even close to being a representative sample of the American population, or even of the legal profession. But as Clinton demonstrated in 1992 and 1996, the key to becoming President is to first win the confidence of political and economic elites, and then build support among a mass constituency through your later work. Perhaps Obama has done both well enough to win the presidency…