A Glimpse into the Style of Governing of Barack Obama

Earlier I posted something from an article in NY Times magazine about the law school years of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the effects that law school had on the two. Toward the end there was a section on Obama when he was the president of the Law Review. At Harvard Law there was alot of tensions and fighting between the liberals and conservatives. it was a mini Washington DC of the 90s and first decade of the 21st century. There were riots and sit ins, ect. over diversity and affrimative action. All the tensions were on display in the Law Review and this is how Obama ran it during this very polarizing and what was described as a 'powder keg' time at Harvard and the Law School and the Review
I found it a rare glimpse into what kind of President Obama would be possibly:



What made Obama so attractive? “He wasn’t a real righty or a real lefty, so if you cared about the institution and didn’t want to spend the next year distracted by infighting, you were comfortable with him,” says his friend Julius Genachowski, who was on the law review at the time. “The other thing is that, because he was so different, it didn’t diminish anyone to support him.”

More impressive than Obama’s election, however, was his style of governance, the way that he held the review together at a time of terrific strain. No one watching carefully would have had any doubt as to where his political sympathies lay. When a minor controversy over affirmative action within the review spilled into public—with one of its conservative editors writing a letter to the Harvard Law Record expressing a predictably negative view—Obama fired back with a forceful statement of the magazine’s official view to the contrary. He even, at long last, took part in a faculty-diversity rally, much to the delight of Keith Boykin. “When the time came to pull out our trump card, he was ready to step forward,” Boykin says.

* Next: Obama saves the Harvard Law Review from self-destruction.


But Berenson and the conservatives were correct in their assessment of Obama. He appointed members of the right-leaning caucus to high positions. “He genuinely cared what conservatives had to say and what they thought,” says Berenson. He also injected a dose of humility into a pathologically self-serious environment. One editor recalls, “When people would have debates over nitpicky things, he would say, ‘Just remember, folks, nobody reads it.’ ”

Not everyone was entirely pleased with Obama’s tenure. Among those on the left, there was anger over his conservative appointments. “He’s willing to talk to and he has a grasp of where they are coming from, which is something a lot of blacks don’t have and don’t care to have,” Christine Lee, a black editor, told the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1990. “His election was significant at the time, but now it’s meaningless because he’s becoming just like all the others.”

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it’s clear that Obama saved the law review from descending into self-destructive factionalism and fury. The year after Obama and his classmates graduated, some of its editors circulated a parody mocking the work of a recently murdered feminist professor, entitled “He-Manifesto of Post-Modern Feminism” by the “Rigor Mortis Professor of Law.” The politics of polarization, already in evidence at Harvard Law and in the country more broadly, blew the place apart.

“The law review was a powder keg,” says Genachowski. “That it didn’t explode when we were there—that it ran professionally, despite all the tensions—was not a coincidence. It says something about Barack, and the kind of president he’d be.”

http://nymag.com/news/features/39321/index5.html

thanks for posting this piece--it is very interesting.