Professor Obama

Jodi Kantor, writing in The New York Times has a long article on Obama's years as a law professor at the University of Chicago. It's hardly a hostile piece - Obama is portrayed as a superb teacher who was eagerly recruited for a tenured position, but turned it down. Obama was a listener who led a socratic dialog, forcing students to think things through rather than mere absorb received wisdom. Obama was a rare but hardly confrontational liberal in one of the most conservative law schools in the country.

Nonetheless, there is a thinly sourced undercurrent in the story promoting the idea that Obama was already plotting a course for high office and planning his career accordingly. If true, it's hardly damning - this is supposed to be a country where anyone can grow up dreaming to be president, but I'm skeptical anyway.

John K. Wilson, one of Obama's former students takes strong exception to that element of the story in this Huffpost article. A bit of his commentary:

The author even tries to smear Obama as someone who taught law school with an eye toward his own political ambitions:

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.

It's not even clear what this means, but it seems to suggest that Obama's careful, thoughtful approach as a teacher and colleague in the law school was all a guise he used to avoid taking positions which, presumably, he feared might be dug up a decade later by reporters investigating his presidential campaign. This notion is, of course, thoroughly insane. What the author should have concluded is that Obama's years at the University of Chicago Law School show without a doubt that Obama's careful, thoughtful approach to issues today is not a centrist political cop-out; instead, it's a fundamental intellectual approach that Obama followed long before he ever sought political office.

According to Kantor:

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.

This is a particularly odd comment, suggesting that Obama was simply using his students as a way to prepare for his political ambitions. In reality, Obama as teacher and Obama as politician was inspired in both roles by certain values and thinkers, and it's no surprise to see similarities.

And this:

According to Kantor,

he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage.

To the contrary, Obama greatly benefitted the law school by being someone who was engaged, with the real world. The problem was that his ivory tower colleagues weren't very interested in the world of politics.

Yet Kantor writes,

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."

I very much doubt this. Richard Epstein is an over-the-top libertarian, and his views are very consistently, and loudly, expressed at every opportunity. I think Obama, like me and everybody else, figured Epstein out very quickly. Personally, I enjoy Epstein and his machine-gun-mouth spewing out oddball ideas all the time. But Epstein is never really interested in finding out where other people are coming from, and certainly not interested in changing his mind about anything. He's exactly the kind of person Obama would tend to ignore, the ideologue with a passion only for hearing himself. Epstein was annoyed that Obama never played his intellectual mind games, and instead sought to make real changes in the political world.

I strongly recommend both articles - the second is a good companion to the first.