Books
By Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream [2006]; Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance [1995]
About: Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama, by Steve Dougherty [2007]
The Democratic presidential primary campaign began around Christmas 2006, and it may end Tuesday night. But of all the days between then and now, the most important was Nov. 10, 2007.
On that day, the Democratic Party of Iowa held its Jefferson-Jackson dinner and invited the candidates to speak. There were thousands of Democrats sitting around tables on the floor of the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, and rowdy thousands more up in the stands.
Hillary Clinton gave a rousing partisan speech. Standing on a stage in the middle of the arena with her arms spread and her voice rising, she welcomed the next president and declared: "We are here tonight to make sure that next president is a Democrat!"
She described how change was going to come about in this country: through fighting. She used the word "fight" or "fought" 15 times in one passage of the speech, fighting for health care, fighting for education and women's rights. Then she vowed to "turn up the heat" on Republicans. "They deserve all the heat we can give them!" she roared.
Finally, she described the presidency. It's a demanding job, she suggested, that requires fortitude, experience and mettle. The next president will bear enormous burdens, she continued. The president's job is to fight for people who feel invisible and can't help themselves.
Clinton rode the passion of the crowd and delivered an energetic battle cry. And in many elections that sort of speech, delivered around the country, would clinch the nomination.
But this is a country in the midst of a crisis of authority, a country that has become disillusioned not only with one president, but with a whole system of politics. It's a country that has lost faith not only with one institution, but with the entire set of leadership institutions. The cultural context, in other words, allowed for a much broader critique, a much more audacious vocabulary.
And Barack Obama leapt right in.
publication -- they said quite a bit more. Obama's Law Review Colleagues: Where Are They Now?
Barack Obama at his fellow student Bradford Berenson's apartment, where he watched the 1990 election returns.
"I was born in Oslo, , the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman," a mock self-tribute begins. "My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks." In Chicago, "I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since."
After his election, the Faux-bama says, he united warring students into "a happy, cohesive folk," while "empowering all the folks out there in who didn't know about me by giving a series of articulate and startlingly mature interviews to all the folks in the media."
In his two memoirs and the biographical video on his Web site, Senator Obama's legal education is barely a blip, one of the least known chapters of his life. But for the Illinois Democrat who is all but certainly running for the presidency, Harvard was the place where he first became a political sensation.
He arrived there as an unknown, Afro-wearing community organizer who had spent years searching for his identity; by the time he left, he had his first national news media exposure, a book contract and a shot of confidence from running the most powerful legal journal in the country.
As the ribbing in the Revue suggests, Mr. Obama was realizing the power of his own biography. 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.
Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind -- and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood. It is a tendency that could prove perilous on the campaign trail, as voters, rivals and the news media try to fix the positions of a senator with only two years in office.
"He then and now is very hard to pin down," said Kenneth Mack, a classmate and now a professor at the law school, referring to the senator's on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand style.
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."
Many of his former professors and classmates say they are cheering on Mr. Obama, 45, in his candidacy. But the skills he displayed in law school may not serve him as well in American presidential politics, which sometimes rewards other qualities -- like delivering sound bites instead of deliberateness or fidelity to a base of supporters instead of compromise.
The law review is "fairly disconnected from the breadth and the rough and tumble of real politics," said Bruce Spiva, a former review editor who now practices civil rights law in Washington. "It's an election among a closed group. It's more like electing a pope."
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.
About the Author
www.search4i.com
No comments:
Post a Comment