surveybob:
Seti03, these numbers point out that JM can't run a very good campaign (yet, I hope). That he can't get ahead of the least experienced candidate in recent history is amazing. He really doesn't have any political accomplishments other than the nomination.
Just what are people voting on?
How about this just for a starter......more to come in the months ahead.
At Harvard Law, a unifying voice
Classmates recall Obama as even-handed leader
In 1990, Barack Obama was elected Harvard Law Review president over 18 others. (Joe Wrinn/ Harvard University News/ File) |
By Michael Levenson and Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff
Standing apart from others
Right from the start, when he arrived in the fall of 1988 at the age of 27, Obama seemed different. With his leather bomber jacket, tattered jeans, and pack of cigarettes, he was older and appeared less starchy than many of his fresh-faced classmates newly arrived from the Ivy League. He was also one of the small minority of black students on the campus of about 1,500 of the nation's most ambitious future lawyers, judges, and corporate executives
A lot of people at the time were just talking past each other, very committed to their opinions, their point of view, and not particularly interested in what other people had to say," said Crystal Nix Hines, a classmate who is now a television writer. "Barack transcended that
Presiding over an assembly of 60 mostly white editors in a law school classroom, Obama listened to impassioned pleas and pressed conservatives to explain their reasoning and liberals to sharpen their thinking. But he never spoke about his own point of view or mentioned that he believed he had benefit ed from affirmative action.
"If anybody had walked by, they would have assumed he was a professor," said Thomas J. Perrelli, a classmate and former counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno. "He was leading the discussion but he wasn't trying to impose his own perspective on it. He was much more mediating."
The law review president's election is a fussy affair, part intellectual debate, part frat house ritual. Obama was one of 19 candidates. As the 61 editors not running for the job debated the merits of the candidates behind closed doors on a Sunday morning in late February, the hopefuls cooked them breakfast, lunch, and dinner . Every few hours, the editors winnowed the list further, until just after midnight, when only Obama and a 24-year-old Harvard graduate named David Goldberg remained contenders .
At about 12:30 a.m., the editors called Obama into the room, told him he had won, and broke into applause. Mack, another black editor, pulled Obama in for a hug.
"It was a hard hug, and it lasted a while," Obama told the Harvard Law Record, the school newspaper, at the time. "At that point, I realized this was not just an individual thing. . . but something much bigger."
Obama gained instant fame, was profiled glowingly in newspapers across the country, and landed a contract for a book that would become "Dreams from My Father," his best-selling memoir.
"You should not underestimate the significance of him being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review because that was and remains a very elite group," said Bell, now a law professor at New York University. "These were some tough folks. . . . It's almost as impressive that he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review as him being elected senator of Illinois."
Carpe Diem