Good Read from McClatchy News: Remembering Obama: 'This Guy Could be President' [View All]

[KoKo]

(NC Harvard Contingent remembers why Obama was special)

By Jim Morrill | Charlotte ObserverLaw Review

On a law review where egos and ambitions soared as high as the Greek columns outside, Higgins was surprised that Obama would even run.

“Most of the people (run) so they can get great clerkships on the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court,” she says. “But he wasn't interested in a clerkship because he was going back to Chicago to do community work.”

Some classmates were less surprised.

“To me it was almost obvious he would be president of the law review,” says Jennifer Collins, who now teaches law at Wake Forest. “He just had this ability to bring people together and inspire people, which was important because it was a contentious time in Harvard Law School's history.”

Ideological battles raged at the law school. Students clashed over faculty diversity and political correctness. Some even booed and hissed one another in class.

Obama, though liberal, was elected with help from conservatives. He prompted criticism from more liberal classmates by putting conservatives in key editorial positions. Some of his toughest critics were black students who complained that he didn't appoint more African Americans to top posts.

“That was the first time I had to deal with something that I suspect I'll have to deal with in the future, which is balancing a broader constituency with the specific expectations of being an African American in a position of influence,” he would later tell biographer David Mendell. “As for the criticism, I'm not sure there was anything all that surprising about that.”

The controversy mirrors the backlash from liberals today who fault some of his early appointments as well as his choice of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation.

“He struck me as moderate in the context of campus politics,” says classmate Adam Charnes, a Republican who would work in the Bush Justice Department and now practices in Winston-Salem. “His cabinet appointments are consistent with the Barack that I knew, someone who doesn't take a hard and fast ideological position on things.”

More...nice read......

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/59627.html