Jodi Cantor writes a fairly balanced piece on Obama’s pre-politics career as an instructor. As you read this, remember the old adage, people don’t change…very much.<\/p>\n
Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart<\/a><\/p>\n He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his precise views.<\/p>\n Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the genus of John Kerry, the Clintons\u00a0and the Kennedy\u2019s, Barack Obama no doubt seeks the Presidency not as\u00a0a means to an end; rather the end itself.<\/p>\n But Mr. Obama\u2019s years at the law school are also another chapter\u2026in which he seemed as intently focused on his own political rise as on the institution itself. Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was well liked at the law school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage.<\/p>\n The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,\u201d said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. \u201cHis entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he\u2019s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he\u2019s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michelle, on the other hand may have actually changed quite a bit!<\/p>\n his wife, Michelle<\/a>, a black woman, loved \u201cThe Brady Bunch\u201d so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Groupies!<\/p>\n As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies.<\/p>\n Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton<\/a>\u2019s efforts to reach across the aisle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In a calculated fashion, Obama will do or say or refrain from doing or saying anything to attain the post and there is ample evidence of this in his tenure as an instructor and in the observations of those who were colleagues but were never quite able to \u201cknow\u201d him or pin him down on his philosophy.\u00a0<\/p>\n