Soros: Obama Was My 'Greatest Disappointment'

Townhall ^ | 18July18 | Leah Barkoukis

[Oratam]

I’m just relieved nobody hit the abuse button!

[Michael.SF.]

Thanks. This is what I saw:

He graduated with a BA degree in 1983 and worked for about a year at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer,[42][43] then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985

I now see they cover 85-88 under the section on "Law Career" which seems out of place since he entered Harvard Law in '88.

I do find it odd that Soros was tracking him though while he was attending Harvard Law.

[qaz123]

No sh*t!!!

[x]

I do find it odd that Soros was tracking him though while he was attending Harvard Law.

The mention of Obama's Harvard Law years does catch the eye, but consider: if you were giving thousands or hundreds of thousands to get somebody elected, wouldn't you research his background? And if you were a mogul who felt jilted by a presidential candidate wouldn't that give you all the more reason to study the politician's biography.

I don't suppose Soros was keenly interested in Obama back in the early Eighties or that he knew anything more than the story the Times reported about his being elected president of the law review. Aspiring politicians usually have a mentor in college or law school who smooths the way for them. Then they catch the eye of local or state level luminaries who help them up the ladder. When they've achieved a sufficient eminence, national power brokers come calling.

If you were an international money man like Soros, you wouldn't bother cultivating every aspiring law student. There are too many of them, and the odds that any one aspirant will get to the top are pretty slim, so you'd waste your time and money if you were tracking each one through life -- unless the prospect was already the child of somebody rich or powerful who you'd have other reasons to get to know.

So I think Soros read biographies later and drew on what he read. What goes unsaid here is that Soros was probably mistaken about Obama's law school years. Obama got along with conservative as well as with liberal law students. He didn't go out of his way to antagonize them. But was he really closer to right-wing Federalist Society members than to left-wing students from the Black and Latino and progressive groups?

I don't think so. Nobody says that. I suspect he avoided some people and cultivated relations with others, looking for people he found congenial and people who could help him out, but I doubt he would have spent much time with Ted Cruz if their HLS years had overlapped.

Soros felt jilted and rejected. He had come on too strong and been too demanding or too needy, so he latched on to what he had read to explain what he saw as Obama's rejection of him.

You know, it doesn't seem like Obama really had a law school mentor. What he may have understood -- or maybe he was just lucky -- is that the Times story about him being a Harvard Law Review first might actually open more doors politically, than even a good recommendation from a professor.