Posted on 10/01/2008 3:38:21 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
His boyhood friends in Indonesia were street peddlers, and his grandmother still lives in a mud-walled house in Kenya. But Barack Obama is another world away, presiding over the Harvard Law Review as the first black president in the prestigious journal's 103-year history.
The charismatic 28-year-old, ensconced in the halls where tradition reigns, is taking aim at another custom: Obama's sights are set on the South' Side of Chicago, not on a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship or a fast-track career with a cushy firm.
"I'm not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me. And I'm not interested in isolating myself," Obama said in a recent interview. "I feel good when I'm engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and those core issues to me are what's happening to poor folks in this society."
His passion is rooted in his background. He was born in Hawaii, his father an Oxfordand Harvard-educated economist from the African nation of Kenya, his mother a white anthropologist from Kansas. Obama moved to Southeast Asia at age 2 when his parents divorced and his mother married an Indonesian.
Until the fifth grade, Obama attended Indonesian schools, where most of his friends were the sons of servants, street peddlers and farmers. Concern for Obama's education led his mother to return him to Hawaii, where he attended public schools through high school. In 1983, he graduated from Columbia University with a degree in political science.
At a recent meeting in a Harvard cafeteria, his affinity with the underdog was readily apparent. "I lived in a country where I saw extreme poverty at a very early age," Obama said. "Parts of my family in Kenya remain very poor. My grandmother still lives in a mud-walled house with no running water or electricity.
"That's who I am, that's where I come from, not always literally, but at least emotionally." Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988, and through a combination of grades and a writing competition, was elected to head the law review this February, He succeeded Peter Yu, a first-generation Chinese-American.
Obama cautions against reading too much into his election. "It's crucial that people don't see my election as somehow a symbol of progress in the broader sense, that we don't sort of point to a Barack Obama any more than you point to a Bill Cosby or a Michael Jordan and say 'Well, things are hunky dory,"' Obama said. "There's certainly racism here. There are certain burdens that are placed, more. emotionally at this point than concretely," Obama said.
"Professors may treat black students differently, sometimes by being, sort of, more dismissive, sometimes by being more, sort of, careful, because they think, you know, they think that somehow we can't cope in the classroom," he said.
Obama sees the inner cities as the front lines of racism. "It's critical at this stage for people who want to see genuine change to focus locally. And it is crucial that we figure out how to rebuild the core of leadership and institutions in these communities," he said. For five years before law school, Obama took on that task in Chicago.
As the director of a program that tried to bring South Side churches, unions and block associations together on projects, Obama was not trying to solve local problems, he said. Instead he sought to construct something more lasting — a forum for the community.
"I'm interested in organizations, not movements, because movements dissipate and organizations don't," Obama said.
his father an Oxford and Harvard-educated economist
From all accounts, BO, Sr. didn't attend Oxford.
Obama moved to Southeast Asia at age 2 when his parents divorced and his mother married an Indonesian.
According to his book, "Dreams From My Father," published five years after this article was published, his father left for Harvard when he was two (actually he was one, but we'll play along with the book), his mother divorced BO, Sr., according to the media, in '64, when Obama was three, and she remarried somewhere around the time he was six, after which they moved to Indonesia.
But this was written without benefit of Obama's book, so if we assume the author wasn't just making stuff up and must have gotten the info from Obama himself, it's a horse of different color.
It seems kind of odd of them to take an interest in Harvard Law, unless maybe they picked the story up from another source.
I want to see his grades and this "writing"....
This guy is nothing but an affirmative action socialist punk with a chip on his shoulder. He seems to think we white Americans are responsible for his poor Kenyan grandmother and relatives.
Then consider this, he and Ayers were both in New York from 1982-1985.
Obama was at Columbia and Ayers was at Bank Street College - 371 yards from Columbia, and later at Columbia after Obama had graduated.
If you accept the conclusion that they met and knew each other (may even have lived together) in that time frame it makes all the other things we know about Obama but cannot explain, fall into place.
Like how Ayers came to choose him for the chairmanship of the Annenberg Challenge a year before Obama claims they ever met, or why Obama moved to Chicago from New York, or how Obama got into Harvard with lousy grades and no money, or how he got to meet Michelle..
Marxist gum flapping, just like he does today.
Here's the NY Times story, written two months earlier: First Black Elected to Head Harvard's Law Review
It does everything but admit that he was an AA selection:
Until the 1970's the editors were picked on the basis of grades, and the president of the Law Review was the student with the highest academic rank....
That system came under attack in the 1970's and was replaced by a program in which about half the editors are chosen for their grades and the other half are chosen by fellow students after a special writing competition. The new system, disputed when it began, was meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review.
Harvard, like a number of other top law schools, no longer ranks its law students for any purpose including a guide to recruiters.
The Times doesn't give much of a bio, though, so it's not the "recent interview" referred to in the AP story, where he sneers at "the suburbs." This sounds like he was taking his fictional life story for a test spin. If his mother took him to Jakarta when he was two (1963), they would have lived through some major violence and bloody slaughter.
BTTT since his comments about being bored by the suburbs is back in the forefront.
LSAT? Did anyone make sure that it was actually Obama that wrote the article for the writing competition? (Ayers again?) Why are his records sealed?
These are simply little Dem Advertising pedestals
Unfortunately, the percentage of African-American students who make it into HLS or any other elite academic program with class-average LSAT or other test scores is very small. Yet to this day professors are strictly warned against flunking or grading too low such students: they have to treat them differently.
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