The Obama I Know

Barack Obama matters to America not just as a politician—not even just as a president—but as a person. A strikingly large proportion of the unprecedented torrent of books and other media published about President Obama in the past several years appear to be as much about personality as politics. In addition to openly biographical works such as New Yorker editor David Remnick’s The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama or journalist David Mendell’s Obama: From Promise to Power, political commentary on the current administration displays a deep fascination with Barack Obama and his family. The dust jacket of Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter’s The Promise: President Obama, Year One proposes to answer the question, “What is the president really like, on the job and off-hours?” Less charitably, Aaron Klein’s The Manchurian President dedicates a chapter to “Unmasking the Mysterious College Years.” Perhaps most straightforwardly, the subtitle of David Bergen Brophy’s biography, Michelle Obama, invites young readers to “Meet the First Lady.”

It comes as no surprise to me that there is such a clamor to know the first family. They are wonderful people, well worth knowing. I first met Barack and Michelle separately, over twenty years ago, when they were students at Harvard Law School. Over the years I have been privileged to know the Obamas not only as a professor but also as a mentor, an advisor, and a friend. I am pleased to share a few of the impressions I have formed over the past two decades and to compare the Obamas I know with the image of the first family that has emerged over the past few years.

When I first encountered Barack Obama, I thought he was a Republican. That Obama, a man even then deeply committed to progressive values, could be mistaken for a conservative was, I think, an early indication of his exceptional personal thoughtfulness and inclusiveness as a leader. Obama was always uniquely capable not only of seeing both sides of a legal or political (p. vi ) argument, but also of making participants on opposite sides of that argument feel like he respected and even agreed with them. As a law student he managed to be a unifying, mediating force even on the thorniest of racial issues.¹ For this reason friends even then found him “hard to pin down,” as Obama’s classmate and my colleague Lawrence Mack put it.²

Far from keeping his head down at HLS, though, Obama marched into the political fray. Speaking to issues from faculty diversity to affirmative action, he somehow managed to find allies on both sides of what then seemed irreconcilable ideological divides. He did this not by politicking or talking out of both sides of his mouth, but by being perfectly fair and sincere. Rather than playing both sides, Barack “walks between two worlds,” as his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, once put it.³

As a candidate for the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, Obama succeeded not by elbowing others out of his way—a skill he reserved for fierce competitions on the basketball court—but by taking that path between left and right that others could scarcely see, let alone walk down. After he became president of the Law Review, Obama expertly charted a course through a time of ideological turmoil that somehow kept the left and right wings of the Law Review unified even as the school’s faculty became so deeply divided that faculty hiring virtually froze.

As long as I have known him, Obama has always been a powerful unifier. He is inclusive, sometimes to a fault, and is able to bring out inclusive sentiments in those fortunate enough to be around him. This remarkable talent for bringing people together was clearly visible during the 2008 campaign, which inspired people of all races to vote in record numbers.⁴ It is still visible today in the standing and respect that the United States now enjoys around the world, in the relationships President Obama has fostered with countries that had grown apart from the US in the past decade. Approval ratings for the United States are much higher now then they were under the previous administration, and even as citizens of other countries express dissatisfaction with their own government’s treatment of the economic crisis, they continue to express enthusiasm for Obama’s leadership.⁵

But the reach of Obama’s inclusiveness, which at one time unified the Harvard Law Review and now embraces much of the world, somehow does not include over half of the American people.⁶ Beyond these poll numbers, which are not much different from those of other recent presidents,⁷ there is an unprecedented level of personal animosity directed at Obama that cannot be explained simply as political disagreement with the president. Indeed, incidents such as Joe Wilson’s shouting “You lie!” at Obama’s speech on health care and Justice Alito’s mouthing the words “not true” at the 2010 State of the Union address are unprecedented in the modern history of presidential speeches. (p. vii ) Respect for the office has always trumped disagreement with the man currently occupying it—until now.

Many of Obama’s actions since taking office have, for good reason, been politically controversial. In a year and a half he has overhauled health care, orchestrated a major financial bailout, instituted an economic recovery plan, and revamped banking regulation all while managing two wars overseas. As dramatic as these actions are in the short term, the full force of their impact will be felt not in the coming months but in the coming decades, as major societal structures shift in response to the new legal rules. The desirability of these overhauls is up for debate, and it is for the American people, now and in the years to come, to judge Obama on the basis of his already substantial record as president.

What concerns me, though, is that the anger and hostility of a noticeable portion of the American people is not a response to the political and economic reforms that Obama has presided over, but to Obama himself. What I see isn’t simple racism, an open rejection of Obama because he is black. Instead, it is Obama’s unique capacity to “walk between worlds”—the very thing that makes him such an exceptional and inclusive leader—that has made him vulnerable to attack. Rather than seeing the president’s position as one that embraces both the left and right, many have chosen to paint him as “other,” an outsider (and not one of those good populist “Washington outsiders”). This effort to delegitimize Obama’s unifying capacity, to exclude him from the communion of “us” on the basis of his inclusiveness of all of us, is emblematic of this country’s continuing and unresolved racial problems.

While there have been moments when Obama’s race has been used overtly to cast him as an oddity, an outsider, the deeper problems are more veiled. The song “Barack the Magic Negro” may have played well with Rush Limbaugh’s audience during the presidential campaign, but its later use by Chip Saltsman quickly derailed his campaign for the chair of the RNC. Tea party references to Obama as “professor,” though not explicitly about race, also traffic in the idea that “he’s not one of us,” that he has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists. Behind these buzzwords, the reality is that these tea partiers look at this president as an African American who is out of place.⁸

Even as Obama appears to some out of place as an African American in the White House—an “uppity” black man not playing the proper racial role—much of the country also sees him as stepping out of line in his role as occupant of the White House when he ventures into the subject of race. Obama’s comments regarding the arrest of my friend and fellow Harvard professor Skip Gates for breaking into his own home met with general criticism. The “beer summit” that followed managed to put the story to rest, but the (p. viii ) meeting on the White House lawn was hardly the successful resolution of racial tensions that Obama accomplished as president of the Harvard Law Review. America is perhaps not ready for such a resolution, and white America is at the moment not interested in having a black president who is going to address race issues on a national level.

At the same time, Obama is also open to criticism from black Americans. Though President Obama has recognized the systemic inequities that continue to place black people in America at a disadvantage, he has yet to enact policies addressing the disproportionately harsh impact the recession has had on black Americans because of these structural disadvantages. But as support for Obama among black Americans remains strong and his approval ratings among whites falters, Obama may not be in a political position where addressing such disparities is a viable priority. More, he may be less able to promote such policies than a white president would have been.

This is all to say that the race of the Obamas, and race in the age of Obama, is very complicated, and having any productive discussion about it is complicated further by a national attention span that is limited to what can be contained in a sound byte or a single news cycle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Shirley Sherrod. Sherrod told a long story of halting, painful racial reconciliation that pointed towards a future free from bias against farmers of any race. What we heard, and what we responded to, talked about, and drew battle lines over, was a seconds-long clip, decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. In the clamor to decide whether Sherrod is a racist, the far more important problem of impersonal structural racism and subconscious bias—the problems addressed in Sherrod’s speech—disappeared.⁹

This collection is an important counterweight to the gross simplifications and resistance to nuance that mark the current national discussions of race. By looking closely at the persistent problems of bias that lie even beneath the level of conscious thought, this book helps to explain how and why Barack Obama has become both a symbol of hope for an inclusive, “post-racial” future and the epitome of excluded “otherness.”

Charles J. Ogletree

Jesse Climenko Professor of Law

Harvard Law School

Cambridge, Massachusetts

(p. ix ) Notes