Obama is Zelig

File this one under "unintentionally revealing?" Be sure to add the question mark, for it is difficult to believe that Justin Driver was oblivious to the implications of his piece "Obama's Law", in The New Republic.

Driver is very disappointed in President Obama.

Much of the criticism directed at Obama's handling of the federal judiciary has concentrated on the lethargic rate of his nominations compared with that of his predecessors. And Obama's team was, in fact, painfully slow out of the starting blocks. During the first two years of his presidency, Obama nominated just 103 district court and circuit court judges, 26 fewer judges than George W. Bush and 37 fewer than Bill Clinton. Only a feverish push last year prevented those gaps from being larger.

The grim truth is that Obama has yet to have a single judge or justice confirmed who is considered a leading intellectual light for progressive constitutional interpretation.

Obama hasn't appointed a lot of progressive judges who believe that the role of the judiciary is to enact progressive legislation that the President and Congress are unwilling or unable to enact.

Driver thinks that this is not mere lethargy or inattention, nor is it the result of Republican obstruction. Rather, Obama has been influence by two scholars: Lawrence Tribe (the good progressive) and Cass Sunstein (a liberal who favors judicial restraint). Unfortunately, in Driver's view, Obama really agrees with Sunstein.

Whatever the merits of this argument, it is remarkable how little Driver has to go on when determining Obama's judicial philosophy.

IT WOULD BE reductive to depict Obama as nothing more than a passive vessel for the legal thoughts of others. After all, he dedicated many hours to teaching constitutional law, and, whatever his other frailties, he possesses a subtle, curious, and analytical mind. He is more than capable of generating his own insights into these matters. Yet, however Obama arrived at his understanding of the judicial role, he has for more than a decade consistently articulated a constitutional conception that bears a striking similarity to Sunstein's. Obama's ongoing intellectual debt to Tribe, in contrast, is vanishingly thin.

Teaching constitutional law hardly indicates that one is no more than "a passive vessel for the legal thoughts of others." As for the claim that Obama "possesses a subtle, curious, and analytical mind," Driver's article shows how vanishingly thin the evidence is. His evidence comes almost exclusively from political statements. This is rather odd, given that Barack Obama taught constitutional law at a prestigious law school. Did he publish nothing? If he did, Driver makes no use of it.

What did Obama do as a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School?

The dominant view of Obama's time at Chicago holds that he passed through its halls without leaving much of a mark on the institution--and with the institution, in turn, leaving even less of an impression on him. "I don't think anything that went on in these chambers affected him," Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague of Obama's at Chicago, told The New York Times in July 2008. "He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues." Admittedly, Obama eschewed the faculty's renowned roundtable discussions and appears generally to have avoided sustained intellectual engagement with the school's numerous libertarians and conservatives.

So this man of a "subtle, curious, and analytical mind" wasn't curious enough to engage in conversation with the world class legal minds around him or in any other way leave a mark on the institution. It is almost as if he wasn't really there.

The most revealing paragraph occurs early in the piece.

ON MARCH 29, 1989, at a time when many of his fellow first-year law students were beginning to prepare for the spring semester's looming examinations, Barack Obama paid a visit to the office of eminent constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe…

On the basis of that meeting, Tribe took Obama on as one of his research assistants. Tribe shielded his dazzling new hire from the mundane assignments that such positions typically require. "I didn't think of him as someone to send out on mechanical tasks of digging out all the cases," Tribe recalled. Instead, the two men would periodically get together, sometimes taking strolls along the Charles River, to exchange lofty ideas about the relationship between law and society. In the wake of Obama's rapid ascent in politics, Tribe allowed that he viewed "him much more as a colleague" than as a student and even went so far as to call Obama his "most amazing research assistant."

In case you missed the force of the key words, let me repeat them:

Tribe shielded his dazzling new hire from the mundane assignments that such positions typically require. "I didn't think of him as someone to send out on mechanical tasks of digging out all the cases," Tribe recalled

Is this what a famous mentor does with a promising student, "shield him" from the work that law students are typically required to do? This was indeed a most amazing research assistant who assisted in no research! This is a scandal. One has to wonder whether the young law student was similarly shielded by his other professors and whether he had to do anything at all at Harvard. One also has to wonder why this brilliant conversationalist suddenly clammed up when he got to Chicago. One no longer has to wonder why his scholarly record is vanishingly thin.

The story Driver tells, intentionally or not, is of someone always pushed up with ladder without ever being challenged. It is a story of a tragedy, perhaps. Maybe if he had been challenged, he might have become the man that everyone feels compelled to say he is.

Obama is Woody Allen's Zelig. He takes the shape of the people around him because they project on him all their precious conceits. That is a great talent when it comes to building a career. It does not provide all that one needs when one is suddenly in charge. If Obama's story is indeed a tragedy, it has become a national one.

Comments

[A.I.]

Do you also have a degree in personality psychology KB? If not, I must point out that this little foray into personality profiling is little more than political hackery at its least-efficient worst.

In fact, one might interpret your piece as complimentary. You seem compeled to invoke word after word and paragraph after paragraph of contorted pseudo-psychology in an attempt to prove Obama unworthy of his office because he is some sort of human chameleon. All we lefties had to do to achieve resonance for the concept Bush was unworthy was call him an idiot. That was political hackery at its best: quick, clean character assassination conjuring up a concept that, once presented, seemed obvious to a lot of people--true or not.

[Ken Blanchard]

A.I.: my piece was about the behavior of Barack Obama and the people around him. Perhaps you would need several years of schooling and an official degree to guess the effect of being "shielded" from challenge. Your average auto mechanic understands that right off. So do I.

[larry kurtz]

you are a pro, doc; i bow to you.

[Ken Blanchard]

A.I. (and Larry): do you not see anything troubling in the career of one Barack Obama? He doesn't have to do the same stuff that other research assistants do. Was that fair? Was it good for Barry? Contrary to what you say, A.I., my post had very little to do with Obama's psychology. It had to do with the way that Obama has been treated by people and institutions. Driver's story is transparent, isn't it? Lawrence Tribe saw in Obama something he could use. He was disappointed. Isn't that worth pointing out?

[larry kurtz]

the office changes every occupant. the last president to change the office was reagan and oliver north fucked him.