Author Talk with David Remnick
“The legal dimension of Obama -- and however modest, his career as a law professor -- is an essential part of understanding who he is.” – David Remnick
Just Books: The arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice. It’s one of Obama’s favorite Martin Luther King statements. How do you think law figures into his understanding the moral universe and the way it moves towards justice?
David Remnick: When we think of the cartoon of Obama’s past, during the Presidential campaign, sometimes the emphasis is overmuch on the three years he spent as a community organizer. And on Saul Alinsky. And the South Side. As if there was something more romantic about creating an image of the past out of these. But, a very, very big part of who Obama is, the way he thinks, his bearing in the world, comes from the fact that after he finishes being a community organizer and finds deep frustrations in that and so goes to law school. For some people, law school is a way of getting a high paying job, a way to advance in the corporate world. In his case, there was a measure of idealism and desire to make law an instrument to do what he could not do as an organizer. The legal dimension of Obama -- and then, however modest his career as a law professor -- is a very important part of understanding who he is.
JB: And yet, his career as a practicing lawyer was very short. He practiced very briefly and then went off to lead Project Vote and to finish his book.
DR: I remember when my parents were trying to convince me – unsuccessfully – to go to law school, they said, “get a law degree, you can do anything!” Remember, Obama says in his autobiography, about going to law school, “I would learn about interest rates, corporate mergers, the legislative process, about the way businesses and banks were put together; how real estate ventures succeeded of failed. I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago, but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.” In other words, he was going to law school, to acquire -- in very idealistic terms -- instruments to be more powerful and more capable of doing what he was interested in doing.
JB: Then of course, you quote Obama as saying that he found the study of law “disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power!”
DR: At law school, some courses were dull; some had a sense of adventure that he appreciated. He studied with Roberto Unger who is a real radical. Obama took two courses with Unger, not one. This is a guy who is in the current Brazilian government and very much to the left. That’s not Obama’s politics, but he was certainly taken up with and fascinated by anything that was out of ordinary contracts and all the rest. Obviously constitutional law was where he lived.
JB: You mention a lot of mentors that Obama had at Harvard. Roberto Unger. Laurence Tribe. Martha Minow. Charles Ogletree. Is there a quality of mind that appealed to Obama?
DR: The primary mentor there is Larry Tribe. And to some degree Martha Minow. These are liberals. Martha is more theoretical and Larry Tribe is more directly involved in constitutional law, and, is probably one of the very best constitutional law and law historians we’ve got. Obama was interested in the radicals, in the Critical Legal Studies people. He was interested, to some degree, in the whole Derek Bell drama, but that isn’t where he lived. That wasn’t his main focus of interest.
JB: His main focus was on Constitutional issues?
DR: Yes. Especially Constitutional issues as they related to racial justice and related to a series of things having to do with civil liberties and equal protection.
JB: Can you talk about what it meant that Obama was the first African-American elected to be editor of the Harvard Law Review?
DR: On a personal level, it meant everything. Here is a guy who was a mediocre high school student in a hotsy-totsy prep school in Hawaii. He was a pretty good, at best, college student at Occidental and Columbia. He was not a break out star. He got into Harvard Law, I think partly, and, I don’t know this for certain, but the admissions people were impressed by his three years as an organizer as well as his academic record. For him, at an institution where everyone thinks they are going to be President of the United States or the head of a corporation or something -- For him to emerge as the elect of the elect, to be the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review and to be so young and to be interviewed by The New York Times and every other press organ, to be a first. This gave him the idea that his ambition and his horizons were limitless. That is a real gift.
JB: A colleague read the book and said, “Gosh! This guy was not qualified to be President.” Your book dramatizes how very accelerated was Obama’s dash from the Illinois state legislature to the White House.
DR: It was pretty accelerated. But Abraham Lincoln’s dash to the White House did not have its measure of acceleration. We never know, do we? People come in to the White House after many years in the Senate or the House of Representatives or the Governor’s Office and they turn out to be disastrous. We just don’t know. Was there a leap of faith involved in the fervent support for Obama? You bet. Some of it had to do with the fact that there was such disenchantment – not only with the Bush administration as a predecessor -- but also with the saga, the heavy history Hillary Clinton brought to her campaign. And, by the way, barely lost, so there was a lot of division in the Democratic party.
JB: Okay, but what does it say about the Presidency that someone with as little political experience as Obama had not only makes it into office but may turn out to be an awfully good President? Have we collectively misunderstood the qualifications for Presidential office?
DR: It can’t just be aptitude. Otherwise we’d just put the person in the Presidency who has the highest SAT score. There is some combination of accomplishment, character, intelligence, political intelligence, and good fortune, political fortune. With Obama, many of the skills he has are suited to that office. A lot of the people around him in the Senate when he was deciding to run for Presidency so soon, said to him, “Look at John Kerry, and at any other number of Senators. The longer they stay around here, the more votes they cast, the more compromises they make, the more hidebound and Senatorial they get -- and it hurts them. So that was part of the calculus. That, and the disastrous Bush administration, that and the fact that there were no incumbents or vice presidents in the race.
JB: You talk, in the book, about the academic mentors and the civil rights leaders who inspired Obama. Were there practicing lawyers who were role models?
DR: Judd Miner. Without a doubt, his model in Chicago was Judd Miner. Remember he didn’t practice much law. But his partner, Judd Miner [a liberal advocate who had been Harold Washington’s corporation counsel] was very close to him, hired him and served as a kind of model who did good. And modestly well. Also people on the University of Chicago faculty. Cass Sunstein is close to him.
JB: When you look at Obama and the kind of leader he is, are there elements of his mind or character that strike you as lawyerly?
DR: I’m not a lawyer. My impression of lawyerly may be more cartoonish than you like. What is always said of him is that his habit of mind, in terms of making decisions, is that he has a kind of aggressive listening. He is very, very intent on the deliberative and quiet intake of points of view, whether its opposing points of views on the economy and Afghanistan or all the big issues he’s got to deal with. And his demeanor is pretty lawyerly. It’s analytical. Despite churchly rhetoric that gets into his campaign speeches sometimes, this is a very analytic guy. He is not a hot personality He is a pretty cool one. If anything that foreign leaders complain about him – and not just Bebe Netanyu, but lots of leaders – complain that he is not Clintonian in his embrace. He is distant. Diffident.
JB: Leaders complain about this? They want more heat?
DR: They want him to show the love!
JB: How do you understand Obama differently than you did before you began writing this book?
DR: A number of ways. You commented on experience. No doubt that on paper, he is one of the less experienced, in résumé terms, to ascend to the Presidency. What is his appeal? I was interested not only in understanding his story in a biographical sense, but in understanding his understanding of his own story, and the way he tells it. Obama does something unique in American presidential politics: he writes a memoir before becoming a politician. This story telling, this understanding of his own story, his repeating of it and retailing of it, in the book and the way it becomes a part of political culture, in speeches and interviews and the rest, is very, very important,. It is important in any number of levels. One is the way he universalizes his story. He becomes the guy who can straddle all races, creeds, and points of view. He is the guy who is – forgive me – the bridge, who thinks that ideological division is almost unnecessary, the one who thinks that in fact that evangelicals should become part of the Democratic Party. That is his habit of mind. That’s his is own self-mythmaking. Some is strong. Some may be dubious. But that is very, very much part of his appeal, who he is, and how he projects himself.
JB: This comes across in the book. In fact, it seems you not only documented his story, you re-enforced it.
DR: I hope so. It’s why I spent the whole chapter – I pause in the middle of the narrative when he publishes a book – and sort through the book, in terms of, what is this book? This book comes in a long history of African-American autobiography. It presents a speaker looking for parents, identity, community, purpose. That’s what that Obama’s book is about. In many ways, there are links in that book to Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and to a whole literature of African-American autobiography, which is probably the strongest genre of all in African-American literature. It isn’t just by chance that that book had such a powerful effect on Obama, Obama’s career and Obama’s self projection as a politician.
JB: Can we talk about mechanics of writing this book? How could you edit a weekly magazine, read so much history, travel to Chicago, Hawaii, interview hundreds of people, and put it all together.
DR: I have an indulgent family and terrible capacity for coffee. Do you know the Yiddish word: Sitzfleisch? I have some of that. And I’ve only done it once in twelve years of being the editor of the magazine, so maybe it was stored up energy. I don’t know. I didn’t have researchers. It wasn’t like Santa’s workshop.
JB: Was Obama interested in the project?
DR: I think Obama has other things on his mind. I spent some time with him. That’s not the key to the book. Interviews with heads of state, in my experience – whether Gorbachev or Obama – once they are in office, they are very, very careful, if they are any good. Only a very sloppy head of state gives what journalists call a “good interview.” Obama had given zillions of interviews. To run for president is nothing if not a self-revealing process. I hope I give due credit in acknowledgments, and in the text, to others who banged on that door before.
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