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We’re well into the political funny season, where it’s hard to take what candidates say seriously.  Barack Obama talks up how bad NAFTA is, and McCain pretends to really care about social conservatism.

Examining the lives of candidates before election craziness takes over seems to be a useful way to cut through the spin.

The NY Times Magazine has an intriguing profile of Barack Obama, written by a reporter who interviewed a number of Obama’s University of Chicago students.  Some interesting excerpts:

Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for a decade before he left in 2003 to run for the United States Senate. He emerged as one of the Senate’s most liberal members, and his voting record is often invoked in the current campaign, especially by his opponents.

But the men and women who studied with him at Chicago echo Escuder’s observation that Obama was much more pragmatic than ideological.  Even as his political career advanced, Obama’s teaching stuck to the law-school norm of dispassionately evaluating competing arguments with the tools of forensic logic. But Obama apparently was not attached to legal argumentation for its own sake. “It was drilled into us from Day 1 that you examined your biases and inclinations,” Richard Hess, now an attorney at Susman Godfrey in Houston, told me. “And then, when you made decisions, they were based on sound empirical reasons.”

…

Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who lobbies for progressive causes in Illinois, agreed that his former professor isn’t likely to emerge as an ideological liberal if he indeed makes it to the White House. “Based on what I saw in the classroom, my guess is an Obama administration could be summarized in two words,” he said. “Ruthless pragmatism.”

…

Obama’s status as senior lecturer in law was a rarefied one. At that time, two federal judges — Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, both of the Seventh Circuit — held that position, and both men had been full-time, distinguished members of the Chicago faculty before joining the bench and reducing their course loads at the law school. So when the 34-year-old Obama told the law school’s dean, Douglas Baird, that he wanted the same post, Baird was somewhat taken aback. “He’s not a man possessed by self-doubt,” Baird told me with a smile.

…

The class led Hynes to take a hard look at his experiences growing up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in racially balkanized Chicago. Under Obama’s supervision, he wrote an independent paper on the history of tensions between Irish immigrants and African-Americans. He was struck, he said, by Obama’s pragmatic take on race relations. “In his mind, the real problem wasn’t racist attitudes some people may hold, but the fact that some minorities were starting at such a huge disadvantage,” Hynes recounted. “Issues like poor public education and the lack of access to credit seemed more glaring to him.”

…

Dan Johnson-Weinberger studied voting rights with Obama two years after Turbes did. He remembers Obama as an able observer of the allocation of power in the American democratic system. As Obama shepherded students through the evolution of how Americans elect their representatives, Johnson-Weinberger told me, he emphasized how important the rules of the game were in determining who won elections.

That background in voting law, the former student said, played a factor in Obama’s primary triumph over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. “He understood how important the caucus states would be, and he grasped that voters in African-American Congressional districts would have a disproportionate impact in selecting the nominee,” he said. “I think one of the reasons he said yes to this race is that he grasped the structural path to victory.”

…

“I don’t think he’s wedded to any particular ideology,” Johnson-Weinberger told me. “If he has an impatience about anything, it’s the idea that some proposals aren’t worthy of consideration.”

(Link to the entire NY Times Magazine article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21obama-t.html?pagewanted=all)

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