According to Wikipedia, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization — growing the staff from 1 to 13 and its annual budget from $70,000 to $400,000. Anyone would expect Obama to have obtained reference letters supporting his admission to Harvard Law School from the community organizing circles in which he operated. And, it would not be surprising for a mentor or friend of the young Obama to seek out the most influential connections to write a letter of recommendation. Percy Sutton may have been at the end of that chain. A Dr. Mansoor may have been another link in the chain (but perhaps not the first connection to Obama). One of the links showed that Mansoor’s J.D. was from Berkely, so he may have written a letter of recommendation to that institution.

The pool of plausible candidates for admission to a top law school is very limited. As the Monopoly analogy goes, “you must pass ‘Go’ to collect $200.” Having the background to be a plausible candidate and a work history in a networking intensive business (community organizing), Obama certainly should have been able to get influential people to advocate on his behalf for admission to Harvard, Berkley, Northwester, University of Chicago and other top tier law schools.

From earlier this year, it certainly appears that the “community organizing” factions on the South Side of Chicago work accross the lines of religious denominations (Wright, Pfleger, Farrakhan). After three years there, the young Obama must have known all the players.