Pasting below a couple graphs from a long Boston Globe piece about Obama’s Grad Student years. Here’s the link..

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/01/28/at_harvard_law_a_unifying_voice/

Noved to pass this on due largely to Volt’s comment – His time in academe has enabled him to be relatively clear about the ludicrous quality of Percy Sutton’s assertions of his influence over Harvard’s Law School – (Sutton – like his boy Rangel – has some serious backing up to do re Obama – the stalwarts of their Harlem Club backed Hillary – not the “Genius”.) But, just so Volt is all clear, OBama’s election was less a testimony to Harvard liberalism than to O’s capacity to disagree with conservatives w/o being prickly…BTW – a constant meme here is that Clubbers know so little about Obama – Guys – If you wanna know – the info is easy to find – Despite rumor-mongering, there’s no heavy, unanswered questions out there – No key to the Mystery – Unless you want to focus on his capacity to put together a much better organization than Clinton (Did you SEE Begala and Carville pissing on Mark Penn last night – How could she have won when her closest supporters hate each other!) Here are the graphs from the piece on Obama in Grad School…

The law review president’s election is a fussy affair, part intellectual debate, part frat house ritual. Obama was one of 19 candidates. As the 61 editors not running for the job debated the merits of the candidates behind closed doors on a Sunday morning in late February, the hopefuls cooked them breakfast, lunch, and dinner . Every few hours, the editors winnowed the list further, until just after midnight, when only Obama and a 24-year-old Harvard graduate named David Goldberg remained contenders .

At about 12:30 a.m., the editors called Obama into the room, told him he had won, and broke into applause. Mack, another black editor, pulled Obama in for a hug.

“It was a hard hug, and it lasted a while,” Obama told the Harvard Law Record, the school newspaper, at the time. “At that point, I realized this was not just an individual thing. . . but something much bigger.”

Obama gained instant fame, was profiled glowingly in newspapers across the country, and landed a contract for a book that would become “Dreams from My Father,” his best-selling memoir.

There was buzz on campus, too. Blair Underwood, the actor who played a black lawyer on L.A. Law, one of the campus’ s favorite shows, came to visit Obama at the Law Review and took him out for a Chinese food banquet. People who had helped pave the way were also moved.

“You should not underestimate the significance of him being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review because that was and remains a very elite group,” said Bell, now a law professor at New York University. “These were some tough folks. . . . It’s almost as impressive that he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review as him being elected senator of Illinois.”

As editor for two semesters, Obama spent 50 to 60 hours a week holed up in a second-floor office of Gannett House, a 19th century building overlooking Cambridge Common. He reviewed hundreds of articles, on topics ranging from corporate law to racial bias in auto pricing, and presided over long, heated debates in the cluttered first-floor lounge.

“Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare,” said Bradford A. Berenson, a former Bush administration lawyer who was an editor at the review.

“The politics of the Harvard Law Review were incredibly petty and incredibly vicious,” Berenson said. “The editors of the review were constantly at each other’s throats. And Barack tended to treat those disputes with a certain air of detachment and amusement. The feeling was almost, come on kids, can’t we just behave here?”

WAIT A SEC – WHiskey! – I just realized something – THE SECRET INGREDIENT BEHIND O’s MYSTERIOUS RISE – When he was cooking those meals for the Law Review editors – he SLIPPED em some of that secret Obama Juice!!!!!!!!! Since Wretch has all the Scoops here – hoping he can find the formula. Got to be somewhere online…