“After graduating from Harvard Law School, and serving as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for about a decade, and I know him from his time as a colleague here. He first came to our attention when then-professor, now-judge Michael McConnell suggested him for appointment to the faculty because of Obama’s first-rate work on one of McConnell’s articles for the Harvard Law Review. (Is it necessary to add that McConnell is a conservative and doesn’t much like affirmative action?) Obama, we quickly learned, was a person of truly exceptional ability. We asked him to teach at the law school, and he turned out to be a terrific though part-time teacher of constitutional law (serving, for most of his time here, in the state legislature as well).
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- Second and perhaps worse, McWhorter creates a straw liberal, referring to “the racial healing many might see him [Obama] as portending.” He names no one who thinks this way. (Nor does Martin Peretz, who should know better.) Does he know anybody who does? I don’t. Or is he just making things up, using his perch at the Manhattan Institute to act as an advance guard of the far right in 2008 or 2012–slinging mud to see what will stick?
