Inside Obama's Brain by Sasha Abramsky

Author:Sasha Abramsky [Abramsky, Sasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Business, Campaigns & Elections, Economics, Leadership, Political Science, Presidents & Heads of State
ISBN: 9781591843023
Google: w8DXRPxr2roC
Amazon: 1591843022
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE WORLD’S TOO COMPLEX FOR SOUND BITES

That persona developed over many years in Chicago, helped along by one man in particular. If anyone served as a mentor for Obama after he attained his law degree, it was Abner Mikva, a man who years earlier had been rebuffed by Obama when he had, sight unseen, offered him a U.S. Court of Appeals clerkship. A skilled legal mind, Mikva had served in the Illinois legislature as well as the U.S. House of Representatives. He had also worked a stint as White House counsel for Bill Clinton. By the mid-1990s, he was back in Chicago, teaching a legislative process class at the University of Chicago’s law school.

While Mikva had been mildly surprised by Obama’s long-distance rejection of his clerkship offer, when, a few years later, he met the young man, now a state senator and lecturer at the law school, he was captivated. Obama, he remembered, “was extremely well-read. He reads voraciously, or did back then. There was almost not a book you could talk about that he hadn’t read. Political biography. History books. Current events. The law. He was teaching constitutional law at the time. I was teaching the legislative process. He was always fascinated by how the legislative process worked and how it fit into the constitution.” For Mikva, the young man “just had all the skills. He was personable, he was smart, he was thoughtful, he was interested in all kinds of different things. Was eclectic. A lot of academics zero in on their specialty and you can’t get them to talk about anything except their little territory. Barack was always very broad-gauged, was interested in everything, especially what you were doing. The university thought very highly of this.”

Over the next several years, Mikva played senior-statesman adviser to the young protégé Obama. They would talk about what worked and what didn’t work in Bill Clinton’s presidency, how a man with a personal life so publicly flawed could nevertheless excel electorally. They would analyze why Harry Truman, a man of modest education, so successfully rose to the challenge of rebuilding postwar Europe and setting in place the cornerstones of American Cold War strategy. They would discuss Lincoln’s cabinet choices, his approach to slavery, his maneuverings to save the Union. Obama understood, Mikva felt, “that particularly in government, people play a role far beyond their particular accomplishments.” History was not made simply by padding one’s résumé. As so many others had found before him, Mikva determined Obama to be extremely good at understanding complicated ideas.18

Obama understands the world to be dynamic, complex and ever changing, said one senior campaign adviser. “He didn’t grow up with traditional frameworks. He is suspicious of dogma. It’s his instinct to not start with some simplified construct or understanding of a problem.”

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