2-Dec-08 2:00 PM CST

Obama’s the Real Deal, says Classmate

As a very proud fifth-generation Australian and dual US/Australian citizen, I am the only native Australian member of the Harvard Law School Class of 1991 and, I would venture, the only native Australian Barack Obama befriended in his days at Harvard Law School.

Barack and I met on the first day, in the fall of 1998, ate our lunch together on the lawn that day and became friends. We were in the same class, a small group of about 15 new students who met with a more senior student to learn how to read case law.

Unlike most of the new students at Harvard, Barack and I had both worked in the “real world” for five years. (We’re just two months apart in age.) Barack had been a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. I had been a bond trader at Goldman Sachs in New York and had just returned from a summer as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Mississippi Blues Archives, making field recordings of some of the last first generation Bluesmen.

Barack asked me to join his study group, which I did, for a time. After the first year, Barack became the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, and pretty much disappeared into The Law Review building. We saw less of each other, but remained friends. We would have lunch together from time to time. He came to my wine tastings and house parties. I haven’t spoken to him since graduation.

Barack, then as now, listened well and rarely spoke too soon. The classes were most taught Socratic Method, with the professors questioning people on an issue presented in a case, often at random, and the discussion would take off from there. It's the method portrayed in the Paper Chase. Often, some hothead would take an extreme position on one side or another of a case, others would take opposite ideologically driven positions, and at the end Barack would say something that sounded good and appeared to somehow tie things together - at least a bit, and some times better than others. But he was a respected and calming influence in the class, always polite and never an intellectual bully. I don't remember him ever saying anything incendiary.

What’s interesting to me, thinking about Barack then and now, is that he really hasn’t changed a bit. He’s a good guy, and the quality which some people interpret as aloofness is just Barack being Barack.

What do I mean by this? Barack is such a good politician that he confuses some. He can be hard to read. He doesn’t show his cards unless he has to, and he rarely needs to. Some people read this as Barack being aloof or somehow evasive. To me, at least, it’s neither. It’s just Barack being Barack. Where Barack is coming from, in my experience, is just an unglamorous, hard-headed idealism. He’s not into polemics. He’s just into trying to make things better. I think it’s that simple.

I should point out that things weren’t all roses for Barack at Harvard. We arrived at Harvard Law School at the very pinnacle of the “political correctness” movement. The atmosphere, frankly, was poisonous. There were student strikes. There were faculty strikes. There were protests. Barack didn’t always eat at the same table with all the other black students. He wanted to - and did - socialise with white boys like me. For this, Barack was rebuked and shunned by some members of the black student establishment. They viewed him as one of “them”.

If you read his Yearbook essay, you’ll see why I think Barack hasn’t changed much. Seventeen years ago, he’s already running for President. What he says sounds great, offends no one, and commits to nothing much. But it makes you feel good, and you can be sure that behind that politically savvy lack of detail in print, there’s a substantive commitment to ideals. To me, he hasn’t changed a bit.

By Advance Member Robin Urban