He graduated from a prestigious East Coast law school.
No one does that unelss they are very intelligent.
Plus, if I recall correctly, he held some extra special post - I can’t remember exactly - but it was something like membership in the Law Review.
The Law Review is a group of the most gifted law students that serve as an editing body that produces the school’s yearbook. Traditionally, only the top five or ten best students are invited to join The Law Review.
But, as I say, I can’t remember exactly what position he held. I’m fairly certain that he did hold some special postion either in the law school or in his first few years of practice.
For example, he may have been a Law Clerk. That is a position like an assistant to a highly prestigious judge. A judge’s Law Clerk does legal errands for the judge. They research legal precedents and do other things that only a qualified lawyer can do.
Only the very top lawyers are given that kind of position. Being a Law Clerk, is a very prestigious thing in the legal community. I will try to Google BO and see exactly what his accomplishments were.
When I googled BO, here is the first thing I found:
He attended Harvard Law School which is accepted as the most prestigious law school in the country - meaning you have to be the very best and brightest to be accepted there.
Also - if that wasn’t enough - he was President of the Harvard Law Review Society. In other words, he may very well have been the very best in his class.
When talking about someone’s intelligence, that is just jaw-dropping impressive and portends someone with just about the highest intelligence going.
To my way of thinking, that really speaks to the character of the man. Working as a civil rights lawyer indicates to me that he is not in this life strictly for himself. His main interest is not grabbing all the money that he can. He is a man who wants to give back to society.
I know that it’s probably difficult to reconcile my feelings towards the man after his first few years in office. In one way I really despise the man for what I see as a very poor job he’s done. But on the other hand, there is just no doubt of the admiration and respect I feel for the man.
I’m sorry that I left my post as it is. I was trying to edit it.
The word “despise” is far too strong. I wanted to edit it out but I ran out of time.
It would be much better for me to say that I’m terribly disappointed and angry at BO for the way he has conducted himself as president. But, on the other hand, there is no denying the admiration and respect I feel for the man.
I like him even more now. Seriously. I was originally going to vote for McCain, but the more I heard from Obama the more I liked him, and it keeps getting better. I just don’t know what he needs to be doing that he isn’t trying to get done. Maybe I just have low expectations from my president. I haven’t liked any of them since Carter, but I was like ten years old so what did I know back then? I trust Obama. That’s what impresses me. I like how he handles these crazy birthers. He doesn’t have time to worry about them so he just lets it roll off his back as he keeps on going.
You didn’t ask me, but I can tell from reading his books. If you haven’t read them, the intelligence and thoughtfulness pops off the page, He doesn’t use ghostwriters and you can tell a lot by how somebody writes.
It might sound strange, but I think he actually dumbs things down in his public speaking. He makes things more simple, more generic, more safe and conventional than in his writing, but you can’t read his books and come away thinking he is not exceptionally bright. He’s much more specific in his writing. He doesn’t write in cliches or stump speeches. In his speeches he’s much more careful and broad, and I actually wish he would let through a little more of the insight and edge I see in his writing.
Unfavorable originally, still unfavorable. Too liberal fiscally for my taste. Not a horrible president, so far, but not particularly good or effective either. Wasted a lot of his political capital on healthcare, when there where other things he could and should have accomplished. He had a few hanging curveballs he could have hit out of the park, built some momentum, established public confidence, and then tackled healthcare early in his second term. Instead, I think he’s shot his wad, and will be a one term President, assuming the GoP can field an electable candidate.
Note to GoP: Sarah Palin is not an electable candidate.
I’m really very sorry to have posted so many short posts here. But I just keep finding more info about HLS (Harvard Law School) and the HLR (Harvard Law Review).
I feel a need to correct something I said earlier. I said the HLR was responsible for publishing the class yearbook. That is not very accurate. In fact, I really don’t know much about the responsibilities of any Law Review Society. I believe that every Law School has one and it seems to me their responsibility is to publish a document containing legal research and legal scholarship.
But, to be accurate, I really should quote what I found on the HLR web page. Here is the first paragraph and a link to the HLR web site.
The Harvard Law Review is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship. The Review comes out monthly from November through June and has roughly 2000 pages per volume. The organization is formally independent of the Harvard Law School. Student editors make all editorial and organizational decisions and, together with a professional business staff of three, carry out day-to-day operations.
Sure. We could be out of Iraq, where we had no business going in the first damn place. The money saved from ending that military adventure would take a chunk out of the budget deficit.
He could have used his influence to significantly improve access to justice by increasing funding and loosening restrictions on Legal Services Corporation (though to his credit, he has done some of this, but needs to go further).
He could have removed barriers to gays in the military–this would have required investing a good bit of political capital, but when it didn’t blow up in his face, it would have been a major accomplishment suitable for touting in 2012.
Had he not jumped right to healthcare, he may have been able to secure more confirmations for his appointees to the federal bench and agency positions, by not giving his opponents a single point to rally around. If he really wants to have a lasting effect on this country, he needs to get as many judicial appointees confirmed as he possibly can. Federal judges have often underestimated influence on a broad spectrum of issues, and they serve for the rest of their lives.
Favorable originally, unfavorable now. He needs to be a thousand times more aggressive on the economy. It’s so frustrating how little he’s done on that issue. I think he has absolutely no idea what to do about it, honestly.
He was my first presidential vote but I’ll probably vote third party in 2010 and 2012. There is no way I am voting GOP, but the Dems have been too lousy for me to want to support.
I’m pretty happy. Stimulus funding and Healthcare were the two most important issues when I voted for Obama, and he got decent versions of both through a fairly determined opposition in Congress.
Both Senate and House defense spending bills for next year include provisions to end DADT, so it appears it will be an accomplishment available for touting come 2012.
What shoud he have done, specifically, to be a “thousand times” more aggressive?
Less so than it could be if he’d already done it, and had three years for the policy to be shown to have no ill effect on the military. Waiting to implement the policy until that close to the election risks allowing his opponents to turn the election into a referendum on the subject, which I don’t think would be politically wise.
That’s not the same set of metrics used on this poll. But if you
Add up the ‘favorable’ results of this poll you get 58% (as of this post time)
Split the ‘middle’ results of this poll down the middle, after taking away 4 total ‘middle’ points to add to the 1.4% to this poll’s unsure bucket, you get
to match the size of the unsure bucket in the RCP poll.
That feels almost exactly right to me, given my experience reading posts on the SDMB. Of course there could be some sort of self-selection going on with those who choose to take the poll.
Those seem like good answers, combined with the other poster’s appreciation of his writing.
So I’ll take it from your post if someone graduates from a presitigous east coast graduate school (like Harvard) they must be extremely intelligent. Probably more so if they went to a prestiguous East Coast undergraduate school (like Yale) as well.
And since he writes so well, I’ll be sure to go and look up some of the papers he wrote as President of the Harvard Law Review, since that sounds like an impressive position.
The poll in this thread is variously framed as about job performance and favorability. Those two metrics yield different results for Obama, as they do for most Presidents. His job approval average from the neutral site pollster.com is 49% (too many individual polls to list out). The last month’s worth of favorability ratings are 47, 56, 52, 51, 54, 54.
If you like, just for the sake of round numbers, let’s call it 50% instead of 55% as I quoted. Even then, the margin of difference between this poll at the time Rand posted and the actual figure was around 6%. That’s not exactly a stunning differential. There is that much variation among the actual scientific polls taken in the same week.
ETA: Which, in case I’m not being clear, says fuck-all about this being a representative poll. It almost surely is not, unless by blind luck. But it also was a poor example of a skewed poll if that was the point.
You are most welcome. I learned a few real good things about BO as a result of answering your post.
Also, I got a good giggle from the following: we seem to have forgotten BO’s most impressive accomplishment. Namely - he was elected POTUS and that is probably the rarest indicator of superior achievement.
Editors of law reviews almost never write more than one paper, their student note, if they write one at all. In Obama’s case, he penned an anonymous note as is the custom on the Harvard Law Review. As you’re probably aware, it has become a conservative meme that Obama was obviously a lazy Law Review President if he didn’t publish multiple papers under his name, but it is based on ignorance.
In an earlier post, I spoke about discussing the BP oil spill in this thread - specifically - the manner in which the Pres has handled that spill. I’m probably talking with the benefit of hindsight here and so maybe I can’t really be taken too seriously on this point. But within the first week or two of that spill, I felt a very strong need for the Pres to get on network TV and address the nation about it.
That spill really scares me. As a matter of fact, the way I feel about it is almost beyond fear and close to panic. I felt a real need for some reasssurance from the Pres that everything was going to be OK - somehow. But that never happened and I’d like to make a few points about that:
The Pres let us down on this score. He failed to do an important part of his job. This oil spill could still be more serious that people are admitting.
The Pres wasted a real good potential source of PR with the nation for his failure to reassure us all that everything was going to be OK.
IMO, he needed to take a stand and tell the nation that if BP couldn’t resolve this problem, the federal government would be taking extreme and punitive actions against BP - at least to give us some kind of sliding scale so that we can feel assured that he was dead serious about this and if BP wasn’t going to fix this thing, his government was going to hold their feet to the fire until they did fix it.
How much longer can this disaster continue before we start to see serious human consequences? I mean illnesses that are so serious they become fatal? What will happen if we are still living with this disaster for a serious length of time - such as many months or even many years?
I don’t know why, but it seems as if people are afraid to explore the worst case scenarios here. I have no idea what those are and I’m disturbed that I haven’t seen any discussions in the media as to just what their consequences are. For some reason, I seem to feel that it is ultimately the President’s responsibility to ensure we are informed about that. I’m sure that he isn’t personally responsible for ensuring that we are informed about that. But since we have never been notified of the long term consequences, I think whoever is responsible (maybe the Centers for Disease Control?) (or maybe the US Federal Emergency Management Agency?) (or some other federal agency?) (maybe John Hopkins?). If none of these are responsible for keeping us notified, Damn It!!! Someone has to be responsible! If not, then I think we should hold the President responsible.
When will it become time to panic? I know the public is always told that it is never right to panic and that panic can never do any good. But, darn it all, suppose this spill goes on for months and months - even years and years? What will be the long term consequences? I may be close to panic as a result of all these stupid documentaries titled something like, “A World Without People” or “A World Without Petroleum”. But isn’t it possible that if we are unable to ever get this disaster under control, we will start to see calamitous consequences of that?
I’m sorry if I have caused any of you to become close to panic. But I am getting real close to the panic button here and I just don’t trust the official blah blah that we are being fed by the official agencies about this disaster.
The only way the oil leak will cause serious human consequences is if people ingest contaminated seafood. You may rest assured that the FDA won’t allow such to be sold.
Johns Hopkins isn’t a federal agency, by the way. It’s a private research university.
As far as the President telling us everything will be okay, most people are not concerned about the health effect of the spill on people. People are concerned about the effect of the spill on the environment and the economy of the affected coastal regions.
You left out “Meh, will probably be OK I guess” originally, “Meh, OK I guess” now.
I wanted Clinton.
This guy seems to be in a bit over his head. He hasn’t been able to convert his phenomenal oratorial skills into policy successes.
He hasn’t done anything yet that I regard as reprehensible and I’m not left with the feeling that his presence in the office is a threat to the country or anything. I like some of his initiatives and I have a decent amount of overlap with the politics that he espouses.