<p>How does graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and being President of the Law Review (THE Law Review, and as we know he was not your usual Law Review President) count as “rather undistinguished”? Sure, every year maybe 10% of the class graduates magna, but only one of them is ever President of the Law Review (and lots of years no one graduates summa, by the way). I suspect lots of Law Review Presidents don’t graduate magna, by the way. That’s a 60-80 hour/week job that has a tendency to interfere with your studying time, and the presidency of the Harvard Law Review is a strong enough credential as to render grades irrelevant. (There is only one reason he wasn’t a Supreme Court clerk, too: He didn’t apply. I guarantee it.)</p>
<p>By the way, to put his achievements in further perspective: Thanks to a nasty public fight over affirmative action at the Harvard Law Review in 1980, the New York Times reported that year that no African American was in the top half of the Harvard Law classes of 1980 or 1981. You probably wouldn’t need all of your fingers to count the African Americans prior to Obama who finished law school with credentials comparable to his. (Not that there weren’t many really smart, great lawyers who were African American, but few went to Harvard or a similar school, and few who did got magna-level grades, and not even a handful had top law review positions. And the ones who did tended to go into academia or seven-figure Wall St. partnerships, not community organizing and politics. One predecessor was William Coleman, Secretary of Transportation under Pres. Ford, who also graduated magna from Harvard and was the first African American Supreme Court clerk.)</p>
<p>During the election, I read interviews about Obama as a law student with former law school classmates and with Larry Tribe, a famous Harvard professor, praising Obama to the sky.</p>