NYT: Obama stands "calm in the swirl of history"; also time-travels, but makes no time for clerkship and little time for practicing law

In a fawning news article by Michael Powell, the New York Times today describes Barack Obama as "a protean political figure, inspiring devotion in supporters who see him as a transformative leader even as he remains inscrutable to critics." The basic facts of his biography, however, such as they are, are apparently also inscrutable even to adoring reporters from the NYT.

In the article's fourth paragraph: "He turned down a prestigious federal appellate court clerkship while at Harvard to work as a community organizer." And then later, in more detail:

Abner J. Mikva, the former judge, asked Mr. Obama, fresh out of Harvard, to apply as his clerk. Mr. Obama declined, preferring to labor as a community organizer. But, characteristically, he later befriended the older man.

The problem with this is that Obama's "community organizer" days preceded his Harvard Law School days. And after graduating from Harvard Law, Obama went to work at least nominally as an associate attorney at the small Chicago law firm then known as "Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard," with which he continued to be affiliated in a more limited capacity throughout his Illinois Legislature tenure up until his U.S. Senate run in 2004. [Update: But see my update below, re 1991-1993, during which it appears that Obama probably temporarily returned to activities that could qualify as a "community organizer" even after getting his law degree and law license. Mea culpa (although I had some help in making this mistake).]

I say "at least nominally" because that "law firm says Obama logged 3,723 billable hours during his tenure from 1993 to 2004, most of it during the first four years." Even Obama's civil rights or other "public interest" legal work would have been logged — such lawsuits always seek awards of attorneys' fees, and you can't get them unless you've logged the hours, even if your clients weren't paying you out of pocket. But that's fewer hours than would typically be logged in two years by almost any young associate at almost any big-city for-profit law firm. Supposedly Obama took time off to work on his first autobiography. But it's still hard to see how he can be described as ever having been more than a part-time, not-very-serious lawyer, at least based on those numbers and the very vague descriptions of his legal work provided in his books or in news articles like this one.

Look, it's not like the guy has held a whole lot of responsible jobs. That not even his hagiographers at the New York Times can keep them straight also suggests that there's also a lack of substance to the jobs Obama purports to have held. It's either that or, gosh, he's so "transformative" that he can time-travel.

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There's also something a bit hinky about the judicial clerkship Obama so nobly turned down.

I do not doubt that Obama, as a magna cum laude graduate and president of the Harvard Law Review, could have landed a prestigious federal circuit court clerkship upon his graduation in 1991. Indeed, those credentials would typically lead to clerking for a prestigious circuit judge and, in the second year following graduation, a Supreme Court clerkship. And Judge Mikva, a Carter appointee from 1979, was by 1991 the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. An opportunity to clerk for him would indeed have been much coveted.

But the normal protocol is that students make written applications for such judicial clerkships. The unwritten understanding is that law students aren't supposed to apply to any judge from whom they wouldn't immediately accept a position if tendered. (I.e., no student is supposed to answer "no" to a clerkship offer.) So did Obama apply, get an offer, and then turn Chief Judge Mikva down anyway? Or was Obama, as the first black president of the HLR, already such a rock-star in legal-academic circles that he received an unsolicited offer from Judge Mikva?

(A third possibility, I suppose, is that Judge Mikva had a "standing offer" to every year's HLR president. I've heard of such arrangements, but I don't know if Judge Mikva indulged in them; and my impression was even such judges who do have such arrangements still prefer that the students go through the formality of submitting an application.)

I don't doubt that Obama and Judge Mikva later became friends, since both were non-tenure track instructors at the University of Chicago Law School later in the decade. And Mikva was a very political lawyer who later served as White House Counsel for the Clinton Administration, so it's not inconceivable that he might have been more than casually receptive to career tracks like Obama's.

Perhaps my suspicions are unfounded, and they're just a product of my surprise that someone with law school credentials bespeaking extraordinary legal talent apparently chose never to use that talent in any really significant way. I'm personally unsympathetic to the notion that turning down the clerkship was so noble: I clerked for a federal circuit judge in 1980-1981, and without exception, every lawyer I know who served as a law clerk to a federal judge feels that he or she rendered a valuable public service by so doing, almost certainly greater in scope than what we could have done even at a "public interest" law firm. Given his political sympathies, the idea that he could have done more "good" working for a small Chicago firm during his first year out of law school than he could have while working for a liberal judge like Mikva is pretty hard to swallow. But suffice it to say that Obama's achievements as a practicing lawyer appear to be even thinner than his achievements as a state or federal legislator.

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UPDATE (Wed Jun 4 @ 6:50pm): Or did the NYT get it right after all? I hate to make mistakes in posts, but when I do, I'd rather catch and admit them myself.

The descriptions I'd previously read of Obama working as a "community organizer," and certainly his experiences in that role as told in his first book, Dreams from My Father, all focus on 1985-1988. But Obama's Wikipedia entry currently says, of his immediate post-law school activities, only this: "Obama graduated with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, then returned to Chicago where he headed a voter registration drive and began writing his first book, Dreams from My Father, a memoir published in 1995." In turn, it references this article from Chicago Magazine in January 1993 about his work in a voter registration drive in 1992. If that also counts as "community organizer" — and I suppose it could, since that job description could mean almost anything — then perhaps he returned to that vocation, briefly, after law school:

Carol Moseley Braun's upset primary victory over Alan Dixon last March [i.e., March of 1992] altered [Project Vote! founder Sandy] Newman's feelings. "It's not that I wanted to influence the Senate race," Newman says. "Project Vote! is nonpartisan, strictly nonpartisan. But we do focus our efforts on minority voters, and on states where we can explain to them why their vote will matter. Braun made that easier in Illinois." So Newman decided to open a Cook County Project Vote! office and went looking for someone to head it.

The name Barack Obama surfaced. "I was asking around among community activists in Chicago and around the country, and they kept mentioning him," Newman says. Obama by then was working with church and community leaders on the West Side, and he was writing a book that the publisher Simon & Schuster had contracted for while he was editor of the law review. He was 30 years old.

When Newman called, Obama agreed to put his other work aside. "I'm still not quite sure why," Newman says. ''This was not glamorous, high-paying work. But I am certainly grateful. He did one hell of a job."

In that case, it's the LAT instead of the NYT who's confused (and partly responsible for my confusion), because of this statement in its April story about Obama's work as a lawyer: "Obama arrived in Chicago in 1993 with a degree from Harvard Law School and was hired as a junior lawyer at the firm then known as Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard."

The remainder of my confusion can be sourced to Obama's own biography page on his campaign website, which doesn't deign to use many actual dates: "He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Soon after, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law." No mention there of a temporary return to "community organizer" status either.

I do know that Obama was licensed in Illinois in December 1991, from which we can confidently infer that he took and passed the summer 1991 bar exam. Beyond that, however, commenters are welcome to provide more info, especially if accompanied by links.