To accompany a long piece today on Barack Obama's time at the University of Chicago Law School, the New York Times posts a whole set of exam papers that he set his students during the time he taught there. (Check out his Constitutional Law Exam 2003 (pdf file) for a hypothetical case study involving "the state of Utopia's new governor, Arnold Whatzanager.")
In the piece itself, Obama comes across as distant from the rest of the (conservative-leaning) faculty there, and aloof, except for a few moments in the classroom that you'll be able to interpret as either gently humorous or terribly damning, depending on your ideological persuasion:
In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. "Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?" he asked in a mock-innocent voice.
In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama's hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. "Take Barack Obama, there's a good-looking guy," he would introduce a twisty legal case.
There's less to be gleaned on Obama's substantive thoughts on policy, but that doesn't seem to be the fault of the New York Times -- Obama's Chicago colleagues recall him as an inveterate fence-sitter, preoccupied with how publicly expressing his views might affect his political opportunities. But should anyone doubt the Obamas' 'mainstream America' credentials:
A favorite theme... were the values and cultural touchstones that Americans share. His wife, Michelle, a black woman, loved The Brady Bunch so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots.
