How does a short 18-year-old interview with a law student manage to be thoroughly transfixing today? When that law student is Barack Obama, who was newly elected president of the Harvard Law Review when Vanity Fair quizzed him in 1990.
Obama evinces a healthy scepticism of his future in Washington, so much so that one wonders what his law-school self would make of his current candidacy: "If I go into politics," he told the magazine, "it should grow out of work I've done on the local level, not because I'm some media creation."
Equally notable in the 1990 interview are the facets of Obama that track with his fondness for the Omar character in The Wire - qualities that are almost too hip, too knowing, to survive his White House aspirations. As a 28-year-old law student, Obama was free to take pride in listening to Miles Davis and speaking the "language of the streets". But as a presidential frontrunner, his edgiest quip may end up being the comparison of his biking attire to Steve Urkel's.
