NYT Publishes Misleading Article About 'Pragmatic Views' of 'Law Professor' Obama

If you had read a newspaper article about Colonel Harlan Sanders which left the impression that he really held that rank in the military without mentioning that it was strictly an honorary title from the state of Kentucky, wouldn't you consider the story to be misleading? Well, that is pretty much what Jodi Kantor did in her New York Times story about "law professor" Barack Obama starting with the title, "As a Professor, Obama Held Pragmatic Views on the Court." Echoing the title is the first paragraph of her article which reinforces the "law professor" misconception:

Many American presidents have been lawyers, but almost none have come to office with Barack Obama’s knowledge of the Supreme Court. Before he was 30, he was editing articles by eminent legal scholars on the court’s decisions. Later, as a law professor, he led students through landmark cases from Plessy v. Ferguson to Bush v. Gore.

Um, sorry Jodi, but Barack Obama was never a law professor. He was a lecturer which is not the same thing. Yes, students did call him "professor" but that was strictly out of politeness, not fact. Just an informal title that lacked even the honorary certificate that "Colonel" Sanders received from Kentucky. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times elaborated on this matter a couple of years ago:

Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama's primary campaign said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school. In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter.

A detail Jodi Kantor conveniently left out of her awe-struck article. Backing up Lynn Sweet is the Wikipedia entry for Barack Obama:

Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, as a Lecturer for four years (1992–1996), and as a Senior Lecturer for eight years (1996–2004). During this time he taught courses in due process and equal protection, voting rights, and racism and law. He published no legal scholarship, and turned down tenured positions, but served eight years in the Illinois Senate during his twelve years at the university.

In fact, so "dedicated" was Obama to legal matters that he simply let his law license expire:

In 1993 Obama joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 12-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.

Jodi Kantor then tries more than a bit too hard to convince us of his "pragmatism":

Mr. Obama believes the court must never get too far ahead of or behind public sentiment, they say. He may have a mandate for change, and Senate confirmation odds in his favor. But he has almost always disappointed those who expected someone in his position — he was Harvard’s first black law review president and one of the few minority members of the University of Chicago’s law faculty — to side consistently with liberals. 

Kantor would be advised to leave out mention of Obama's supposed scholarship especially considering this commentary from Politico:

As president of the Harvard Law Review and a law professor in Chicago, Senator Barack Obama refined his legal thinking, but left a scant paper trail. His name doesn't appear on any legal scholarship.

Most of the rest of the Kantor article consists of her making the pitch for Obama as a "pragmatist":

Former students and colleagues describe Mr. Obama as a minimalist (skeptical of court-led efforts at social change) and a structuralist (interested in how the law metes out power in society). And more than anything else, he is a pragmatist who urged those around him to be more keenly attuned to the real-life impact of decisions. This may be his distinguishing quality as a legal thinker: an unwillingness to deal in abstraction, a constant desire to know how court decisions affect people’s lives.

The very words of Barack Obama himself belie the notion urgently pushed by Kantor that he is some sort of "pragmatist." Last October, Rush Limbaugh went where the MSM feared to go. He played a 2001 audio of Obama talking about the Supreme Court and the Constitution. Here is some of what Obama said about those topics:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that, uh, I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and -- and as long as I could pay for it I'd be okay.  But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.    

Yeah, "pragmatic" issues like the redistribution of wealth. Somehow Kantor overlooked that Obama point. And here is Obama claiming that the Earl Warren Supreme Court wasn't all that radical:

As radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical.  It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted -- and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.  And that hasn't shifted, and one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.  And, uh, in some ways we still suffer from that.

Here is Rush commenting on that bit of Obama "scholarship":

You can talk about the Warren Court and how they didn't do enough or they weren't radical enough, folks, the thing that leaps off the page is when he says that the Constitution "is a charter of negative liberties.  It says what the states can't do to you. It says what the federal government can't do." Note the terminology here.  He looks at the government as something that can do something to people, and he's mad that the Constitution limits the role of government in people's liberty.  That's why he's saying he doesn't like here.  He doesn't like the idea of liberty, and he wants to change it!

So it sounds like Kantor's persistent description of Obama as a pragmatist is just as flawed as her calling him a law professor. 

And now that your humble correspondent has a bad case of the munchies, I shall take my leave to pick up a bucket of KFC from the "Colonel."