EMORY, Va. – The year 2008 was not the first time Barack Obama got elected president, an old classmate of the new commander in chief told students Monday at Emory & Henry College.
“Barack stood out right away, but let me tell you he looked very different than he looks now. He dressed like a bum,” Christine Spurell, who attended law school at Harvard University with Obama, said of 1990, when he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review.
“But he spoke the same and his demeanor was very similar, which is how we knew he had a future in politics, though we weren’t exactly sure what it was going to be,” she added.
Spurell, an attorney who works for the federal public defender for the Western District of Virginia, described her relationship with the man who became president of the United States last week as “contentious.”
“I spent a lot of years now trying to distance myself from many of the things I’ve said about Barack,” Spurell said. “Right now, I worship Barack like everybody else … though they want to remind me I said he was the devil years ago.”
Spurell said Obama “played his cards right at every turn” and was well-liked, even though he often played basketball while others attended to the details of editing the journal.
“He used to say, ‘I’m the idea man; I’m not the details man,’” Spurell said.
Obama was active in political movements on campus that sought a more diverse faculty, she added, and he was always selected as a spokesman because he knew how to talk without alienating people.
She said the new president somehow managed to get better grades than she did.
work on the law review and still maintain a kind of balance in his life that most of his classmates could not.
One clue to fellow students that Obama would enter politics came when he was offered clerkships by at least two Supreme Court justices, and he did what no law student in his right mind would do – turned them down.
“Masterful” was the word Spurrell used to describe Obama’s ability to walk across the political aisle and, as president, to welcome debate over the law review selection process.
“He allowed things to be heard openly and robustly,” Spurell said. “He believed, as I now believe, that an idea has value. If it’s the right thing to do, it’s going to survive even if you have an open discussion about it.”
As for the presidency he began last week – Spurell said she doesn’t think Obama will suddenly solve the nation’s problems, fix the economy or change citizens’ everyday lives.
But, she believes that in his role as the nation’s figurehead he will build respect for the United States abroad.
“I don’t think tomorrow’s America is going to be dramatically different from yesterday’s America, and I think anybody who believes that is mistaken,” Spurell said.
But, she added, Obama is the kind of president who inspires people in the same way former President John F. Kennedy did.
“I think that’s what Barack’s going to be,” she said. “He kind of makes people care about the country again.”
Now, she said, as fellow classmates are promoted to cabinet posts with great responsibility, she marvels at the fact that people she knows are suddenly running the country – and she wonders how they could possibly be qualified.
“It’s a surreal experience,” she told an auditorium full of E&H students Monday. “Look around you; you don’t know who is going to go ahead and be running the world 20 years from now.”
dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement