"I think Barack took 10 times as much grief from those on the left on the Review as from those of us on the right."

Conservative Bradford Berenson talks about what Obama was like as president of the Harvard Law Review:

The law school generally at that time was riven ideologically, and not just in terms of Republican/Democrat partisan politics, but there were contending schools of legal thought at the time, represented on the faculty, that really polarized both the faculty and the student body....

... [R]ace was at the forefront of the agenda. There were intense debates over affirmative action...

[A]fter [Obama] became president of the Review, he was under a lot of pressure to participate and lend his voice to those debates. And he did, I think, to some degree. But I would not have described him as a campus radical or a campus political leader....

You don't become president of the Harvard Law Review, no matter how political, or how liberal the place is, by virtue of affirmative action, or by virtue of not being at the very top of your class in terms of legal ability. Barack was at the very top of his class in terms of legal ability. He had a first-class legal mind and, in my view, was selected to be president of the Review entirely on his merits....

[T]he conservatives were eager to have somebody who would treat them fairly, who would listen to what they had to say, who would not abuse the powers of the office to favor his ideological soul mates and punish those who had different views.....

We had all worked with him over the course of a year. And we had all spent countless hours in the presence of Barack, as well as others of our colleagues who were running, in Gannett House [the Law Review offices], and so you get a pretty good sense of people over the course of a year of late nights working on the Review. You know who the rabble-rousers are. You know who the people are who are blinded by their politics. And you know who the people are who, despite their politics, can reach across and be friendly to and make friends with folks who have different views. And Barack very much fell into the latter category....

[As president of the Law Review,] Barack took 10 times as much grief from those on the left on the Review as from those of us on the right. And the reason was, I think there was an expectation among those editors on the left that he would affirmatively use the modest powers of his position to advance the cause, whatever that was. They thought, you know, finally there's an African American president of the Harvard Law Review; it's our turn, and he should aggressively use this position, and his authority and his bully pulpit to advance the political or philosophical causes that we all believe in.

And Barack was reluctant to do that. It's not that he was out of sympathy with their views, but his first and foremost goal, it always seemed to me, was to put out a first-rate publication. And he was not going to let politics or ideology get in the way of doing that. ...

He was unwilling to undermine, based on the way I viewed it, meritocratic outcomes or democratic outcomes in order to advance a racial agenda. That earned him a lot of recrimination and criticism from some on the left, particularly some of the minority editors of the Review. ...

It confirmed the hope that I and others had had at the time of the election that he would basically be an honest broker, that he would not let ideology or politics blind him to the enduring institutional interests of the Review. It told me that he valued the success of his own presidency of the Review above scoring political points of currying favor with his political supporters.

I'm inclined to believe Berenson's account of how Obama handled himself in the role of leading a group of ambitious students as they all needed to work together to publish a journal. But let's interpret and extrapolate. What does this say about how he will govern as President of the United States, working with a Congress dominated by members of his political party?

I certainly don't think it means he will give equal treatment to conservatives. He won't be publishing a journal, he'll be pursuing a successful presidency, the preservation of the Democratic majority in Congress in 2010, and re-election. So I would predict that Obama will methodically rack up important legislative accomplishments, probably the very things he's been telling us he plans to do. He'll be excellent at explaining why these things are good for us and creating the feeling that he's figured it all out very competently and deserves our trust.

I found the Berenson piece through Mickey Kaus who says: "If (like me) you want to feel better about Barack Obama, try reading conservative Bradford Berenson's Frontline comments...."

Should we want to feel better?