"Obama ... turned down high-paying jobs after graduating from Harvard Law School and became a community organizer," says The Washington Post.

This is in an article that struggles to show why "Despite his roots, Obama struggles to show he's connected to middle class."

And indeed, it is a struggle to figure this out when you are getting your facts so wrong. As John B. Judis writes in TNR:

He didn’t become a community organizer after graduating from Harvard Law School, but after graduating from Columbia. He left community organizing to attend Harvard Law School. After graduating from law school, he joined a prestigious Chicago law firm with offices just off Michigan Avenue. In 1991, he began teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He was chair of a Chicago branch of the Annenberg Foundation.

As Judis shows, Obama belongs squarely in the professional class:

Obama’s parents were professionals—his mother was an anthropology PhD and his father was a Harvard-trained economist. How much money they made was immaterial. His grandmother, who raised him in Hawaii, was a bank vice-president. He went to a fancy private school and to prestigious colleges (Occidental and Columbia) that turn out professionals and managers. He clearly was not obsessed with making money, but with performing a public service—yet that doesn’t distinguish him from other professionals or other Columbia graduates. It does distinguish him from a working- or middle-class American for whom being a civil rights lawyer or professor or politician is at best a passing fantasy.

It is admirable that Obama spent three years after graduating as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, but many graduates of elite colleges spend several years after college doing something unusual, before returning to graduate school or settling into a profession. Some travel around the world; some join the Peace Corps; some try to write novels.... Afterwards, they usually return to more sober and sedate occupations appropriate to their social background and education. That’s what Obama did....

Once out of law school, Obama lived and worked over the next decade in a grey area between the very upper reaches of professional America and the country’s managers, owners, and rulers. He didn’t just have access to more money and live differently from ordinary Americans; he possessed power and authority that they didn’t have.... 

Judis really embarrasses the WaPo here, but I've got to give credit to the WaPo for picking out some hilarious quotes that show Obama trying — tryin' — to sound like a working class guy:

"I just like gettin' out of the White House, and then I like tooling around companies that are actually making stuff."

Is he driving a car inside these factories? I think he was searching for the right word and rejected "puttering around" because it was too golf-y, and golf is not the sport of the working class.