One of the most impressive things about President Obama when he was just Barack to me, as my constitutional law student and research assistant at HLS in 1989-91, was Barack\u2019s deep appreciation for history and for the impossibility of fully appreciating its unfolding while it is in the process of being made. Barack especially treasured the part of the Constitution\u2019s preamble that spoke of our commitment over the generations \u201cto form a more perfect Union,\u201d and he took solace, ever since he was a first-year student at this law school, from the conviction that ours would always be an unfolding narrative \u2013 never completed, much less perfected.<\/p>\n
I was of course thrilled and inspired, not to mention proud, when Barack took the oath as our 44th<\/sup> President on January 20, 2008 \u2013 an oath administered by another of my former students, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, whom I knew less well \u2013 and I have been enormously impressed by the thoughtfulness and integrity with which Barack Obama carried out the duties of that high office ever since. Given my no doubt unrealistically high aspirations for all he might accomplish despite the entrenched opposition he was destined to face as our first African-American president from the moment he assumed the position of POTUS, I have at times felt disappointment, sometimes acute disappointment, especially on the international front. But I have faith that history, such as it is, will render a glowing verdict on President Obama\u2019s impressive achievements in the face of implacable opposition \u2013 even more glowing than one might expect from the unusually high national approval ratings that measure his esteem in the eyes of a fickle public as his two terms in office wind to a close.<\/p>\n Rather than making an attempt to itemize or summarize what I see as this President\u2019s most enduring accomplishments, or to acknowledge what seem to me to have been his missed opportunities on the global stage, I would simply respect Obama\u2019s own insight that history cannot be properly written from the vantage point of the present but requires the perspective of elapsed time for it to be reliably, even if always contestably, captured.<\/p>\n This much I know: Whether from the vantage point of the time I was privileged to spend in the Obama administration as this President\u2019s and Attorney General Holder\u2019s first Special Counselor on Access to Justice, or from the perspective of the academic perch I reoccupied upon returning to Cambridge, I will always treasure and long miss the steadiness and solidity of his control \u2013 not just of himself but of the compass guiding what, for want of a better term, I would join in calling the ship of state. For some, \u201cno drama Obama\u201d may have been a moniker emblematic of a certain distance and disconnection from the ordinary experience of the people he had the honor and burden to lead. For me, it represents a quality of calm and of reflection that, in our finest presidents, has always been an essential ingredient \u2013 a measure of grace and, when appropriate, of wit \u2013 whose absence we will all notice acutely once it no longer presides over the Oval Office.<\/p>\n Laurence H. Tribe @tribelaw <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the most impressive things about President Obama when he was just Barack to me, as my constitutional law 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\nCarl M. Loeb University Professor and
\nProfessor of Constitutional Law
\nHarvard Law School<\/p>\n