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EJ Dionne, fresh from an hour-long audience with the President-Elect, has a column today on Obama's allergy to ideology. I don't buy this sort of thing, and would refer people to Chris Hayes' essay on the cynical effort to recast the Bush years as an object lesson in the failure of ideology rather than the failure of conservatism. But that aside, Dionne does a service reminding us of Obama's first campaign, his effort to head the Harvard Law Review. Recall how he won:
The election was an all-day affair with the ego-crushing drama of a reality TV show. Inside Pound Hall, the editors picked apart the intellectual and social skills of the 19 contenders, eliminating them in batches. At the last moment, the conservative faction, its initial candidates defeated, threw its support to Mr. Obama. “Whatever his politics, we felt he would give us a fair shake,” said Bradford Berenson, a former associate White House counsel in the Bush administration.It's hard to read that and not think of Obama's dinner at George Will's house. Obama won the editorship of the Harvard Law Review by making the conservative faction feel heard. There's no evidence he gave them anything, or that the journal moved right under his leadership, but the conservatives preferred the guy who would listen to them over the guy who wouldn't. And, occasionally, that slight preference can pay off in a big way.
