Not so hot. On Volokh.com, somebody calling himself LawStatMan goes all Bill James on the citation record:

Obama’s vol. 104 is the least-cited volume of the Harvard Law Review in the last 20 years

I’ve run electronic searches to determine the number of times Obama’s volume 104, and every other volume of the Harvard Law Review published during the last 20 years, has been cited in all law reviews during each subsequent year for which full data is available (starting in the year after the last issue of each volume appeared, and running through 2006, the last year for which full citation data is currently available).

The results of my searches are in a PDF which you can download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?bxdzmmtuanx.

Some highlights, using only the first 12 years of citations to each volume, where available (obviously, the more recent volumes have fewer years of citations available):

1. Obama’s volume 104 (1990-91) has been cited an average of 170 times a year. That is, it was cited 2045 times in the first 12 full years after publication (i.e., 1992 to 2003). It has been cited at the lowest rate of any volume published in the past 20 years.

2. By comparison, for all other volumes published during the past twenty years for which at least a year’s worth of data is available (vols. 101 to 103, and vols. 105 to 118), they have been cited an average of 262 times a year — a rate 54% higher than the citation rate for Obama’s volume.

Another commenter cites a paragraph from p. 11 of a leftist book about Harvard Law School in those years, Eleanor Kerlow’s Poisoned Ivy: How Egos, Ideology, and Power Politics Almost Ruined Harvard Law School l (1994):

“Obama was friendly and outgoing, but the class succeeding him wanted a tougher editor to lead them. [David] Ellen, quiet and fair-haired, had graduated summa cum laude in history and science from Harvard College in 1987. He had worked at The New Republic in 1989, the summer before starting law school, and was seen as someone who would be a more rigorous blue-penciler.”

There doesn’t seem to be any record of Obama publishing anything in his own journal. The commenter who say he’s a former editor of HLR claimed on Volokh:

“The law students on the Review all have the right to publish at least one piece (typically they publish at least their third-year papers, which they have to write anyway), and many publish at least two pieces. It would seem surprising if Obama published nothing at all in the very Review over which, he has so often boasted, he presided as President.”

Okay, assuming all this is true, what are we to make it?

1. Obama was, objectively speaking, a lousy president of the Harvard Law Review.

2. It’s difficult to say how hard Obama tried. He was apparently keeping his grades up (he graduated an impressive magna cum laude), was planning his big book on race and law, advising Blair Underwood of “LA Law,” and his heart was in Chicago, where his girlfriend and political future resided.

3. This doesn’t prove it, but it fits in with the theory that Obama was intentionally avoiding leaving a paper trail “to maintain my political viability” (as Bill Clinton explained his complicated draft-avoidance plan back during Vietnam).

4. Obama got a lot more out of the Harvard Law Review than the Harvard Law Review got out of him.

5. By the standards which we demand of our Presidents, being the worst editor of the HLR in two decades is really pretty good. If George W. Bush had been editor, it would have looked like the Beavis & Butt-Head Law Review, but with more drunken nicknaming. And W. got better grades at Yale and scored higher on military aptitude IQ tests than John Kerry, who almost got elected President. Kerry had to go Boston College Law School, even though he may well have been the most celebrated person in America to apply to law school that year.

6. It does suggest a strategy that might make McCain’s campaign a little less hopeless against Obama. He could say:

“Obama is a state-of-the-art B.S. artist who tells everybody what they want to hear. Everybody loves him because they think he agrees with them, but that’s because he has spent his whole adult life not telling anybody what he really thinks. In contrast, lots of people hate me because I’m always saying what I really think.”

Of course, the problem is that a lot of people hate McCain for very good reasons. What McCain really thinks is often maniacally disastrous. But, McCain does let us know what’s on his mind. You have to give him that much credit.

7. To return to the pressing question of who is The Real Obama, one of the more boring possibilities is that he really is the technocrat with a long laundry list of minor reforms that his website lists. Perhaps Obama wants to be President not to unleash any master plan, but because he’s always felt that getting elected President would fill the father-shaped hole in his soul that his traumatic family background left him. And while he’s enjoying the therapeutic benefits of being President, he might as well try to push through some little high IQ changes in 401-k regulations or whatever.

After eight years of a President who knew he was too lazy and bored to manage a lot of details, so he decided to roll the dice on about three giant policies–invade the world, invite the world, and in hock to the world–and see what happens, an era of technocratic reform might be welcome.

8. On the other hand, the cultish insanity Obama has elicited this winter might be going to his normally cool head. His Super Tuesday speech:

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.”

sounds like he’s auditioning to take over Keanu Reeve’s Neo role in the next sequel: “Matrix: Re-Election.”

In summary, the combination of a secretive individual like Obama, mass hysteria, and a press terrified of being smeared as racist for asking tough questions means that we shall be living in interesting times.

A new satirical video has surfaced on You Tube describing how voters can win their weight in immigrants depending on which of the open borders candidates they support. See it here.

Hearing old acquaintances’ opinions of Barack Obama is starting to resemble hearing old Korean War buddies’ opinions of Raymond Shaw.

Fine, but what would he do as President? And what would he do in a second term as President, when he doesn’t have to run for re-election? When it comes to those minor questions, nobody who has known him seems to remember him saying anything terribly relevant.

Fortunately, in these days of electronic databases, we can look up what a public figure has published in the past on controversial topics. A couple of readers have now done searches looking for Obama’s published contributions to public debate in the 1980s and 1990s.

Unfortunately, despite the enormous amount of talking about politics Obama did during those years, he doesn’t appear to have put much of anything down on paper where it might come back to haunt him in a future campaign.

Reader Sideways comments:

LexisNexs law gives 4 hits for author Obama, all years. 2 from 89 with Obama as noted as a researcher for the author, one that simply borrows “the Audacity of Hope” title, and one that has nothing to do with him at all.

A search for Obama in the body, ignoring the earlier searches and before 1999 turns up one mention of “Dreams of My Father”

So, yeah, nothing much.

I ran a few other academic/legal searches for the heck of it, nothing came up. It’s so little I suspect I’m doing something wrong.

Reader Planetary Archon Mouse comments:

“A Lexis-Nexis search pulled up a few mentions of Obama between Jan 1, 1980 and Dec 31, 1996. Most of it wasn’t too interesting — news articles about his being named to head the Harvard Law Review and thanks for his input on articles written by professors. (Although one of those articles, by Lawrence Tribe, is about what law can learn from modern physics, and is quite laughable. I wonder what Obama would say now about it..it was written in 1989, and he’s probably smart enough now to stay away from a topic like that.)

The only thing specifically published by Obama, apparently, was a 1994 NPR vocal contribution, in which he went way out on a limb and … took the side of all right-thinking people everywhere:

Charles Murray’s Political Expediency Denounced

HIGHLIGHT: Commentator Barack Obama finds that Charles Murray, author of the controversial “The Bell Curve,” demonstrates not scientific expertise but spurious political motivation in his conclusions about race and IQ.

Can anybody find anything else he published?

If not, we’re faced with a puzzle. Here we have the president of the Harvard Law Review, who was later employed as a Lecturer at the U. of Chicago Law School for eight years. Yet he has apparently never published a law journal article.

What about in the popular press? He was a glamorous figure as first black president of HLR, and was given a book contract while still in law school He was, at least in part, the model for Blair Underwood’s character on the hit TV series “LA Law.” His contributions on public issues would have been widely welcomed. He was, by his own testimony, obsessed by politics and social change. Yet, he managed to leave a remarkably thin paper trail before he had pollsters to advise him.

With one fat exception — a massive autobiography, whom nobody except Shelby Steele appears to have read with any comprehension. Everybody else just seems to absorb a sense of Obama’s mellifluousness from it, and then gets bored before long, but never holds their boredom against Obama, who seems like such a nice young man.

So, what would he be like as President?

My original surmise a year ago still seems the most plausible: that Obama doesn’t know either. His head is in the center and his heart is way to the left. Whether his head or his heart would win when he has attained the summit of power and can finally take off the mask that he has worn all these years remains a mystery, even to him.

A book review (Tales Out of School; not yet online, and requires a subscription, anyway) by Sandra Tsing Loh in the just-arrived Atlantic Monthly for March is less a review–nominally of Jonathan Kozol’s new Letters to a Young Teacher –than navel-gazing on Loh’s part about her own thoughts on public education. (See this article by Sol Stern in City Journal for all you need to know about Kozol.)

Loh lives in Los Angeles, specifically the Van Nuys neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley, and has a couple of young daughters in public schools. She writes, cluelessly,

[A] First World family’s entry into Los Angeles’s 21st-century urban public schools can be daunting. Yes, one’s uniquely American expectations of giving one’s children a better life than one had growing up can be challenged. On simple demographics alone, the landscape startles.

In other words, though she’s apparently a life-long Southern Californian — “of German-Chinese extraction”–she’s startled that Van Nuys is about 80% Hispanic! (This doesn’t speak well for the powers of observation among us physicists–Loh has a BS in physics from Caltech.)

But what does this have to do with assimilation? Well, near the end of her meandering review, Loh writes:

That so many of L.A.’s English-speaking families are fearful of letting their children come into contact with great numbers of English learners is ironic. The terror is that, like rockets losing heat tiles, Dylan and Taylor will drop a vocabulary word here or an SAT point there, and thus be doomed to Pitzer instead of Brown. Meanwhile, the far more vast and gloomy possibility is that most immigrant children will plunge off the college map entirely. In their isolated, maxed-out schools, they won’t master the higher-level English they need if they are to succeed. Such language acquisition could be greatly speeded via meaningful contact with native speakers, but, as the authors of Learning A New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society point out, few immigrant youngsters have “even one native English-speaking friend.”

The last line in that passage strikes me as a graphic–even startling — refutation of the usual soothing assurances that today’s immigration will work out fine, just like in the 1880 - 1920 Great Wave. It’s not that we National Question patriots think it’ll all work out fine, but the line Loh quotes puts the fact that it won’t quite memorably.

Put another way, even if they want to assimilate, they can’t. (But they probably don’t want to. Also see this.)

Despite that show-stopper, Loh remains adamantly, liberally optimistic, presumably not surprising for someone who’s a regular on public radio:

We will (…) speak English at them until they turn blue. We must invest in the poor urban school, not because of any moral authority a la Jonathan Kozol exhorts us to, but because that school is our school. And in return, we get to be infused with the energy of hopeful immigrants ready to try anything, in a brave new land that, to them (…), itself represents optimism, resources, and a better and better future.

Now, that it’s the dead of winter again, reporters are digging once more into Obama’s upbringing, mandating additional expense-account research trips to Honolulu.

Here’s a long article from the Chicago Tribune “Obama’s Mom: Not Just a Girl from Kansas,” which reveals a few things of minor interest about the Senator’s late mother, whom he likes to stereotype in speeches as rooted deep in the heartland of America in order to balance off the exoticism of his name.

Her first name was … Stanley. Her father, Stanley, who sounds like a goof, wanted a boy so much that he named her Stanley Ann. She appears to have gone through high school using the name “Stanley,” as part of her “Juno”-esque striving for attention as a nonconformist, and only later switched to “Ann.”

Obama makes a big deal about her being from Kansas, but she spent her adolescence in the Seattle suburbs. Her parents dropped out of their Protestant church and started attending Unitarian services. She was a high school atheist, leftist and feminist. But soon after her father moved her to Hawaii, much to the surprise of her high school friends, she got pregnant and quickly married the father, just like so many other more conventional teenage girls during the Baby Boom.

Of course, the new husband was a bit of an attention-getter. And there was the problem of his already having a wife back in Kenya, although that’s not mentioned.

The descriptions of her sitting around having rap sessions with Obama Sr. and the other developing nations students at the U. of Hawaii are exactly like the equivalent passages in John Updike’s 1978 novel The Coup in which the future dictator of Kush sits around at McCarthy College in Franchise, WI from 1955-1959 shooting the bull with the tiny number of nonwhite students plus his white girlfriend, who he will bigamously marry after a pregnancy scare.

One of the themes of Obama’s autobiography is his being weirded out by his youngish mom being sexually attracted to dark men. And there’s an undercurrent of Obama being freaked out by the realization that his mother pretty much wrecked her life through her attraction to unreliable Third World men and unreliable Third World countries, but, if she had been more sensible, where would he be? This is the kind of thing that leaves Obama sighing deeply over the tragic conundrums of fate, while less self-absorbed people would have a laugh.