Obama: Keeping cool, focusing on 'common purpose'

— -- When Barack Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, the law school was roiling with tensions over issues such as faculty diversity and school support for public-interest law.

The cool and restraint that have frustrated many Democratic strategists and hard-line liberals during Obama's presidential bid generated similar feelings at Harvard. But those qualities have worked for him then and now.

"There was lots of political and racial division. Almost every two weeks there was a blowup" at the Law Review, says former classmate Kenneth Mack, who now teaches at the law school. "Barack was good at heading off controversies before they got started. He got us … doing the things we needed to do."

Another former classmate, Brad Berenson, a Republican who was associate White House counsel in President Bush's first term, says Obama won trust by "being fair, a good listener, inclusive, and by not himself aggressively taking sides in the hotter disputes. He played more the role of the benevolent referee."

That earned him "the enmity" of editors interested in a leftist agenda, Berenson says, but "he was not going to let political ideas get in the way of putting out a successful publication."

The Harvard Law Review is 2,000 pages of material published in eight issues from November to June. As its president, Obama displayed the type of managerial skills now evident in his presidential campaign.

"You've got to manage getting the work in from the authors, getting it edited, the paper, the printers, the computer systems, the distribution network, paying vendors," Mack says. "Many law reviews don't publish on time. When Barack was president, we got every issue out on time."

Limiting confrontations

The principles Obama absorbed in his first job helping poor Chicago families organize and improve their communities have been a constant throughout his career: Listen to people, win their trust, find common goals and motivate them to work together.