This is a long article in The New Yorker, well-written and interesting.
In the fall of 1971, a Yale Law School student named Greg Craig sublet his apartment, on Edgewood Avenue, in New Haven, to his classmate Hillary Rodham and her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, for seventy-five dollars a month. Over the following decades, Craig and the Clintons continued to cross paths. Craig, who became a partner at the blue-chip law firm Williams & Connolly, in Washington, D.C., received regular invitations to White House Christmas parties, where Hillary always remembered to ask about his five children. In the fall of 1998, President Clinton asked him to lead the defense team that the White House was assembling for the impeachment battle. On a bookshelf in Craig’s large corner office are several photographs of him with one or both Clintons, including a snapshot of the President and his lawyers—their arms folded victoriously across their chests—taken after Craig’s successful presentation during the Senate trial. An inscription reads, “To Greg. We struck the right pose—and you struck the right chords! Thanks—Bill Clinton, 2/99.”
In spite of his long history with the Clintons, Craig is an adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign. “Ninety-five per cent of it is because of my enthusiasm for Obama,” he said last month, at his law office. “I really regard him as a fresh and exciting voice in American politics that has not been in my life since Robert Kennedy.” In 1968, Craig, who is sixty-two, was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy when he heard a Bobby Kennedy speech at the University of Nebraska, and became a believer on the spot. Since then, Craig has not been inspired by any American President. As for the prospect of another Clinton Presidency, he said, “I don’t discount the possibility of her being able to inspire me. But she hasn’t in the past, and Obama has.”
Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and Presidential leadership. In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. On rare occasions, however, a leader can become the object of an intensely personal, almost spiritual desire for cleansing, community, renewal—for what Hillary, in a 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley, called “more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” Somewhere between the merely great communicators and the secular saints are the exceptional politicians who, as Hillary put it then, “practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”
Robert B. Reich, the Secretary of Labor in Clinton’s first term, who now teaches at Berkeley, told me that he believes political inspiration to be “the legitimizing of social movements and social change, the empowering of all sorts of people and groups to act as remarkable change agents.” Reich was once a close friend of both Clintons—he met Hillary when they were undergraduates, and began a Rhodes Scholarship the same year as Bill—but he has not endorsed a candidate, and he seems drawn to Obama, for the same reasons that attracted Craig. “Obama is to me very analogous to Robert Kennedy,” Reich said. “The closer you got to him, the more you realized that his magic lay in his effect on others rather than in any specific policies. But he became a very important vehicle. He got young people very excited. He was transformative in the sense of just who he was. And a few things he said about social justice licensed people. Obama does all that, almost effortlessly.”
Read the entire article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/28/080128fa_fact_packer
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