Panel Endorses Obama at KSG Event

U.S. Senator Barack Obama may be the youngest major contender vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, but three prominent Harvard faculty members said yesterday that the 45-year old’s life experiences, particularly his time overseas, give him an edge over his older competitors.

“Barack Obama is the only candidate who can give us 21st-century solutions to 21st-century threats,” foreign policy scholar Samantha Power said at an event last night for Obama.

Power, the Lindh professor of practice of global leadership and public policy, took a leave of absence from the Kennedy School last year to advise Obama on foreign policy.

Yesterday she said that Obama’s background and experiences give him an important perspective on international affairs.

“One cannot overstate how important it is to have someone in office who has lived abroad and can see the United States from the inside out and from the outside in,” Power, a 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner, informed a Kennedy School of Government auditorium audience of more than 100 Harvard students and faculty.

Professor of Law Kenneth W. Mack graduated with Obama from Harvard Law School in 1991, after spending two years together on the Harvard Law Review.

“The thing that struck you about Barack back then was that he seemed very different,” Mack said. “He seemed like he was a little bit older, a littler bit wiser, and a little bit better read in the ways of the world.”

“I think he has the right politics for a reconsideration, reexamination, and reworking of the Democratic coalition,” Mack added.

Kennedy School Lecturer in Public Policy Marshall L. Ganz, who cut short his Harvard undergraduate career in 1964 to volunteer as a civil rights organizer in Mississippi, called next year’s election the “most important election since 1968.”

Ganz, who returned to the College in 1991 to finish his undergraduate degree, added that “Obama’s life experience in particular equips him to understand the kinds of ways in which we need to bring a very diverse set of people and interests together around a fundamental group of values—compassion, generosity and tolerance.”

Students who attended the event were encouraged to address questions to the three faculty members.

Kennedy School student Shouvik Banerjee said the most powerful part of the Obama discussion was “hearing the first-hand experiences with him.”

“I thought this had a town hall feeling,” he said. “A lot of people searching for something find it in Obama.”