From the Boston Globe, “Obama Shows Hints of His Year in Global Finance” by Sassha Issenberg I know what you’re thinking: Obama spent a year in global finance? Where did He find the time, what with already being a community organizer, a part-time lawyer, a law school lecturer and a state legislator? Well, this was before all of that. What the Globe rib-splittingly refers to as Obama’s “year in global finance” took place immediately following His college graduation in 1983. You’re also probably wondering why Obama has soft-peddled this “year in global finance,” especially given the lightness of His résumé. Well, contra the Globe, a lot of people wouldn’t consider Obama’s job at the time to actually be in global finance per se. He was a writer/editor for the Business International Corp. where His principal responsibility was editing manuscripts. Obama did discuss this period in His life, or at least a fanciful version of it, in His autobiography. Quoth the Globe:
In “Dreams From My Father,” his 1995 memoir, Obama describes being hired by an unnamed “consulting house to multinational corporations.” “Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe,” Obama wrote. “Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors – see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand – and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry.” Those who worked at Business International say Obama’s brief account contains inaccuracies or misrepresentations about the company. (Obama has acknowledged fictionalizing narrative elements in the book.) They say that while offering consulting functions to clients, Business International was far more a publishing house than a consulting firm. Founded in 1954 to publish a magazine targeted at an increasingly globalized managerial class, Business International covered a broad array of subjects, including reports on economic policy making and recommendations for executive insurance policies. The office had a collegiate feel: Employees rarely wore suits, and writers at Obama’s level did not – as he suggests in one anecdote – have their own secretaries, according to fellow workers at the time. Obama had to share a Wang computer terminal with another employee
Making much of a candidate’s first job experience doesn’t make much sense, but the following description of our potential dilettante-in-chief sounds rather familiar:
Obama (was) described by peers as a distant presence in the office: diligent about his work but rarely engaged by it, uninterested in after-work drinks with colleagues. “He was all business; he didn’t chat and gossip,” said Chang. “He always seemed aloof, a little bit of a stray cat,” added Celi.
