At Salisbury Forum, journalist, scholar analyze Obama presidency

SALISBURY — The Salisbury Forum brought two favorite guests back for an appearance last Friday, April 9, at Salisbury School.

For journalist and best-selling author Todd Brewster, it was a second appearance in Salisbury, while Yale Law School professor and constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar was back for his fourth visit.

At a Forum event in October 2008, Amar and Brewster discussed what the Constitution does and does not say about the presidency, as well as what qualities American voters have historically tended to look for when choosing a president.

For Friday’s presentation, “The Presidency in the Age of Obama,� the two men discussed 10 moments that they felt defined the young Obama presidency, and that would be seen in years to come as also defining the era in which they occurred.

Some of the moments, such as the inauguration and the passage of health-care reform, were obvious choices.

Others, such as Obama’s first meeting with Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Oct. 1, 2009, were perhaps less so. One or two (“The Tea Party�) weren’t technically moments.

For each one, first Brewster and then Amar explained what he felt the event had to tell us about the president and about the country. The common theme running through all the discussions was the many burdens that Obama finds himself under.

One example was the Beer Summit, in which Obama invited black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley, the white police officer who arrested Gates in his home, to share a beer at the White House.

According to Amar and Brewster, the incident showed that the first African-American president had become the arbiter of all things racial in the country.

Despite the political topic, both men were generally politically neutral. For example, while Amar made no attempt to hide his negative feelings about the Tea Party, his criticism focused solely on what he considers their misunderstanding of the Constitution and of American history, not on their political positions.

In the brief question-and-answer period that followed the talk, audience members asked about health-care reform and about the Supreme Court. The final question of the evening, about the deterioration of the political debate in recent years, served as a segue to the next Salisbury Forum event, in which local students will show documentary films they made as part of a program with Global Village Media and the Connecticut Project for the Constitution. The latter organization was co-founded by Brewster, and is dedicated to improving the quality of public dialogue about constitutional issues. “The Constitution in Our Midst,� will be held at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village on Friday, May 14, at 7:30 p.m.