Little Known About Obama's New York Years

You don't say.

When 23-year-old Barack Obama, then a recent Columbia graduate, walked into the office of the New York Public Interest Research Group after answering an ad for a job, his supervisor had a warning for him.

“I told him he would make less than $10,000 a year,” said Eileen Hershenov, who was the downstate campus coordinator for NYPIRG. “He laughed and told me that was a step up for him.”

As president-elect Obama prepares to move into the White House, relatively little is known about his five years in New York in the early ’80s. It was a period of transition for Obama, a time of soul-searching and uncertainty. It was also when Obama first worked full-time as a community organizer, a role that would define his young life and help shape his political outlook.

As a project coordinator for NYPIRG on the City College of New York campus in Harlem for three months in 1985, Obama spent hours with students in the trailer that served as the group’s office just below 140th Street and Convent Avenue, giving lessons on how to organize rallies and letter-writing campaigns, how to speak to legislators and lobby for change in public policy.

Former colleagues recall a “fabulously intelligent” and confident young man who was intensely interested in the idea of creating political change from the ground up, an idea that would resurface years later in his meteoric political rise.

Whose fault is it that we know so little about Obama's time in New York? That would fall on the media, whose lack of curiosity about Obama's past, his associations, and views, may have serious consequences going forward as President.