I know John Moser is raring to join
Historians for Obama. There’s some background in this article. There are a few claims in the manifesto that are grounded in "historical expertise," especially this one:
As historians, we understand that no single individual, even a president, leads alone or outside a thick web of context. As Abraham Lincoln wrote to a friend during the Civil War, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
I suppose that I would be a little more impressed, or less unimpressed, if the arguments made on Obama’s behalf displayed some disciplinary specificity or intellectual sophistication. But they’re campaign boilerplate.
I’m a little more impressed by the academic members of this list, in part because I trust that the issues that moved them to give their names to the effort have something to do with their expertise. I recognize, of course, that every campaign could come up with a "Lawyers for" organization, but I think I’d find myself less in sympathy with the legal and constitutional views of, say, Lawrence Tribe, Cass Sunstein, Geoffrey Stone, Jack Balkin, and Edwin Chemerinsky.
