A tale of two law professors with Harvard Connections

Okay, I’m going to mince and play with words. I’m probably taking all this talk about being “professorial” too personally but look at different takes on the word. One as applied to Elizabeth Warren and the other applied to President Obama. Notice the differences?

WaPo on the professorial Elizabeth Warren:

She’s either the plain-spoken, supremely smart crusader for middle-class families that her supporters adore, or she’s the power-hungry headline seeker her critics loathe, a fiery zealot disguised in professorial glasses and pastel cardigans.

NYPost on the professorial Elizabeth Warren:

O’Neill has a particular bone to pick with Geithner because he hasn’t been forceful about endorsing Warren. He has reportedly expressed some behind-the-scenes opposition to her because the brainy Harvard professor’s hard-charging style isn’t suited for the finesse Washington politics requires.

CNN and ‘language mavens’ on POTUS being professorial:

He singled out this sentence from Obama as unfortunate: “That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”

“A little less professorial, less academic and more ordinary,” Payack recommended. “That’s the type of phraseology that makes you [appear] aloof and out of touch.”

NPR on POTUS being professorial (and having “rhetorical tics”)

Since Obama’s election, a parade of critics has opined that as president he seems to be more of a professor and less of a poet when addressing the public. And they say that though he may be trying to explain the complicated issues of the day in a simple manner, the way he talks to his constituents may be creating more problems than solutions. After all, desperate times call for inspirational oratory.

Myiq2xu on Law Professor Ann Althouse’s take on POTUS and his incoherency and the professorial meme:

Only a bad law professor operates that way. A good law professor speaks as clearly as possible and draws attention to anything the courts have glossed over or left ambiguous. We lawprofs try to extract the doctrinal rules and point up any place where courts have left the rule mushy. Then we apply those rules to particular factual settings. We hypothesize the most difficult applications of law to fact and help the students work through these hard problems. Obama’s lolling at high levels of abstract principle and avoiding the specifics of applying principle to real problems is not the way of the law professor.

See Elizabeth. See Elizabeth speak. See Elizabeth coherently fry Geithner’s ass in a very large pan on TV.

So which is it? Is being professorial being “aloof” or “fiery”? Is it a genitalia thing or a melatonin thing or just a bunch of confused journalists thing?

NOW’s Terry O’Neil thinks the old boys club at the White House are pushing Warren to the sidelines because she won’t fit in with the Washington Crowd. So, how come Obama was touted for his ‘professorial’ outsider status and Warren gets a dead fish?

A spokesman for Treasury said that selecting Warren isn’t up to Geithner. “It’s the White House’s decision,” the spokesman said.

Still, O’Neill believes that Geithner’s lack of endorsement for Warren is indicative of the nature of Washington politics and President Obama’s administration of late.

“Treasury is a notoriously sexist and misogynist industry and the good old boys don’t like her,” the NOW president said. “It’s the testosterone-fueled attitude that drove our economy off a cliff, and yet the president has advisers that are from that industry.”

It’s a combination of [Warren’s] attitude and her anatomy,” she added.

For Geithner, this isn’t his first estrogen-charged run-in. The Treasury Secretary locked horns several times with Federal Deposit Insurance Co. Chair Sheila Bair during the height of the credit crisis.

Well, that’s understandable. But still, I have to ask, where do these two completely different pictures of what it means to be professorial come from?