Professor Obama

Noam Scheiber says that Barack Obama's experience as a professor gave him the edge in last night's debate:

Obama really benefitted from his years as a law professor. He was fluent and very much at ease walking and talking at the same time. He had a professor's knack for making eye contact and maintaining it while he walked a questioner through a multi-step response. And his answers were much more concrete and intuitive than I'd ever heard them. It's as though it took fielding questions from ordinary people to remind him of this latent professorial talents.

I have found that such talents, unfortunately, do not come automatically with being a professor.