Editors-in-Chief

I normally avoid comment sections like the plague, but Kevin Drum's post about the Obama speech was repeatedly updated in response to comments, so I thought I'd take a look. Mostly the same dreck, but I thought this comment was funny for its innocent ignorance:

Obama apparently was head? president? of the Harvard Law Review. Not surprised he can speak off the cuff so well.

All due respect to past and present editors-in-chief and presidents of the nation's many (way, way too many) law reviews, but I am not under the impression that extemporaneous speechmaking is a weighty consideration in the selection of the EIC. Nor should it be. That's not to say that it would not be a useful skill, or completely ignored by those who choose the EIC. But I doubt there is enough of a causative or even correlative relationship to provide any explanatory value for Obama's oratory skills. That's my snotty law student comment for the week.