In Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama’s highly-reviewed memoirs of his early years, he wrote of a moment in the early 1980s after he took a job on Wall Street when he faced a crossroads about where to go in life. A few months later he took on the radically different role of a community activist among Chicago’s urban poor. He would go on to gain admission to Harvard as a high-flying law student, but that was still several years ahead.