Mr. Obama's Neighborhood

...A waitress at his favorite restaurant: Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...But back to the product Obama could sell...

...The program lasted a decade...

...Some of these people are famous—Harold Washington, Chicago’s fi rst black mayor, lived in an apartment by the lake, and Muhammad Ali lived down the block from Louis Farrakhan, who lives in Elijah Muhammad’s old digs, around the corner from the house of Joe Louis’s widow...

...Vast stretches of the old Hyde Park were bulldozed, including the main shopping and entertainment (that is, honky-tonk) district along 55th Street...

...This struck me one afternoon when I drove from Obama’s house to Trinity United Church of Christ, the now-controversial church where he worshipped for nearly 20 years...

...Alarms were going off everywhere...

...No matter what might be on his mind, he always asks how I’m doing...

...I never had roots growing up,” Obama has often said...

...There are no movie theaters, for example, and not much commerce generally...

...That’s because there’s only one class—upper...

...hammocks on the front porch...

...My god, she was more critical of the left than I was...

...They didn’t want only black families, or all black families, but black families of the right sort were welcomed...

...The place seems unrooted...

...But when he did have something to say it was always soothing and stimulating at the same time...

...He lived in the Boston suburb of Brookline— a “progressive” village where the townsfolk congratulate themselves for riding mass transit, eating fi brous bread, holding Winter Festivals in place of Christmas parties, joining committees, attending meetings that last many hours and result in the appointment of more committees, growing organic Chinese vegetables in sideyards, and hanging potted plants in macram...

...Not counting time spent in college and law school, plus part of a year working for a consulting fi rm in Manhattan, Hyde Park is the only place Barack Obama has lived as an adult...

...None of the progressive politicos I spoke with in Hyde Park considered it dismaying—“disappointing,” as one oldtimer said, but hardly disqualifying...

...In his own memoir, Obama depicts his mother fl eeing the “smugness and hypocrisy” of her small Midwestern town— a town that Obama visited for the fi rst time this year, campaigning...

...the university keeps the restaurant owners afl oat by providing business for their catering service...

...Inside, harmony reigned between white and black residents, but the whites drawn by the university were often here only temporarily, and the blacks who moved here have the same sense of displacement, even if they arrived from another neighborhood nearby...

...But the reputation for right-wingery is based on a simple if imprecise bit of data that shocks the delicate sensibilities of college professors: Of the tens of thousands of faculty who have taught at the University of Chicago over the past halfcentury, perhaps as many as 65 have, at some point in their lives, voted for a Republican...

...Inside were display ads from local businesses, full of good wishes and exclamation points: “Good luck, neighbor...

...If they stay, they do something...

...A pussycat...

...Bloom is dead...

...He’s an elitist...

...Like a gabby relative or a crooked business associate, a membership in a restrictive golf club or a long-forgotten bisexual fl ing, a neighborhood can be a problem for a candidate...

...The school was having trouble attracting students and faculty...

...Even Harold Washington, now canonized as the greatest of Chicago reformers, was machinemade...

...The nation’s fastest growing ethnic group, Hispanics, is scarcely represented at all...

...He fi rst moved there in 1984, when he came to Chicago as a community organizer, and he returned after graduating from Harvard Law School...

...He said he’d always been ambivalent about it...

...Administrators considered moving the campus to Arizona or New Mexico—anywhere pleasant—but balked at the expense...

...And, having obliterated the neighborhood’s entertainment district 50 years ago, it is now trying to draw bars and clubs back to Hyde Park, either through subsidy or outright purchase...

...If not, they get out of town...

...When he walked away he would leave that thought in your mind...

...From Hawaii to Indonesia and back to Hawaii, then to Los Angeles and Manhattan and Cambridge, Mass., and fi nally to Hyde Park: He’s never lived in a part of the country that’s like 90 percent of the rest of the country...

...Despite national fame, Barack Obama remains a Hyde Parker to the core,” read the banner headline...

...That’s one of the downsides to his background, coming up outside normal channels,” Patner went on...

...Who pushed him to get where he is so fast...

...Right out of college, Barack Obama placed himself in the middle of this curious legacy...

...From these razed blocks sprung parking garages, dormitories, classroom buildings, parks, and rows of townhouses suitable for students and faculty...

...He even wrote a book, a small masterpiece, about his tortured attempts to locate himself in the larger world...

...But there are upsides, too...

...If you’re from another neighborhood, you might go to Hyde Park on the weekends...

...Even at the time, you could see the university was saving us, and it was destroying us,” he said...

...An outsider sees it most clearly in the university police cars that patrol Hyde Park around the clock, and in the emergency call boxes spaced throughout the entire neighborhood, far beyond the campus proper, that anyone can use at any time to summon campus cops...

...Obama does show signs of having imbibed its view of the America beyond the moat...

...U. of C. recently bought and moved the South Side landmark Checkerboard Lounge close to campus, to restore the nightlife that the 1950s urban planners hoped to kill (and did...

...Look around...

...The affection is mutual...

...Bill Ayers—I know Bill Ayers very well...

...The reputation for diversity, though, probably will survive...

...Politically,” wrote the Chicago political analyst David Fremon, “Hyde Park has never joined the city...

...He’s always had to prove himself with the black community...

...It’s not extreme...

...This is the perfect place for a man without an identity to make one of his own choosing...

...The poor were secured at a safe distance...

...for university offi cials in the 1950s, enlightened liberals all, the panic was over a decline in social and economic class...

...As Republicans felt about Brookline, so Obama supporters feel about Obama’s neighborhood: It’s a measure of the man...

...A single saloon survived...

...Its sense of urban intimacy is reinforced by its isolation...

...said Obama’s friend, neighbor, and campaign adviser John Rogers in USA Today...

...It’s a long drive, 30 minutes or more...

...And both of these, the fancy restaurant and the new grocery store, are creatures of the university’s paternalism...

...Planners clear-cut an entire subneighborhood of wooden bungalows that housed workers from the nearby slaughterhouses and the Indiana steel mills, scattering the residents to parts unknown...

...He’s not really from here...

...But it made the neighborhood different, unique...

...But everybody saw the potential early on...

...They had a violent streak at one time...

...This contributes to the neighborhood’s relatively low crime rate and, in part, to the university’s reputation as a home for squares and nerds, a buttoned-down “bastion of conservatism,” in the phrase of one magazine writer...

...Most are lawyers and business executives from the Loop, doctors and technicians from the university hospital center, administrators and professors from the university—united to the white upper class through shared politics and aspirations, and delighting in, congratulating one another on, their unique neighborhood...

...He’s a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Obama said with a shrug, as if to say, “Don’t we all have to put up with these cranky old domestic terrorists wandering through the yard...

...Only a lack of familiarity with the benign fl ow of middle-class American life could inspire clich?s like these...

...So is Friedman...

...The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions...

...It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interests of the community in mind...

...There’s a certain wariness toward Hyde Park among South Side blacks, most of whom are poor,” he said...

...These terminate abruptly at the edge of Hyde Park and give way to shade trees and lawns and stately brick mansions and huge, tidied-up apartment houses...

...At its boundaries, the university bought and leveled city blocks that could serve as a buffer, or moat, from the surrounding South Side as it fi lled with impoverished blacks...

...There aren’t many restaurants, and only a single overpriced restaurant catering to the culinary affectations of the yuppie trade—strange for a neighborhood with so many wealthy residents...

...It drives everyone inside...

...All around Hyde Park, white fl ight was transforming Chicago, goosed by racial panic and the sleazy importunities of “blockbusters”— real estate speculators who bought the houses of fl eeing whites at fi re-sale prices, then fl ipped them at a high profi t to incoming blacks...

...It’s neither one thing nor the other...

...The Hyde Park Herald printed a gala issue when Obama announced his candidacy, in February 2007...

...In Hyde Park,” a resident told me, “ ‘integration’ means white people and black people...

...The university police force is the second largest police force in Illinois...

...Anyone who knew Brookline would not have been surprised to learn that Dukakis, as one of its favorite sons, liked to take books about Swedish land-use planning with him to the beach, thus disqualifying himself from the presidency...

...Most successful African-American politicians in Chicago come up through the Democratic big-city political machine—either the old machine of Richard J. Daley or the gentler version overseen by his son, the current mayor, Richard M. Daley...

...After ten years of urban renewal, the neighborhood’s population had dropped by 40 percent...

...The snow and the cold keep the street people away...

...Recall poor Michael Dukakis, the hapless Democratic presidential nominee in 1988...

...He never had that seal of approval...

...I’ve never advocated terrorism,” Ayers wrote, “never participated in it, never defended it...

...The working men and their families, who replaced them, were driven out by the university...

...Hyde Park’s isolation was by design...

...This neighborhood is genuinely integrated...

...Hyde Park may be partly responsible...

...Just to the south, turn-of-the-century apartment houses were saved, refurbished, and offered as housing for the administrators and faculty at U. of C. Having uprooted most neighborhood businesses, the plan concentrated all commercial activity into three small shopping centers, from which most of the old shop owners were excluded...

...He’s as round and white-bearded as Santa, with the same twinkle...

...As it happened, I’d spent the evening before reading Ayers’s blog, and lingered over a manifesto he posted in early April, after his friendship with Obama became national news...

...It’s not a trifl ing question...

...People think we’re radicals here, wild-eyed...

...Surrounded, Hyde Park is different from any neighborhood in Chicago— different from anywhere in America, for that matter...

...Obama is a politician of Hyde Park pedigree, outside the normal bloodlines of Chicago’s black politics...

...But there’s a word, sadiddy...

...Wish Hyde Park’s very own Barack Obama and family all the best...

...It just wasn’t that big a deal...

...The thing is, it’s not what you might think,” Rabbi Wolf said...

...Urban renewal drove out as many poor whites as poor blacks...

...It’s unlikely that the school’s wobbly reputation for conservatism, and the neighborhood’s, will survive them...

...government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently...

...It is the most racially integrated neighborhood in the nation’s most racially segregated city...

...You just have to look at his supporters...

...But now—they’re thoroughly conventional, just very nice, well-educated people from the neighborhood...

...same for Asians...

...They often refer to their neighborhood as a “small town...

...Notably absent from the scheme was any public housing for the poor...

...Just as important, political consultants often go to great lengths to make voters feel that way...

...Many of these insurgents were either disciples of the university’s most famous faculty member, the free-market economist Milton Friedman, or were drawn to the school because of him...

...It’s the snow that keeps us from being Berkeley...

...David Mendell, in his indispensable biography Obama: From Promise to Power, quotes a coworker of Obama: “[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day...

...Some people call it a college town, since its largest inhabitant, the institution that defi nes the neighborhood’s character, is the University of Chicago, one of the world’s most prestigious universities...

...But of course not every neighborhood has a former Weatherman and his wife, former Weathermoll Bernardine Dohrn, living in it, especially not as twin pillars of the community...

...After services, Obama would get the family in the car and go home...

...America has been having the same reaction, but Hyde Parkers experienced it fi rst...

...The university has long been aware that the neighborhood it created lacks the amenities that urban dwellers demand as compensation for the discomforts of city living...

...A political rival, State Senator Donne Trotter, put it this way in an interview with the Chicago Reader: “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community...

...Capitalism, he went on, “is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution—a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love” and so on...

...If you think this sounds improbably quaint and Norman Rockwellish, like Anytown, USA, Hyde Parkers think so too...

...Only in the last few months did the neighborhood get a reliable, clean, and well-stocked grocery store...

...Barack is perfect for the neighborhood...

...And his wife, too...

...he said...

...By Chicago standards, Obama’s sweetheart real estate deal with the convicted fi xer Tony Rezko—who purchasd the lot next to the house Obama was buying, effectively giving him a bigger yard for free—is almost beneath comment: a cost of doing business or a small professional benefi t, typical of machine-backed pols and reformers alike...

...It’s a rational, progressive philosophy based on experience...

...All agreed he’s “down to earth...

...It’s too weird, too far outside what most of Chicago knows...

...BY ANDREW FERGUSON Hyde Park, Chicago When Barack Obama was briefl y embarrassed earlier this year by his association with the onetime bomb-builder and wannabe bomb-exploder William Ayers, he blamed his neighborhood, sort of...

...The university fi gured Hyde Park was next,” Spicer said...

...And Barack and his family fi t right in...

...He came to Hyde Park before urban renewal and saw its effects fi rsthand...

...The comedian (and later movie director) Mike Nichols, who got his start in a club on the old 55th Street, defi ned Hyde Park liberalism for all time: “Black and white, marching arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder against the poor...

...Their disciples and colleagues who remain at the university aren’t getting any younger...

...You see it here...

...Bill Ayers is an aging, toothless radical...

...At last they decided that if they couldn’t move to a nice neighborhood, they would make their neighborhood nice...

...Strolling the quiet streets on a morning in May you’ll admire the lilacs spilling over the low stone fences, the mansions with the squares of lawn marching to the edge of the boulevards, the funky, vine-covered apartment buildings shaded by overarching oak and poplar...

...It’s too cold just to hang around...

...We did it here, we really did it...

...The project was the fi rst of its kind in Chicago, and one of the fi rst in the country, and it served for a generation as a model for other cities, for better or worse—usually worse...

...The neighborhood is better known as a haven for the black upper class, especially those who don’t want to move to an all-white suburb but also don’t want the crime risks and miserable schools associated with the neighborhoods to the immediate south, west, and north...

...This is a pretty good description of William Ayers, by the way...

...When Barack announced for president,” Patner told me, “it was a total ho-hum in the black community”—beyond Hyde Park, that is...

...Maybe this was a low blow, but the Republicans had a point...

...It was keeping us afl oat, but it was also taking away the old characteristics, the old buildings, the old trees, the old roots...

...He twinkled...

...That’s sort of the view of Hyde Park...

...As he walked me to the door he mused about the urban renewal that created the new Hyde Park...

...That was scary to him...

...The aim of urban renewal in Hyde Park, according to the university’s president, was “to buy, control, and rebuild our neighborhood” until it was a “community of similar tastes and interests...

...And the conservatism, by popular account, infects the neighborhood at large, tempers its politics, and adds to its diversity...

...You have to understand the mindset,” a neighborhood preservationist, Jack Spicer, told me...

...A friend once described Hyde Park as “Berkeley with snow,” and it does indeed have the same graduate-student fl avor, the same political activism and boho intellectualism, the same alarmingly high number of men wandering about looking like NPR announcers—the wispy beards and wire rims, the pressed jeans and unscuffed sneakers, the backpacks and the bikes...

...Obama’s neighborhood, Hyde Park, is on the South Side of Chicago, about seven miles from the Loop...

...I sat on a commission with his wife a few years ago...

...He greeted me with a friendly ‘hello,’ ” she testifi ed...

...Congratulations to Barack, our hometown hero...

...Culturally he’s never been a “South Sider,” because no one on the south side thinks of Hyde Park as a South Side neighborhood...

...Here, too, is the mansion he bought in 2005, with the proceeds from his two bestselling books in which he speaks fondly of the life he has built here...

...Not just talk about it...

...For 25 years he led the congregation at KAM Isaiah Israel, a synagogue across the street from Obama’s mansion...

...Now everybody’s happy...

...The two of them, they’re utterly conventional people...

...Only after a day or so do you notice what’s not here...

...This is their neighborhood...

...The fancy restaurant, too, was encouraged by the university as something its cultured faculty would like, and as a place where parents might take their student children on campus visits...

...Recently, the Secret Service contingent has been using its bathrooms...

...Hyde Park has always been relatively affl uent, but the neighborhood’s character was changed forever beginning in the mid-1950s, when university offi - cials orchestrated an ambitious scheme of urban renewal, paid for by the city and federal governments...

...It’s the theme of his life, as he himself tells the story...

...Voters often feel that incidentals like these reveal something essential about a potential president...

...On three sides it is closed in by some of the most hellish slums in the country, miles of littered streets, acres of abandoned lots, block after block of shuttered storefronts and empty apartment buildings left over from the 19th century...

...There’s nowhere to buy a pair of pants or shoes...

...Rabbi Arnold Wolf told me, when I stopped by his Hyde Park house one afternoon for a talk...

...So when the neighborhood’s only large grocery store failed recently— it was a customer-owned cooperative, whose empty shelves and accumulated gunk attested to its Soviet-like disdain for market forces—the university subsidized a new outlet from a “gourmet” grocery chain...

...Obama’s casual dismissal led people all across America, people who live in all kinds of communities without bombers, to look at each other and say: “Wow, what kind of neighborhood does Barack live in...

...Hyde Park lacks the freewheeling energy of a college town, and it lacks the surprises and variety of a healthy city neighborhood...

...The irony would be funny if it weren’t so jarring: Black America, after 400 years of enforced secondclass status, offers the country a plausible presidential candidate, and what’s the charge made against him...

...They wanted a comfortable place for the upper class to live,” said Spicer, the preservationist...

...It means you think maybe you’re better than you are...

...others came under the infl uence of Allan Bloom, the Straussian philosopher, who ran the university’s Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, along with a few classically minded scholars...

...But in Hyde Park urban renewal worked like a Swiss watch...

...It’s not often noted that the neighborhood’s diversity has its limits...

...By contrast, politicians from Hyde Park, white or black, actively opposed the machine and the headlock it had on the city’s politics...

...It’s an anomaly that the writer and cultural critic Andrew Patner, a native Hyde Parker, tried to explain to me as we drove around the neighborhood one day...

...The U.S...

...The isolation brings a whiff of unreality to the neighborhood...

...Everyone seems from somewhere else...

...Not ‘Berkeley with snow,’ ” a U. of C. professor said, when I mentioned my friend’s comment to him...

...I said right away: ‘Here’s a guy who could sell our product, and sell it with splendor!’ ” I asked him what the Hyde Park product was...

...Hyde Park isn’t a town but, with a population of roughly 35,000, depending on who’s counting and how, it is pretty small: 15 city blocks from north to south, another 15 or so from Washington Park on the west to its eastern boundary at the shore of Lake Michigan...

...Hyde Park’s the neighborhood he returned to, the place he’d chosen to live, and its roots were torn out 50 years ago...

...Here he courted his future wife, who grew up in the nearby neighborhood of South Shore, and here his children were born and now attend (private) school...

...Whether you take the freeway or the surface streets, the route jolts you from the manicured quiet of Hyde Park through one bombed-out neighborhood after another...

...Pretentious...

...We had a party for him at our house when he was just starting, back in the Nineties...

...The other upside, said Patner, is that “because he came up through Hyde Park instead of the machine, he stayed clear of all the corruption that’s involved with that...

...You don’t have all the students who dropped out of school or graduated and refused to leave...

...He was always one of my quietest customers,” said the owner of the local video store...

...What survived the wrecking ball was equally desirable: the mansions built during the neighborhood’s day as the The Obama home (center) in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood city’s Gold Coast, in the 1890s, when it drew Armours, Swifts, and other monied families looking for a lakeside home...

...It’s not radical...

...You notice there’s no class confl ict here...

...In the middle of the 1950s, the university thought they were in the middle of an emergency...

...The neighborhood’s famous racial harmony is the result...

...The paternalism is less obvious because it has never been racial...

...It made you wonder...

...One local mother recalled standing next to him at a Halloween parade...

...By the end of it the neighborhood had been reconfi gured physically and redefi ned socially...

...Then you arrive at Trinity, hard against the roaring freeway, at the edge of a district of blond-brick bungalows, some tidy and trim, others obscured by weeds, the shutters off their hinges...

...Just another guy in the neighborhood...

...A college town, it has all the churning and transience the phrase implies...

...This had consequences for Obama’s political future...

...You can’t say Barack’s a product of Hyde Park...

...One upside is that Obama, the Hyde Parker, was automatically more appealing—less threatening—to white liberals, in Hyde Park and beyond...

...Most found in Obama instead a mintperfect expression of their particular brand of politics...

...What better way to defi ne what you’re all about than where you choose to live and bring up your family...

...The Armours, Swifts, and the other fi rst families of Chicago left long ago...

...But the similarities can be overdone...

...Hyde Parkers sometimes seem strangely unaware of how completely their neighborhood’s uniqueness is a product of the university’s noblesse oblige...

...The Olin Center closed its doors in 2005...

...Brookline was an eddy of American life, a pocket of preciosity set apart from the world that most Americans struggle through, and Republican operatives made it a symbol of Dukakis’s disconnection from the common man...

...There were pages of testimonials from neighbors, shopkeepers, political activists, and his barber, too...