Efforts to explain Barack Obama have usually focused on his roots—his mother's Kansas background, the exotic Hawaiian islands of his early years, even his remote antecedents among Kenya's goat herders. But most reporters, and even Obama himself, have said little about his home for the last 20 years—the Hyde Park neighbourhood on Chicago's south side. I grew up in Hyde Park, and I'd argue that this quirky place is a big reason for his success. Equally, it may keep him from the presidency.
A small, tree-lined area of about one square mile, Hyde Park is home to about 50,000 people. It was a Lake Michigan resort before being incorporated into Chicago in the 19th century. In 1892, the University of Chicago was founded here. Modelled on Oxbridge, it laid down grass-lined courtyards and quadrangles. The scale of Hyde Park is small, even cosy, with many detached houses built in a mix of stone, brick and wood. Robie House, the epitome of Frank Lloyd Wright's "prairie houses," sits on the edge of the university campus.
Historically, Hyde Park is famous for being bohemian in a city that isn't at all, possessing coffee houses long before Starbucks was born, and drawing in enough sandal-wearing lefties to be called the Berkeley of the midwest. Its famous residents include Saul Bellow (between wives), the crime writer Sara Paretsky and, since the late 1980s, Barack Obama. For a long time, Hyde Park was the one place in Chicago where you could buy the London Review of Books. Most importantly, the neighbourhood has stood out for its racial integration—something almost unique in a city whose racial housing patterns constituted a de facto apartheid.
Yet growing up in Hyde Park, for many years there was also a sense of threat from the black ghetto that surrounded it on three sides. Racial tensions ran high; so did crime. The university, where both my parents taught, found it hard to persuade faculty and students to live in Hyde Park. Murders were common; the university's police force was the second largest in Illinois.
These days, for the first time, a majority of Hyde Park residents are African-American, after years of the university fighting fiercely to keep a white majority. But these new inhabitants are mainly affluent, not the feared ghetto émigrés. As one white long-time resident has told me, "Early in the morning, I can jog all the way to 39th Street now, no problem. I pass black people all the time, but without feeling any apprehension—why should I? They're all richer than me." A substantial black middle class has emerged in Chicago, and much of it wants to live in Hyde Park, where there are good schools (especially the University Laboratory Schools, which Obama's children attend), good housing, and where a black face isn't a novelty.
The impact of living in this semi-utopian multiracial community has influenced Obama's own careful juggling act—counting on black votes without ostentatiously presenting himself as a black candidate. Obama has avoided black-only politics in his campaign, and many other black politicians have accused him of "racial betrayal." Unsurprisingly, then, Obama doesn't emphasise his years in middle-class Hyde Park. Yet he knows that whatever politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton say, Obama will always command black votes against a white candidate. To the black community as a whole he is a hero, because of his unprecedented success in the white man's game of presidential politics.
If Hyde Park has proved a catalyst for Obama's attempt at a raceless campaign, his 12 years (1992-2004) teaching at the neighbourhood's citadel, the University of Chicago, also played a role. Associated with more Nobel laureates than any university in the world, Chicago is renowned for its sober intellectualism, unleavened by the social frivolities found in the ivy league—no secret societies, no Skull and Bones.
Although Obama repeatedly turned down a full-time post at the university, he taught three law courses a year, and as state senator he used the law school as a base. Geof Stone, the provost who originally hired Obama, admits that in the first few years, nobody thought of him as particularly special. "Nobody saw an aura. He was just a talented, attractive African-American guy." But when Obama delivered his now famous speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, Stone says, "I was completely blown away. I'd never seen him do anything like that." Although Obama was popular with his students, Stone remembers that "he was not a proselytiser… He was effective in getting students to understand issues, not persuading them what they should think about them. He's a very empathic person."
Empathic, and very smart. Hillary Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law School, and no slouch, but Douglas Baird, a former colleague of Obama's at Chicago, claims that intellectually, she isn't even in the same league. "Obama and I often disagreed," Baird says, "yet I never left a discussion without knowing he'd understood my point of view."
Because Hyde Park is traditionally liberal, Obama's detractors are keen to tar him with a leftist brush. Yet the university may have reinforced his pragmatism and moderated his politics; for all its early leftist reputation, it has been home to Milton Friedman and Allan Bloom. Former teachers include the conservative judge Richard Posner and right-wing supreme court justice Antonin Scalia. The law school has close ties to the business school and the economics department—an institutional triumvirate of conservative thought.
With the most liberal voting record in the Senate, Obama is no closet conservative. The closest he had to a judicial mentor is Cass Sunstein—a long-time Chicago professor, now at Harvard—who is a well-known liberal. Yet Sunstein is also a judicial minimalist, something that jars with liberals who would like to see courts dictate social policy, and he advocates using behavioural economics to gauge the real impact of legal decisions (he is co-author of the recent book Nudge). Obama often seems similarly wary of government regulation.
The picture that emerges of Obama is of a remarkably unpartisan intelligence. Like Hyde Park's racial integration, Obama's tempered, civilised discourse is exceptional in a polarised America, and often resented. The last eight years may have made voters more receptive to the idea of someone with brains in the White House. Yet it may be precisely Obama's intelligence that keeps him out. With the advent of Sarah Palin, we're unlikely to hear much of Hyde Park's racial harmony or intellectualism—the blue-collar votes he needs are not keen on either. Professors have never played well in Peoria.
