There Goes the Neighborhood

I promised I wouldn't get very political in my blog entries, but this time, the Republicans made it personal....

Apparently, pundits who are being paid to charge Barack Obama with being too liberal and too elite are skipping the fact he went to Harvard Law School and lived in Cambridge and instead are attacking where he lived and taught constitutional law: the University of Chicago and Hyde Park. One of the first articles was a Washington Post last Friday which said "Republicans plan to describe Obama as an elitist from the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where liberal professors mingle in an academic world that is alien to most working-class voters." The Weekly Standard featured an article, "Mr. Obama's Neighborhood," which described Hyde Park as "Berkeley with snow" and rampant with "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" as Berkeley. It ends, "[t]his is the perfect place for a man without an identity to make one of his own choosing."

Former and current Hyde Parkers were quick to defend their alma mater and its world. Thomas Frank in the Wall Street Journal pointed out the fallacy in the Republicans associating the UofC academia with liberalism, especially in a school home to Milton Friedman, Anthony Scalia, Allan Bloom, and a bunch of economists that helped a Chilean dictator. The Asian Times and Inside Higher Education are lamenting how one of the last bastions of academia is being defamed.


I guess my biggest problem with these articles is that they (purposefully) screwed up describing Hyde Park as another Berkeley or Cambridge. Well, its not; it has people who aren't just white and rich (just joking). There is nothing elite or extremely gentrified about it. There's a Starbucks next to Jimmy's. That's about it. There's no Apple stores or Abercrombie-malls anywhere and you're more likely to find Chardonnay drinking yuppies in Lincold Park than at the Med. Yeah, the UofC still is an ivory tower. But most of all, those articles miss how diverse the neighborhood is. Hyde Park does not have a classifiable identity because it doesn't adhere mindlessly to one doctrine or one party platform. Of all the neighborhoods of Chicago, it's the most diverse and most defiant. It also shows the limits of academic paternalism. co-existing with the UofC has its advantages (urban renewal, the UofC police, high incomes and property values) and its drawbacks (the UofC's intentions, the exclusion of lower-income minorities, the overpriced Co-op that's been replaced by a Treasure Island. But where else can a guy interview top Venezuelan businessmen at the GSB and then grab 40s of Steel Reserve with his SOUL friends? (that happened in one day).

So John McCain and his campaign is free to attack Obama; I mean it is an election. But mess with the UofC, caricature Hyde Park as some liberal elitist haven, there are a lot of UofC alum in high places who'd make you their bitch.

Still Getting Calls from the DNCC

I've stayed away from a political entry mainly because the primary season has been so long and volatile that there have been children conceived and born before it ended, including my newborn niece Kaitlyn, and really, I've been too damn busy with work and med school. Still, I've never shied away from debating my political views, whether or not it's my family, my peers, the New York City Police Department, or the Department of Defense. And everyone in my lab still wonders why I have a degree in Political Science and didn't think about the high-paying world of political operative (truth being, I'm too blunt and honest to spin. Bite me, Bill O'Reilly.)

So today I was listening to the radio to hear a woman talk about how she knew Senator Barack Obama follows closely Senator Clinton on most of the issues pertaining to women's rights, but she didn't care. She would vote for Senator John McCain in the fall and hope he screws up the next four years so badly that Hilary can run again in 2012. This wasn't NPR. This was Kiss 108. And her sentiments have been bounced all over message boards this past week.

Without interjecting my own political views, let's take this from a logical step. Now let's say that you are trying to nail something together to build an object. And your choices were a hammer... or a jigsaw. Let's say the choices for the hammer are a claw hammer or a framing hammer. And when you go get the hammer, you find your choice (claw, whatever) is gone. Would you really use a jigsaw to drive one nail because you don't prefer the framing hammer?

Now this was a really dumb-down, and blatant metaphor, but I think it works (maybe?) Hilary's was a flawed campaign. Obama's was not perfect. But if Clinton supporters believe that the change promised by her campaign are needed to fix this country, then they really should reconsider their threat to abstain from voting or voting for Senator McCain. Because when all the filters are applied, and all the sand is sifted, the two candidates for the Democratic nomination are incredibly close on the major, vital issues that make up governance of a nation. McCain is not close to Hillary's positions by a long shot.

Now whether or not you should support either platforms is a different issue.