Chicago, Part Two

November 17, 2012 By 5 Comments

 

The Obama house in Chicago, located in an otherwise rather dense urban area

 

Continuing my account of the tour of Chicago that my wife and I took for four hours on Friday:

 

We drove by the house in which Barack Obama was living when he was elected to the Senate and then to the presidency.  It’s very near the University of Chicago, and is, by some distance, one of the nicest houses in the area.  Multistory, unusually big yard, quite large.  Our tour guide was rhapsodic about “Our President.”  He invited us to take an “Obama tour” of the city, told us tales about  the experiences of Mr. Obama’s barber with the great man, etc., etc.  My (irreverent) unasked question was, How did somebody whose background was in community organizing and the state senate manage to get such an impressive mansion?  Later, as we were driving through the Hyde Park neighborhood, our guide told us that it was the most diverse part of Chicago, and that Mitt Romney got virtually no votes there.  Several of the other academics on the bus cooed their admiration of so wonderful a neighborhood — there is very little meaningful diversity among leading universities and colleges in America (one thinks of the late art critic Clement Greenberg’s description of certain intellectuals as “a herd of independent minds”)  – but my wife asked just exactly wherein the neighborhood’s diversity was supposed to consist, if virtually everybody in it voted in lockstep for Barack Obama.  The question obviously caught our guide somewhat by surprise, and he stammered a bit.  So I helped him out:  ”You meant,” I said, “that Hyde Park is ideologically monochrome but ethnically diverse.”  ”Yeah,’ he responded.  ”Ethnically diverse.”

 

Well, there’s still more to be reported from the Chicago tour.  But I’ll have to return to that later.  It’s getting late.

 

I spent most of today in the conference book display.  Absolutely impoverishingly wonderful, as always.  And then my wife and I attended an excellent evening session about the reliability of the New Testament.  (I’ll report on that in more detail tomorrow, perhaps.)  And we ended the evening with a good meal at The Italian Village on Monroe.

 

Posted from Chicago, Illinois.

 

 

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Filed Under: Uncategorized 5 Comments
  • Rick

    “Utah Professor Saves Wife From Chicago Mob, Film at Eleven!”

  • joe etheridge

    last Dec we did a “Moonlight” tour of DC on one of the old looking bus type vehicles. hit quite a few sites in the 2 hours, oh and there was a full moon shining upon DC that cool & crisp evening! our tour guide was a well read gentleman, as he spoke not only of stops on the tour, but many past & present Supreme Court Cases and extensive history lessons of early American settlements of the surrounding area. most surprising to my wife & i, though he never blatantly removed himself from the fence…..we came to the conclusion our guide was somewhat conservative minded?

    though we wanted the experience of touring DC at night in such a group, the thought of being lead around by a partisan loudmouth almost caused us to dismiss the idea…….turned out well in the end! joe

    • danpeterson

      This guide of ours was very good, but I could have done without the partisan political stuff. My wife and I were, I’m guessing, the only conservatives on the bus. Except, perhaps, for a few foreign academics (from Japan, Korea, Austria, German, the Netherlands, and somewhere in Africa) — some of whom, I’m guessing, understood only about 10% of what the guide said. Who knows? They may have all been Goldwater Republicans at heart.

  • Raymond Takashi Swenson

    My understanding is that the Obamas got a very good deal on the house with the help of a politically connected gentleman who was interested in the influence BHO had as a US Senator. Mrs Obama had a job as an inhouse counsel for a local organization paying over $300,0000 a year, a job which they did not fill again when Mrs Obama left for Washington.

    • danpeterson

      An inspiring story of high achievement!