The meteoric rise of Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.  And it has people trying to better understand The Chicago Way.

It brought Andrew Ferguson to explore Hyde Park, which Obama called home for most of adult life (before investing in a property in the Kenwood neighborhood with Tony Rezko).

Although Ferguson paints an accurate picture of how isolated Hyde Park is from the rest of the city, due to an extensive urban renewal program and the enormous influence of the University of Chicago, he underestimates how out of touch the Hyde Park menatlity is to most other places.  One of his sources is Rabbi Arnold Wolf:

“Barack is perfect for the neighborhood!” Rabbi Arnold Wolf told me, when I stopped by his Hyde Park house one afternoon for a talk. He’s as round and white-bearded as Santa, with the same twinkle. He came to Hyde Park before urban renewal and saw its effects firsthand. For 25 years he led the congregation at KAM Isaiah Israel, a synagogue across the street from Obama’s mansion. (Recently, the Secret Service contingent has been using its bathrooms.)

“You can’t say Barack’s a product of Hyde Park. He’s not really from here. But everybody saw the potential early on. We had a party for him at our house when he was just starting, back in the Nineties. 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.

“People think we’re radicals here, wild-eyed!” he said. “Bill Ayers–I know Bill Ayers very well. Bill Ayers is an aging, toothless radical. A pussycat. And his wife, too. I sat on a commission with his wife a few years ago. My god, she was more critical of the left than I was! The two of them, they’re utterly conventional people. They had a violent streak at one time. But now–they’re thoroughly conventional, just very nice, well-educated people from the neighborhood.”

Ferguson, to his credit, then quotes a recent blog posting from Ayers calling the US the real terrorist.  But he neglects to give readers background on his source:

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf is also a Reform rabbi who was one of the earliest Jewish advocates for “dialogue” with the PLO (he himself met with the PLO back in the 1970’s) and was a founding member of Breira, a short-lived organization whose only purpose was to urge Israel to give into Arab pressure and give up land for peace. We all know how that worked out.

***

Rabbi Wolf thinks Obama would be good for Israel, and that he is a friend of the Jews. In fact, if he has any criticism of Obama at all, it’s that he’s not radical enough in demanding Israel make “painful concessions.”

Thus, Wolf’s opinion of Ayers is hardly shocking.  Further examples of how Obama and Hyde Park are seen as (shocka) elitist by much of the rest of the city can be found in a March 17, 2000 piece from the Chicago Reader about the campaign for Bobby Rush’s House seat (which Obama lost, natch):

Lu Palmer, a radio talk show host and chairman of the Black Independent Political Organization, dismisses Obama as arrogant and compares him to Mel Reynolds, who went from a Rhodes Scholarship to Congress to prison.

“When Obama first hit town, my recollection is that he came here running some voter registration drive,” Palmer said. “He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn’t like his arrogance, his air.”

Indeed, the Reader article illustrates just how consistent Obama — and others’ perceptions of him — have been through the years.  The only difference now is that Obama is paying his debts to the city’s machine politics and cozying up to the Wall Streeters and lobbyists he pretends to disdain.

Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide. — Jim Malone.

At least it does once you get outside the isolated and out-of-touch enclave of Hyde Park.

(h/t Memeorandum.)