The crazy uncles in Obama's attic

Hyde Park's intellectual life has been dominated by two contradictory strains. The first is neoconservatism: Allan Bloom wrote "The Closing of the American Mind" at U. of C., and Paul Wolfowitz studied under Leo Strauss. The second and by far numerically superior force is the humorless liberalism that makes every elite campus such an anal-retentive place. Hyde Park is our most uptight neighborhood. In 1995, the Princeton Review named U. of C. America's "worst party school," inspiring this joke: "Q: How many University of Chicago students does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Quiet! I'm trying to study in the dark." The neighborhood invariably elects a goo-goo alderman who pulls killjoy stunts like, you know, asking to see what's in the mayor's budget before voting on it. The most famous, Leon Despres, who just turned 100, once spent five days at Trotsky's place in Mexico City. The only reason Hyde Parkers don't drive Volvos is that they're too long to parallel park.

Obama began teaching constitutional law at U. of C. in 1993. When he decided to run for state Senate, in 1995, his district encompassed Hyde Park, as well as the weary black neighborhoods to the west, with threadbare street corners that might hold a liquor store, or a chicken shack. (It did not include Trinity United.) One of his first campaign events was at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers and Dohrn were the '60s most glamorous radical couple: the Bonnie and Clyde of the Weather Underground, they spent 11 years underground after an accidental bombing that destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three of their comrades. Ayers came from an upper-class background -- his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison -- so when he came in from the cold, he didn't do prison time, the way some biker toolbox bomber would have. Instead, he became a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a fixture in Hyde Park liberal circles. The outgoing state senator, Alice Palmer, introduced Obama to local activists at the home of Ayers and Dohrn. Obama later served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, which supports projects in poor Chicago communities. Ayers is also a member of Public Square, which organizes events that combine arts with social justice.

"Bill and Bernardine are respected members of the community," says a friend of the couple. "He's extremely involved in education policy nationally."

Another acquaintance, though, calls him a "narcissist," because he promoted his memoir "Fugitive Days" by saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers posed for Chicago magazine with an American flag wadded at his feet.

In Hyde Park, Obama also met Rashid Khalidi, who recently became the first Arab-American scholar to make the pages of the National Enquirer, where he was called "a harsh critic of Israel" in an article titled "Obama's Secrets."

In 2000, when Khalidi was a professor at U. of C., he held a coffee for Obama's congressional campaign. I was at the event, which Obama attended with his wife, Michelle, and their toddler Malia. Khalidi's wife, Mona, set out pita and hummus and Khalidi, a Christian Arab born in New York to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, praised Obama in unaccented English. Khalidi was head of the Center of International Studies, so his support suggested Obama was a faculty darling. There was talk that year that Obama was backed by a "Hyde Park Project" -- a group of well-funded, mostly white intellectuals aiming to push him up the political ladder.

Khalidi is a proponent of a Palestinian state, and has represented Palestine at international conferences, but he also recognizes Israel's right to exist.

Like Ayers and Obama, Khalidi was a member of the Woods Fund board, where he granted $75,000 to the Arab American Action Network, which was run by his wife. The AAAN is a social service agency aiding Southwest Side Arabs, but the right-wing Web site World Net Daily nonetheless has insisted it is anti-Israeli. That wasn't radicalism, it was nepotism, Chicago style.

Obama's tenure as Hyde Park's state senator gave him two advantages he has used to become the Democratic front-runner. The first is his ability to build a biracial coalition. Representing the campus and the 'hood, Obama had to appeal to educated whites and inner-city blacks. Those groups are now the pillars of his presidential support. As a state senator, he promoted bills that pleased both constituencies: opposing racial profiling, reforming death penalty laws, stiffening ethics requirements for legislators, providing health insurance for poor children.

Obama has also benefited from the district's leftist, academic bent. In Hyde Park, he ran with a crowd that harshly opposed this country's policies in the Middle East. Khalidi has gone so far as to say "we owe reparations to the Iraqi people." When Obama spoke against the Iraq war in 2002, it was hardly a gutsy stand. (He didn't have to take a stand at all, since the Illinois General Assembly can't declare war on foreign countries.) But it looks good now next to Hillary Clinton's "aye" vote. Obama comes off as a principled progressive because he represented a district that demanded clean government and liberal social policies -- values cherished by activist Democrats.

To Obama's credit, he hasn't repudiated anyone from his past. His campaign strategist, David Axelrod, admits that Obama and Ayers are "friendly." And Obama denounced Wright's comments without rejecting the man himself. How can he? Wright played an important role in shaping him as a politician. Ayers and Khalidi nudged him along the way. To apologize for knowing them would be to apologize for who he is: an African-American, a Christian, a city dweller, an academic, a liberal. Most of those would be exotic qualities in a president. And maybe that's the real problem.