madtown, chitown vibes
Splitting time between Madison and Hyde Park is like living in an America where Obama was elected a year ago. The McCain loyalists are few and far between. But the two places are not the same. There are important differences.
Our quiet, genteel neighborhood in Madison, with lots of modestly stylish mid-century homes tucked into wooded slopes, is all about the signs. You still see IMPEACH yard signs around here. At about when the RNC was going on, a single McCain sign went up on our street. Within a couple weeks eight or nine yard and window Obama signs went up in the immediately neighboring homes. This, on a street in a bourgeois neighborhood which gets hardly any thru traffic. It is really happening: sign wars.
In Hyde Park the mood is a little different. The signs aren't out in as great a force. The bumper stickers are legion, but once you get into the t-shirts and trinkets, it's all about the grassroots. And the hustling. Many neighborhood retailers offer some product with an Obama angle. In other words, the Obama imprint is visible, but compared to what's going on in Madison, the campaign is less present. Of course, it goes without saying that Hyde Park is attracting a lot of national attention and curiosity. WaPo is the latest to take a stab at it.
In both places I detect anxiety. In Madison, it's about Obama losing. Can't let it happen! Fine, I can relate. Especially given Sarah Palin! But in Hyde Park there seems to be a weird kind of dual anxiety. First, the losing. Same psychology there. But then there is the winning. How good a job is Obama going to do, we wonder. And in Hyde Park, this goes beyond the boilerplate leftist lowering the expectations we have of any Democrat. In Hyde Park I think there is a particular touch of second-guessing that somehow goes like this: the diversity of Hyde Park is no small achievement, it is true, and Obama will represent this part of the American social mosaic well on the national and international stage. But being Hyde Parkers, somewhere deep down we also know that simply being accepting of each other, independent-minded, and socially aware is not sufficient for high functioning. Or even low functioning. Hyde Park is not exactly a place where everybody gets along all the time. Sometimes it feels like a place where everybody has learned to live with a certain constant level of social tension. And as anybody involved in any number of neighborhood issues knows, Hyde Park can be extremely dysfunctional.
