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Chicago is a tough place to pull together. It's a city with an immensely strong and richly earned civic sense of pride. Frequent visitors will note how it has improved greatly as an urban place in the past quarter-century, in contrast to the relative decline of its sister city, Toronto.

Nonetheless, it's a city of income and racial divides that are not easy to bridge. Perhaps as a result, its municipal governance featured machine politics for much of the past century, with strong mayors at the top, the two Daleys, Richard Sr. and Richard Jr., being the obvious examples.

For a black man to conquer Chicago was impossible for a long time, and difficult after that. Harold Washington did it in 1983 to become the city's first black mayor. And Barack Obama did it en route to becoming President of the United States.

Chicago is Mr. Obama's town - not his birthplace, but the city where he began his political ascent. Today, his administration is full of associates from Chicago who helped him up the greased pole to the presidency.

It took remarkable skill, as black man, to climb up through Chicago. As David Remnick chronicles in his absorbing biography of Mr. Obama, The Bridge, he had to navigate the many whirlpools of the city's black community and then link himself to the white establishment, the influential Jewish community and the multiplicity of ethnic and civic associations that make Chicago the prototypical polyglot U.S. city.

As Mr. Remnick shows, Mr. Obama had the right combination of personality, intellect and approach to make the necessary connections, literally and psychologically, with the peoples of Chicago and, later, with the voters of Illinois and the United States.

From his earliest student days, Mr. Obama was a conciliator, not an ideologue. Time and again, as an undergraduate, law student and legislator, he tried to form coalitions. He absorbed from his law teachers at Harvard University the lesson that the most successful lawyer should understand the other side's brief as well as advocates for that brief.

In a telling moment of his life, described by Mr. Remnick in considerable detail, Mr. Obama was elected as head of the Harvard Law Review because student conservatives at the law school, with whom obviously he did not agree, nonetheless felt that he listened to and was more respectful of them than the other liberal candidates.

Mr. Obama as a coalition-builder and listener, rather than some "socialist" as the Tea Party nutters and their radio shouters call the President, is the convincing portrait Mr. Remnick draws.

Alas, for him in the White House, the society he governs - or at least its political system - is so divided and partisan that the hand-across-the-aisle strategy hasn't worked yet. And, chances are, it will not, what with the Republicans in full ideological bray and set to make gains in the fall midterm elections.

From health care to climate change, from financial regulation to tackling the deficit, Republicans just didn't and don't want to co-operate with Mr. Obama. They have become more ideological than ever, with their grassroots defeating, frightening or pulling to the right candidates and legislators who, while not exactly being moderate, were nonetheless capable on certain issues of at least trying to work with the other side.

You can see Mr. Obama's disinclination to be as ideological (the lesson about him from Mr. Remnick's book) in the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. He could have nominated, as many liberals wanted, a candidate with a track record suggesting a battle on the court with the four redoubtable conservative judges who usually get their way. Instead, Ms. Kagan appears by all accounts to be mildly liberal, best known for working well with conservatives while she was dean at Harvard Law.

Mr. Obama has been trying to turn his country toward at least facing some of its immense problems, without the kind of success he obviously would have liked.

He tried, for example, to get the Republicans to face the country's biggest problem: the growing debt, which the Congressional Budget Office predicts will grow by $9.7-trillion from 2011 to 2020, producing a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90 per cent without remedial action. They refused an offer of a bipartisan congressional committee, so Mr. Obama established a committee of civilians instead to advise the country.

Regrettably, it's doubtful in the current climate that many Americans will listen.

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