Obama's Chicago Blues

By Sasha Issenberg, Globe Staff

When a Republican National Committee "research briefing" came out earlier this week titled "Razzle Dazzle: Chicago Star Obama Continues His All Show, No Substance Campaign With Event On Broadway," some cried racism. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo cited the RNC's claim that Obama was "intellectually lazy" as an "allusion to generations of stereotypes
about black men."

When a charge of intellectual laziness is lodged against a black man who is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law and former member of the University of Chicago faculty, it may not only be racially allusive but evidence of an odd lack of confidence in the institutions of American meritocracy. But buried beneath is a suggestion of a new line of Republican attack against Obama: that he is from Chicago.

Obama has been generally masterful at introducing himself to the country as a man from Illinois, with a halo of Midwestern common sense. Chicago, where Obama relocated after law school and represented a state senate district on the city's South Side, carries different connotations in the American mind -- big-city corruption, big-city crime, big-city identity politics -- that, too, carry racial associations of their own. Ronald Reagan was fond of citing a fictitious "Chicago welfare queen" when he wanted to paint a picture of lazy, urban entitlement. In the vernacular of Democratic primary politics, Illinois is Paul Simon and Chicago is Jesse Jackson.

One of Obama's greatest coups in the campaign came in eschewing the habit of announcing a candidacy from one's hometown and instead doing it in the city where he built his political career -- Springfield, the downstate capital of Illinois, a landscape that suggested the placeless prairie moderation Obama has tried to make his defining characteristic in the campaign.

The RNC, in embracing a code word that would tag Obama as just another big-city black pol, may have signaled that it would prefer to remind general-election voters of the head-fake non-announcement of candidacy Obama pulled off two months before the Springfield speech.

Last December, to kick off an installment of "Monday Night Football," Obama put on a Bears hat and, looking straight into the camera, laughed. By next November, Obama may wish he had stocked up on Fighting Illini merchandise instead.