After writing three major cover stories about Barack Obama’s books, his speeches and his tony Chicago neighborhood, Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard probably knows as much about Sen. Obama as any conservative writer and reporter can know at this point.

Ferguson’s first piece, “The Literary Obama” on Feb. 12, 2007, was a double review of Obama’s 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” which he found praiseworthy for many artistic and intellectual reasons, and Obama’s 200x campaign book “The Audacity of Hope,” which Ferguson found stereotypically dull and ruined by its super-cautious politics.

On March 24 of this year Ferguson’s examined the “The Timeless Wit & Wisdom of Barack Obama” and found that a lot of his best political phrases sounded, well, very, very familiar. The cover of the latest Weekly Standard carries “Mr. Obama’s Neighborhood,” the results of Ferguson’s recent visit to Hyde Park, the unique, upscale Chicago neighborhood Sen. Obama has lived in most of his adult life. I talked to Ferguson on Wednesday by phone from his offices in Washington.

Q: They haven’t officially given you the Barack Obama beat at the Weekly Standard have they?

A: No. (laughs)

Q: Which of your “studies” of Obama’s life told you most about his character?

A: First of, it was early on very apparent to me that he was going to be the most interesting candidate that the country had seen in a presidential race in a long time. I always thought he had a chance to win. I had been watching him in that sense for quite a while. By far the most revealing thing about him is the books that he wrote. Anyone who rally wants to understand Obama has to read those books, particularly the first one, which is a straight out memoir that was written – well, I don’t know if could say it was written before he was considering running for president, because I think that occurred to him when he was about four, and he’s been doing it ever since; but it was written in more of a free-wheeling sort of way than the second book, which has a lot of policy wonkery in it. I think anybody who reads that book will get an excellent sense of who Obama is as a person and how he wants to present himself to people.

Q: What would be the best qualities that shine through?

A: Well, the first thing is intelligence, which is vast, I think. The second is his personal sensitivity, which is almost a romantic sensitivity to his own feelings but also to the feelings and perspectives of other people and he’s able to put this in a literary sort of way, which I think is extremely rare in a politician. The gifts of a good politician are totally different from the gifts of a good writer, but he somehow has both. The book is just beautifully written, beautifully paced, and filled with wonderful stories, beautiful characterization. The dialogue is of a kind you’d find in a book by a veteran literary artist. But in between the lines are the things that you need to know about Obama – which is that he deeply, deeply wants to be loved by people. He is given to a kind of rumination that doesn’t stop. He’s kind of a on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand kind of guy. I think this is where the charge or suspicion that he is weak comes from, because he is just habitually thinking one side and then other side and never really coming down on one side or the other. That’s something that I think will play out in the campaign.

Q: You saw that in “The Audacity of Hope” as well?

A: Of course “The Audacity of Hope” is something that was written after he was in the state legislature for 10 years, and you really see the shrinking that can take place in a human being by professional politics. There, he goes off on the one hand on the other hand sort of thing in examining one political thing and another – and never comes down anywhere but on the doctrinaire liberal side of an issue. It’s as predicable as can be and it’s very disappointing, especially to someone like me who read the first book first and really had high hopes that here was a guy who wasn’t moved by the kind of rigid ideologies that move some other political activists. But you really do see that essentially he’s a liberal Democrat with now I would say this sort of veneer of on the one hand on the other hand sensitivity to opposing viewpoints.

Q: You did a cover piece for the Standard called “The Wit and Wisdom of Barack Obama,” which deconstructed Obama’s speeches. You said as a speech giver he is getting away with murder and that he is “a master of le baloney.” A: Well, just watching the campaign unfold I was astonished at people going ape over his speeches, as though they were models of originality and insight, when to my ear – and I don’t think I’m that old but maybe I am – I just kept hearing the same political clichés I had been hearing for 40 years. So with the aid of Nexis and Google, I went through these speeches and started copying down some of the phrases that had sent college students across the country into a St. Vitas dance, just into a tizzy. Sure enough, nearly every one of them is just boilerplate.

Q: For example would be?

A: “We’re going to choose hope over fear.” Well, OK, great – who doesn’t want to do that? But it just happens to be a phrase that Al Gore used in 2000 and Bill Clinton used in 1992. It probably goes back to Adlai Stevenson or someone. But people would swoon when he’d say these things. Now partly it’s because of his incredible personal presence and that beautiful voice that he’s got. And he’s developed a mannerism that is quite effective in delivering a speech. This is the thing that scared the Founding Fathers – that people could fall in love with the sound of words and never stop to think about the ideas the politics is presenting are. It’s clearly what’s happening with Obama.

Q: You said “his speeches were meant to be succumbed to, not thought about.”

A: Right. In a way it’s kind of emasculating the audience. I think that’s a very dangerous thing in a political audience.

Q: You say it’s kind of not fair to complain that Obama’s speeches are filled with these shopworn phrases because almost every politician has done it since the beginning of time – their recycling the same four phrases. So what’s your most damning critique of Obama’s oratory?

A: I don’t think it should just be placed on him. He’s doing what he can get away with. It falls on the audience and the people in the press who treat him as though he’s the second coming of Pericles, instead of just mouthing platitudes that should be familiar to anyone who’s followed politics for the last 50 years. So I don’t really blame him. He’s doing the minimum necessary to send the people into the stratosphere. I wrote that piece before he did his much-praised speech on race. Now that is a speech that I think bears closer examination. I think it’s a very weak speech and filled with all kinds of logical holes. But that’s a more substantial thing.

Q: You just spent a lot of time in Sen. Obama’s neighborhood of Hyde Park. “Mr. Obama’s Neighborhood” makes it sound like Hyde Park is quite the bastion of upper class white liberals and black liberals…

A: Yes.

Q: And it seems pretty artificial, pretty over-planned, pretty over-regulated. Every city it seems has some kind of neighborhood like this, where commerce has been stripped from the landscape and everybody’s house better be tidy or the lawn police or shrub police will get them.

A: Right. The important thing about it is that it even Obama’s friends and supporters say that it does tell you something about a man where he lives and where he chooses to raise a family – especially in Obama’s case, where this is really the only place he’s ever lived as an adult other than time he’s spent in school. It’s interesting on its face. But Hyde Park is also interesting because it really is unusual, even for these other urban neighborhoods that are hyper-regulated, because it really is a creature of the University of Chicago, which 50 years ago undertook this massive urban renewal and essentially remade the neighborhood that UC was in the middle of. They made it safe for University of Chicago people. So all the poor people were bulldozed out, except on the very marginal parts of the neighborhood. A sort of a moat, an urban buffer, was created around the neighborhood to keep out poor people, essentially. Blacks were welcomed to a certain extent, but mostly blacks who could afford to live there as the housing values went up. So it became a place not segregated by race but really segregated by class – by design of the University of Chicago. So there’s this sense of un-rootedness to the place. You don’t have a sense of being in a place that has a past and a history and deep roots.

Q: You said it’s like a college town.

A: Yeah, it’s like a college town, but it doesn’t even have that kind of vibrancy, partly because it’s the University of Chicago and partly because it doesn’t have the amenities that a college town has, being surrounded by these ghettos.

I thought this does explain a few things that people have noted about Obama. One of them is his elitism, which I think is probably real and is probably almost reflexive with him now. It’s surfaced here and there – his famous comment about Western Pennsylvania people clinging to religion. He talks about “the coldness of capitalism” in some of his early writing. He talks about his mother fleeing “the smugness and hypocrisy of the middle West.” It’s this kind of basically academic, PC view of the ordinary course of American life. It tells you that Hyde Park is completely detached from those normal flows of middle class America. It’s interesting that he would choose that place to live. Now I don’t think this disqualifies him from the presidency or anything. I mean, the left-wing blogosphere has gone ape about this piece – they’ve said it’s the “right-wing slime machine” and all that. I could talk until I’m blue in the face and probably nobody would believe the truth – that I actually wrote this piece in good faith because I was curious about what this neighborhood was like. I just think it’s interesting. You can’t psychologize the thing over much, but it’s still an interesting angle to this extremely interesting and complicated person. Continued...