The Obama Library (sorry) Center Accurately Represents its Subject

We look at the Obama (checks notes) Center and revisit its namesake's legacy.  

Transcript

The Obama Library (sorry) Center Accurately Represents its Subject

June 2026

By AD Tippet 

“It is not a presidential library but a gigantic, unmissable monument to the man and his administration. It appears completely out of context in the South Side’s Jackson Park, as though placed there by aliens.”

Kyle Smith

Mr. Williams told me that he wanted his design to be embraced by living Americans. “This is their Washington Monument,” he said. But that sublime monument was raised by a grateful nation, decades after that president’s death, as were those to Lincoln and Jefferson. This is a vanity project, and although it slipped in under the radar in the guise of that most innocuous of architectural objects, the “Presidential (yawn) Library,” it turned into something that would be recognized by Cheops, Trajan, and even Ozymandias himself.”

Michael J Lewis

“The Obamas’ not-so-secret superpower, and the only thing they’ve mastered, is the insidious culture and language of oppression and white guilt.”

Brian Allen

I love libraries.  From the age of 7 or 8 when I first discovered paleontology (Dinosaurs) I have rooted about them both in my various schools, and at the public version.  So it was a nature jump to presidential libraries.  I am registered with the National Archivist, part of the State Department, so that I can go into anyone and obtain materials (more on that later).  And politics do not matter here.  Whether is FDR’s in Hyde Park or Ike’s in Abilene I do not care.  So I was not as skeptical as some of the Obama version though I did approach the grandiosity of the project did fill me with wariness.  For a man who prides himself on cynicism I was naïve and should have known better.    

I am going to do you a favor, valuable reader.  Instead of getting an eye cramp trying like the devil to figure out what is etched on the side of the Obama Center museum tower, I am going to provide them here:

“You are America.

Unconstrained by habit and convention.

Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be...

The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’

‘We The People.’

‘We Shall Overcome.’

‘Yes We Can.’

That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.

Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.”

This excerpt comes from President Barack Obama’s 2015 speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches.

These words so much match the rhetoric from the man himself.  Pablum. Hollow. Vacuous.  Word salad.  This supposedly brilliant intellectual could produce no “New Birth of Freedom,” “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, “Shining City on a Hill” or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear Down that Wall.”  The difference of a great speech is the “opposed to what” question.  In the case of Lincoln, it was a choice of letting the South keep its slaves to reunite the nation.  The Gettysburg Address put paid to that.  Roosevelt’s famous line was a call to reason over emotion and to reassure a belief in the nation.  

So what the heck is his celebrated Selma speech about?

“That word (we) is owned by no one.”  So every time a Democrat says “we,” meaning their constituents, it is not really “owned” by them?    

“Unconstrained by habit and convention.”  So, all conventions are wrong?  

The “we?” A Democracy is not me, but a bunch of people?  This is the soaring rhetoric of a man who said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.”  I would have fired the speech writers.   

Obama’s speeches are the equivalent of McMansions that feature massive, imposing Greek columns, ornate facades, and sweeping driveways. However, step inside, and the illusion shatters: you are met with hollow-core doors, thin vinyl flooring, and cheap laminate finishes. 

Because Obama had a better handle on cadence, elocution, and snark than John McCain and Mitt Romney, and his 2008 Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, was one of the worst retail politicians in American history, he always looks better by comparison.  

I love to challenge people to quote a positive statement from Obama among the roughly 3,500 speeches, remarks, and public addresses during his eight years in office, including the Selma speech, that is remembered today.  They cannot do it. 

Now, let us look at the litany of other things he did say that are still quoted:

“They want you to have dirty water and dirty air.” A straw man argument about Republicans

“They cling to guns and religion.” A comment on many GOP voters. 

“If you like your doctor, you will keep your doctor.”  A comment to try to assuage concerns over the disruptions of the Affordable Care Act.  As it stands, 5 million were thrown off their private plans, and millions more were unable to keep their doctors.  

“Trayvon could be my son.” Obama is personalizing the death of a black youth at the hands of a half-Mexican, half-white man.    

As a conservative, let’s say I am not the biggest fan of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson.  But I cannot argue that they did big things, nor can I point to any sincere positives in the case of Roosevelt’s management of World War II or Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act.  

I cannot carve out successes with Obama aside from an act granted by the American people.  There was a time when I, too, was excited by him.  His 2004 Democratic Nomination speech, “No White America, No Black America, but a United States of America,” was arguably the only memorable positive rhetoric associated with his name.  And then he governed as a Democratic Party hack.  His two signature accomplishments, the Affordable Care Act and the Federalization of Student Loans, have only driven the costs of healthcare and education to rise precipitously.  His foreign policies, seeing the rise and rampage of ISIS, an aggressive Russia conquering the Crimea, and the Iranian Nuclear deal, were all abject failures.  And the one area of historical significance?  race relations, which, according to Pew Research, were positive over his first years, cratered in his second term.  And the timing is significant.  There is a narrative that the decline in race relations was in response to Obama’s election, but for four years, race relations were positive.  

Obama’s rhetoric was intentionally divisive: “The situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is, in too many parts of this country, a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color.” As Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute has pointed out, “This distrust was justified, in Obama’s view. He reinvoked the “diversity” bromide about the racial composition of police forces, implying that white officers cannot fairly police black communities. Yet some of the most criticized law-enforcement bodies in recent years have, in fact, been majority black.”

“We have made enormous progress in race relations,” Obama conceded. “But what is also true is that there are still problems, and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.. . . The law too often feels like it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion. . . . [T]hese are real issues. And we have to lift them up and not deny them or try to tamp them down.”

This, not the soaring rhetoric etched on a massive tower in letters eight feet tall, is Obama’s legacy.

History will decide on Obama’s mediocrity.  Yes, the first black president, and that is something, but that is far more about the innate goodness of many Americans than about some obscure Junior Senator from Illinois so vacuous that so many imprinted their feelings and hope inside him.  Obama did not lead; he existed, then he imbibed, and now he divides.  

As Charles CW Cooke wrote this past May, “Where Bill Clinton was a moderate (at least after 1994), Barack Obama merely played one on TV. He would posit ‘the one hand,’ and then posit the ‘other,” and then, however objectively ludicrous the spatial characterization might be, place himself right in the middle of the dispute. When he meant “Democrats,” he’d say “democracy.” When he meant progressivism, he’d say “common sense.” Even when he was doing something self-evidently grotesque — suing nuns for declining to provide contraception, for example, or supporting abortion up to the moment of birth — he’d coat his position in six tubs of treacle. If you could see it, it was infuriating.  He’s still doing it.” 

Whether field campaigning for Democratic candidates, weighing in on social media, putting his weight on the scales of the recent VA gerrymandering effort, or constantly promoting his center, Obama is everywhere.  My heart sank when I learned that he would, unlike all living presidents before him, maintain a home in Washington DC.  To paraphrase the rapper Eminem, Obama believes it would be so empty without him.  And the fact that he was in his mid-50s meant we would have him around for another 30 years. Sigh. 

But even a former president as ubiquitous as Obama can be ignored.  But this 20-acre tribute to his awesomeness?  It has variously been compared to a Star Wars Imperial Walker or the Death Star itself, a Star Trek Borg cube, a World War II German pillbox, and a trashcan but missing the swinging entry point on top.  

I do not really care what is looks like.  The Herman Wells library on the Indiana University puts the brutal in Brutalist architecture.  It is like they set out to make concrete look terrible.  And it contains thousands of history books.  The thing could like an architect on a cocaine bender made something resembling a combo of legos and Lincoln Logs and as long as it contained history, fine by me.  

Of the library, Michael Brendan Doghtery wrote, “Notably, despite being located near a university, this is the only presidential library without a physical archive where historians and biographers might dig and work. Instead, the president’s files are digitized on a website. Again, the library is like the presidency itself — filled with grand images and exhibits, but not offering the democratic people the substance they’ve come to expect.”

You saw that right.  It is a library without a … library. So what is the point again?  Adjusting for inflation, the nearby Chicago Museum of Science and Industry cost $189 million.  The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago’s South Loop cost nearly $200 million.  The Obama Center cost $850 million.  

The Museum Tower in Chicago stands 225 feet tall and spans roughly 200,000 to 225,000 gross square feet across its 11 stories. It contains a few museum exhibits but offers little substance for a historian to grasp and learn from. It is a bloated, massively expensive monument dedicated to an overrated politician.  That is exactly right about the entire Obama presidency.