The Obama Presidential Center
A Monument of Self-Glorification

2,001 words

We are the change we seek.
-Barack Hussein Obama

Across the past twenty years, during which the American people have been subjected to the “Chicago Hustle,” aka “Barack Obama Live,” it is safe to say that he and his little missus have emerged as the sole beneficiaries from that performance. Barack and Michelle are reported most recently to be worth 70 million dollars, and they divide their time between four luxury homes in Martha’s Vineyards, Washington DC, Chicago and Hawaii.  The book contract upon Obama’s departure from office in 2017 was for 64 million dollars. This American “elder-statesman,” whose American origins have always seemed, well, mysterious, has elected to live like a Ottoman Pasha.

On the other side of ledger, that is, what the American people finally got out of the Hope and Change deal was “racism in our DNA; we’re not cured,” Black Lives Matter, the martyrdom of George Floyd, our first cadaver president in Joe Biden, and his affirmative action Veep with a brutally conspicuous absence of intellect, character and competence. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, entertain in your imagination these two counterfactuals – President Hillary Clinton; President Kamala Harris – and the horror-show of a Democrat-run gynocracy.

Now, in the ninth year of his post-presidency, underway on the south side of Chicago is the building of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC). Every aspect of what this massive eyesore will be captures one of the most distinctive features of Barack Obama’s personality: solipsism.

Obama has always been exclusively about Obama. The only thing he has ever written about is himself. All he talks about is himself. Every political office he held was merely a prelude to the next step up; his career a non-stop exercise of self-adulation and self-promotion. Looking back, Obama governed as he lives, that is as a solipsist. The solipsist believes that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.  Obama as our “leader” was that complete Self undergoing the only modifications that mattered, his own. He contemplated nothing but his own self’s facets of perfection, preternaturally blind to certain intractable features of a world outside of that self that he had neither the interest nor the capacity to comprehend.

To grasp how his solipsism continues to apply to his post-presidency, we must go back briefly to the 2008 presidential campaign.

Obama suddenly appeared as a David Axelrod crafted, Pritzker family-funded, stunning contrast, first to the charmless Hillary Clinton, then to George W. Bush.  By the end of his presidency, Bush was deemed to be intellectually and morally flawed, deeply so. He was a palooka, a political piñada whom everyone took turns whacking until he broke open and his approval numbers plummeted into the 30s. McCain, helpless and old. was no match. Obama in stark contrast was a star. Cool, contemporary, photogenic, an Olympian standing high above the fray, descending only to bestow calm, impart his wisdom, reascend, and receive thanks.

Bush was served up as the benighted antipode to an unblemished Obama, a uniquely singular individual (The One), morally and cognitively complete, a phantasm proclaiming that “We are the change we seek.” Obama thus became a totality, both the question and the answer, that Self, outside of which nothing else was important or relevant. There was, however, no “We”. There was only Obama himself mirroring the “Genius of Obama” to be held in contemplation, admiration and … anticipation.  The “first”… well, you remember the excitement.

The anticipation came and went. After eight years of solipsistic rule, we possessed a real, empirical grasp of the “Change we seek.” The “we,” of course, was a puff of smoke from behind the mirrors. The “change” the real “we” got was not what most people had in mind; a few years later it came in the form of his former, cognitively impaired Vice President who turned up Obama’s dial on the demolition of “whiteness.” All the essentials were captured in the translation from rhetoric to reality.  His modifications of self produced exactly what you would predict from a man whose core obsession is racial grievance.

Which brings us to the OPC, a lump of concrete redolent of 20th century architectural monuments designed to continue a cult of personality in perpetuity, such as: Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square, Mao’s Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square and the two Kims in North Korea. Perhaps a hall has been reserved in the OPC for the embalmed remains of The One to lie in permanent repose when he shuffles off his mortal coil.

Here is the solipsistic version of the OPC. From the Obama Presidential Center; A Global Center for Change:

Spanning 19 acres, the campus will feature a fruit and vegetable garden; an athletic, programs, and events facility; a world-class museum; an auditorium; a branch of the Chicago Public Library; and more. Additional programming will also invite visitors—whether they’re coming from down the block or across the globe—to bring change home. [italics added]

The Obama Presidential Museum will tell the story of President and Mrs. Obama and their historic presidency—and how we can all do our part to create change. [italics added]

Ah yes, “change,” that Obamaesque incantation that got the juices flowing in 2008 – vacuous but at least then promising a “something or other” for the starry-eyed acolytes; now, so banal and over-worked that no one even pretends to think that it means anything.  Here is Obama, as always, with his self-presentation as the unique “knower,” the One, who can show how the helpless “we” “can all do our part” to pull off that mysterious change thing.

Oh yes, and speaking of racial resentment, carved into stone along the exterior of the Museum Building, will be part of Obama’s script from his 2015 speech for the 50th anniversary of the Selma, Alabama protest march.

Here is reality version of the OPC:

Massive cost overruns and long delays

The OPC, currently running a tab of 830 million dollars ($330 million over the original $500 estimate with the likelihood of going higher) is also four years behind its scheduled completion date.  Originally scheduled to open in 202l, it’s now projected to open in 2026. Previous Presidential Libraries opened in less than five years after departure from office. Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library and Museum cost $176.5 5; George W Bush’s cost $300 million.

South side Chicago didn’t want it.

The OPC was imposed by a lawsuit.

From Newsweek:

The Center has been the core of debates around the gentrification of the South Side neighborhood and Jackson Park. Nonprofits like the Friends of the Parks opposed the loss of parkland and had threatened to sue to block developments, but the plan to build the center was approved shortly after a lawsuit was filed.

The Obama Foundation turned out to be “racist.”

A black owned construction firm did shoddy work and then sued the Obama Foundation’s engineering firm, Thornton Tomasetti, for racial discrimination.

From The Washington Free Beacon:

A law suit by Robert McGee, the black owner of II in One, is seeking to recoup roughly $41 million in additional costs his firm allegedly incurred as a result of Thornton Tomasetti’s discriminatory actions, which ‘directly undermined the Obama Foundation’s DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) goals and commitments and mission to bring transformative change to the construction industry and local community,’ according to the lawsuit. The company was now ‘on the brink of forced closure because of racial discrimination by the structural engineer.’

You can’t make this up. “Transformative change to the construction industry”? How about the kind of change that would make it possible for a minority construction firm to “construct” concrete walls that don’t crack open?  According to the “racist” Thornton Tomasetti firm, in a memo to the Obama Foundation, the cost overruns and delays: “were all unequivocally driven by the underperformance and inexperience … [of] what everyone knows was a questionably qualified subcontractor team.” The memo also included images of cracked slab and exposed rebar from the construction site. “We cannot stand by while contractors attempt to blame their own shortcomings on the design team.”

Thornton Tomasetti photos of “significant cracking” in the slab poured for the library and “partially exposed reinforcement” in the area.

So, if “everyone” knew that the minority subcontractor was “questionably qualified,” why was it hired?

Here is a possible answer. Cost overruns, delays, shoddy construction and discrimination law suits might have something to do with Obama’s South African government-style spoils systems approach to awarding business and government contracts. Translated into the social justice warrior argot: “the Obama Foundation’s DEI goals and commitments and mission to bring transformative change … etc.”  In other words, racial preferencing in the allocation of contracts is the official “mission.”

In case you are wondering how the Obama racial spoils system works by the numbers, the chart below shows who gets what – note the pecking order.

The Obama Foundation

The Obama Foundation is a typical money-laundering 501 (c) (3) tax exempt NGO for corrupt politicians who cash in big, like the Clinton Foundation, created to funnel tax-free donor money to friends and family to enjoy perks and bloated salaries. The Obamas put large portions of their sixty-four million dollars from their book contract royalties into the Obama foundation.

Who is running the Obama Foundation? The Obama Foundation, the fund-raising arm for the OPC is run by Obama’s old consigliere, who lived with him during the White House days, Valarie Jarrett. Her annual salary is $740,000. The Obama Foundation spokeswoman is Emily Bittner, who previously worked as a senior adviser to Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker, and with Rahm Emmanuel in the Chicago Mayor’s office. The ProPublica report on the Obama Foundation financials lists the “compensation” that includes the salaries of “key employees and officers” (seventeen) all well into the six-figure range. Also, Penny Pritzker, Obama’s former Treasury Secretary is listed as an unpaid “Director/Vicechairperson.”

The Obama Foundation is a front, and slush fund for the Pritzker family to perpetuate Democrat rule over Illinois. Obama long ago was selected to be the smiling face man for the cabal that moves money to place people where they are most helpful. It has turned Chicago into a scene of urban deterioration, rising crime and lawlessness and political corruption. According to PropertyClub Chicago “is about 67% more dangerous than the U.S. average.”

What does the Obama Presidential Center, with its price tag moving toward a hundred million dollars, promise to be as a recipient of such unprecedented largesse?  Let me speculate. In ten years, due to its shoddy workmanship it will be the early stages of deterioration, its large, concrete presence casting a gloomy shadow of neglect and dereliction over Jackson Park.  Given the direction of Chicago’s political leadership with the exploding crime, and the location of the OPC in one of the more crime-ridden neighborhoods, only with an armed escort would one dare to go there. Who, really, would be drawn to it?  If Chicago didn’t want it, who would?

In 2018, more than 150 faculty members at the nearby University of Chicago wrote an open letter echoing concerns from community activists that the center would be a “socially regressive intrusion” that “will not provide the promised development or economic benefit” to surrounding neighborhoods.

The other piece of vintage Obama devotion to his swollen ego is that the OPC, as stated in the open letter “abandoned its original plans to be a Presidential Library.” That is correct.  It is not even a library. The site will hold only an electronic database of President Obama’s records. There will be no hard-copy manuscripts, and “no official connection to the National Archives.” There is no reason for serious presidential scholars to visit the OPC.

The Obama Presidential Center is physically emblematic of the man and his career. The hype surrounding it is as devoid of substance as was Obama the politician.  It is a massively wastefully built monument, and it serves no purpose, other than to glorify Obama.  At some point in the future, as it falls apart and with no one in it, no one will be able to recall why it was even built.