New Obama Center has a bar and no archives -- All the Change in the World

All the Change in the World

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by Thomas Frank

Competitive magnificence is the main aesthetic principle of modern presidential libraries. From the rectilinear sprawl of the George W. Bush Presidential Center to the elevated glass box of Bill Clinton’s edifice, each new entrant is required to outdo its predecessors in price, grandness, and architectural spectacle. The second principle, almost as important, is that with each successive presidential center, the vanity function of these facilities increasingly overshadows their research function. Technically, the institutions I am describing are quasi-public; they exist in order to catalogue the records of the executive branch and make them available to researchers. But what they have in fact become are ever more ostentatious monuments to the man in question, would-be Lincoln Memorials built by the would-be Lincoln himself. Each one features a museum of the years in which he occupied the Oval Office, and each describes history in a manner that only the most committed partisan would accept as legitimate.

The Obama Presidential Center, which opened in June, is the latest contestant in this derby, and it duly bests its predecessors in all the important ways. It cost some $850 million to build, which, when adjusted for inflation, is roughly twice the outlay for Bush’s library in Dallas, nearly three times what was spent on Clinton’s in Little Rock, and more than forty times what was spent on the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Truman’s library, completed in 1957, is a single modest story; the Obama Center, on the other hand, is dominated by a 225-foot tower, a contoured granite block with a passage from an Obama speech spelled out in concrete letters around the top—by which I mean not one or two memorable phrases but a full 103-word passage from a speech, an excerpt so long and in letters so large that it takes nineteen lines (more than eighty-three feet, roughly the height of an eight-story building) to render in full.

Despite its text-inflected architecture and its staggering price tag, the Obama Center is, in fact, not a presidential library at all: it houses no official presidential records for researchers to dig through. Those are stored in a National Archives facility somewhere in suburban Maryland. With this magnificent granite chunk, in other words, the vanity side of postpresidential structures has finally and totally eclipsed the research side. Instead of archives, the Obama Center features beautiful landscaping, a restaurant and bar, an athletic center, and up in the tower an Obama museum that trumpets what is flattering to its subject and omits what is not.

The location of the Obama Center was a matter of some controversy during the planning process. It now stands in Chicago’s Jackson Park, on a site once occupied by the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair held in 1893. And like that legendary convening, with its neoclassical palaces displaying Gilded Age advances in engineering and electricity, the Obama Center has a didactic and high-minded purpose: it aims to instruct us in the science of change, a pedagogy every bit as central to elite self-understanding today as were progress and the Beaux-Arts to the right-minded gentlemen of the fin de siècle.

I intend no insult when I use the word “elite”; it is the only word that accurately represents the dazzling list of names one finds on the Obama Center’s donor wall. In the fifty-million-dollars-and-up category we find Jeff Bezos, of Amazon and the Washington Post; Connie Ballmer, the wife of a former Microsoft CEO; Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb; TWG Global, an AI-focused holding company; a foundation associated with the private-equity billionaire Glenn H. Hutchins; and a mystery donor identified as Anonymous.

These patterns persist in the more densely populated donor categories: tech and private equity, multibillionaires and dynastic wealth; great foundations and the biggest of big corporations. Eric Schmidt and Sean Parker are there, as are Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. Ken Griffin, a financier who supports conservative causes, shows up in the 1-to-9.9-million-dollar category, along with the personal foundation of the Walmart heiress Alice Walton and the Walmart Foundation itself. There is a robust contingent from the philanthropy world, a number of athletes and celebrities, and a generous sampling of names from the Fortune 500. Had this presidential center been constructed thirty years ago, Donald Trump himself would probably have been on board.

What unites all these oligarchs and dynasts, all these monopolists and employers of lobbyists, is their interest in advancing a very particular interpretation of history. It goes like this: “ordinary people” can make “extraordinary change.” I take these words from the wall text in the museum section of the Obama Center, but transmitting this message of uplift and people power is really what this complex is all about. The museum has a series of interactive exhibits entitled imagine your impact that urge you to consider things like “collaborat[ing] with your community to make change.” There’s a famous Obama quote in huge metal letters that greets visitors on the fifth floor: i’m asking you to believe. not in my ability to bring about change—but in yours.

Fifteen years ago, conservatives used this sort of anodyne sentiment—then as now one of Obama’s favorite modes—to spin nightmares about our “radical” president and how he intended to “socialize” America. Others, like me, brushed it off because we came to see Obama as a moderate’s moderate, a would-be Blue Dog Democrat, a man who honored norms, precedent, and incrementalism to a self-sabotaging degree. This man was no progressive, we would realize: he was a fan of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; chose Larry Summers as his principal economic adviser; and longed to strike a “grand bargain” with the Republicans in Congress. (Cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for tax increases, for those who don’t remember.)

To judge by the Obama Center, however, one might wonder whether those right-wingers were on to something after all. Summers and the pursuit of a “grand bargain” are not mentioned in the museum; they have been removed from the official account. But Rules for Radicals is sold in the gift shop. And the museum does describe—at length and in some detail—the history of left-wing protest in America. Exhibit after exhibit carries visitors to the unavoidable conclusion that Barack Obama was somehow the bearer of the sacred flame of reform, the heir of the Progressives, the women’s-suffrage movement, the New Deal, the civil-rights movement, the various upheavals of the Sixties, the Eighties Chicago mayor Harold Washington, and pretty much any other left-wing insurgency you can think of. He was, the museum suggests, the most progressive president anyone could possibly hope for.

Powerful institutions cloaking themselves in the trappings of radicalism has been a familiar phenomenon ever since the nation’s corporations, foundations, electric utilities, and intelligence agencies decided a while back that they needed to depict themselves as intersectional warriors against colonialism and white supremacy. But here the stratagem indicates something more meaningful. After all, Obama’s presidency began on a note of overwhelming triumph, with a huge electoral majority and a Nobel Peace Prize, and it ended with the unthinkable: Trump in the White House and the Democratic Party in tatters across the country. What went wrong? What do the center’s many invocations of radicalism tell us about the Obama years and how to interpret them?

No presidential museum addresses its subject’s failures squarely, of course, and this one is no exception. In its exhibit on the 2008–09 financial crisis, it does not discuss why the president didn’t do more to punish fraud in high places or rescue beleaguered homeowners. There is little discussion of the fate of the public option in the universal-health-care debate. Obama’s persistent failure to get tough with the Republicans in Congress is not addressed, nor is his incredible naïveté about the supposed beneficence of international trade and Silicon Valley.

But the museum does give an answer to all these questions, if only by implication, and it is that progressivism has certain built-in limits. If you believe in democracy and in ordinary people, as Obama so clearly did, you simply cannot ask for more than what he accomplished.

Consider, once again, Obama’s many inspiring invocations of the power of ordinary people. In a surprising number of instances, this message comes with a tacked-on corollary that the president has far less power than we think he does. It is not Obama’s “ability to bring about change” that we are to believe in, remember, but our own. “The change we need doesn’t come from Washington,” Obama said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. “Change comes to Washington.” He said it again in his speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the march in Selma—the speech from which the words on his tower were taken. Solving problems, he said, “is work for all Americans, not just some.” He continued:

Our democracy is not the task of Congress alone. Or the courts alone. Or even the president alone…. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘“we.” “We the people.” “We shall overcome.” “Yes we can.”

These may be noble sentiments, but think about them from a different angle and you realize they are also a form of evasion. It is somehow up to us, not the president, to get working and get it done. We, the public, have to earn our change by staying eternally mobilized or deserving of it in some way. We have to “make him do it,” as the popular liberal saying from 2009 had it. For progressive groups to use that line to raise money is one thing. For administration officials themselves to repeat it, as Vice President Joe Biden once did, is an excuse.

“Idon’t believe in nostalgia,” Obama said at an event for former staffers the day before his presidential center opened. “Because I think nostalgia implies this sentiment that there’s this thing in the past that was somehow golden and better but is unattainable now, and it lets us off the hook because it makes us feel like, well, that was wonderful, but now this is the reality and there’s not much we can do about it.” And yet despite its hooray-for-hope messaging, Obama’s museum is, in fact, a nice warm bath in precisely the sentiment he meant to deny.

With its emphasis on the early years of the Obama saga—the inspiring 2008 campaign, the great achievement of electing the first black president, the glorious history of reform—the Obama Center invites us to relax into comforting memories of the days when we were led by a brilliant, elegant, and youthful man who talked movingly about change and hope. Since then, the world has fallen apart, but here the visitor can remember what it was like before the country’s descent into idiocy and hate—that golden moment when it seemed like all things were possible.

I mentioned before that the Obama Center has a bar: a full, functional, and stylish one at that. Few postpresidential facilities offer this particular amenity; after my tour of the building, I longed to perch myself at its polished-stone counter, sip from a big glass of bourbon, look out over beautiful Jackson Park, and reminisce about 2008, the only time in my life I have voted for a presidential candidate enthusiastically and without reservations. What a chump I was.

Unfortunately, the bar wasn’t open that day. But later on, in an Irish pub on Chicago’s North Side, I caught up with one of my friends from back in the day, a man who wound up going to Washington with Obama and then spent about eight years of his life serving in the federal government. For him, the nostalgia was mixed with a strong dose of bitterness. Back in 2009, it felt like it was the New Deal all over again, he recalled. He told me about the administration’s ambitious but never realized plans in its earliest days and remembered how his bosses would shoot down ideas that were even slightly creative, out of fear of transgressing the iron rules of norms and precedent. With no small anger he told me about an initiative the administration advanced to help kids in underfunded schools that backfired in a catastrophic but totally predictable way. And he said this: the Obama Center is a privately funded monument to President Obama that is built in the wrong location according to the wrong design; it is, he told me, “insanely wrong in every way.”

Meanwhile, back in Washington, a different president plans grandiose structures across the capital, built according to his demented interpretation of neoclassical style. In his heart, however, Trump is more a man of carnival than of didactic uplift: he consorts with porn stars, depicts himself dumping shit on his critics, and stages UFC matches beneath the Claw on the White House lawn.

How the nation was persuaded to choose this crude bigot over the handpicked successors of the high-minded Obama is a mystery too painful for the principled to unravel. Obama and Trump seem like cosmic opposites: the tasteful and the vulgar; the respecter of norms and the smasher of precedent; the reluctant president and the would-be tyrant who will stop at nothing.

But there is a common thread if we look closer. Both men are celebrities who headed up popular movements that turned out, when challenged, to be as thin as a coating of ice on a windshield. They are both men of image, and in both cases the image is a sort of phony populism. Obama’s salutes to “ordinary people” were not much more sincere than Trump’s shout-outs to the “forgotten man.” Both presidents have proved themselves able stewards of the age of inequality, rescuing banks or cutting taxes as the moment requires. Trump’s presidential library, which will be built in Miami, will surely surpass Obama’s in both price and ostentation.

Both men have chosen to decorate their trademark towers with words. In Obama’s case, it’s the noble phrases from his speech at Selma, wrapped around the top of his stately building. These words are visible from everywhere in the neighborhood but at the same time almost impossible to read—fragmentary bits of prose signifying nothing more than generic high-mindedness floating freely in the sky. Trump’s words, of course, are glaringly legible and are always the same: his name, trump, in big, shiny letters, glued to the side of his ninety-two-story tower next door to the Wrigley Building, overlooking the Chicago River, where it can be gawked at by tourists and truck drivers alike.

These mighty men and their plutocratic populism: it is their world now, not ours, and sometimes it feels as though all that is really left to us ordinary people are futile gestures. One beautiful day this June, I caught the CTA’s number 6 bus outside the Obama Center and rode it from the South Side to its terminus in the Loop. A boisterous group of teenagers had got on somewhere along the way, and we all exited together at Wacker Drive. One of the bunch walked out into the teeming sidewalk across from Trump Tower, held her middle finger up before the president’s proud name, and snapped a picture of it with her iPhone. 

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/all-the-change-in-the-world-thomas-frank-presidents/