“Hello Chicago! Sweet home, Chicago!”
The voice was unmistakable and the husky, jaunty tone a throwback to an era of US politics that seems more distant than a mere decade ago. Barack Obama opened his presidential library in Chicago on Thursday and reminded his adopted city that few orators in the era of colour television have been able to make a speech sing like he can. But who, in 2026, is listening?
The presidential library is both a lofty ambition and a troubled conceit. The Obama Presidential Center attracted strong opinion for years before it opened because of its appearance: a windowless, granite-clad 250ft high obelisk dominating the low-slung cityscape of southside Chicago.
The Obama-haters on the right have had a field day mocking and trashing it, and spent Thursday boosting stories that contracting firms are still awaiting payment on a project that has cost $850 million (€741 million). In fact, president Donald Trump reposted an AI image in which the centre has been manipulated to look like an actual gigantic city trash can.
Even the most charitable eye would agree that architecturally, it’s an acquired taste. Forbidding would be one word to describe it, post-apocalyptic another. But then, these libraries reflecting the intense four- or eight-year spans which the chosen presidential few experienced are meant to last long after the lifespans of the honourees.
It was Franklin Roosevelt, at a loss to know what to do with the vast trove of presidential papers he had acquired, who initiated the first library in 1938. His successors have all followed. The buildings are literal safe houses for non-classified papers and personal memorabilia – the LBJ library, in Austin, Texas contains the limousine in which he used to sit, and his favourite cowboy boots.
The more burning question is how many Americans are all that interested in walking through the footsteps of musty presidential pasts. The national archive records show that in 2024, 121,000 people visited the Kennedy library, 29,000 the Nixon library and 60,000 the Clinton library. The Reagan library is the most visited by a country mile. The last available figure for Dubya’s, in 2023, was 23,000: a reflection of the stunning swerve away from George W Bush-era Republicanism by the GOP.
The living former presidents – Clinton, Bush and Biden – all sat together to listen to Obama on Thursday. Trump was not invited.
Also present was a list of stellar stars whose names are redolent of an era that is fading fast in the rear-view mirror: Bruce, Bono, Hanks, Spielberg, Oprah. Bono summoned the chutzpah to serenade the former first lady with a rendition of The Beatles’ Michelle.
Obama himself explained the rationale for locating his library deep in the southside rather than in the swankier zip-codes of the city.
“More than 40 years ago on a late summer afternoon in 1985 I arrived here in Chicago, entering the city through the very spot where this centre now stands. I can still picture myself heading down what was then Cornell Drive in a janky used car that I’d bought in New York, with all my worldly possessions stuffed in the trunk and back seat, and I really couldn’t see out of the rear view mirror and I was a safety hazard.”
[ Michelle Obama: ‘Sorry Bono, don’t think for one second you could ever compete’Opens in new window ]
Add “janky” to the lexicon. He knew what he was at, of course. Nobody paints pictures like Obama can behind the microphone – with the possible exception of Trump who, in full flow, can conjure up a vision of America as though channelling the worst nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch.
The Obama story has been told a hundred times, most powerfully through his memoirs. Yet even now, the mysterious question: how did that 23-year-old mixed race man with “the funny name” get himself elected president 23 years after landing in Chi-town in that janky car? And how has the country flipped into such an unrecognisable place in the decade since he left office?
Various data suggests that anywhere between 6 and 9 million people voted for Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016: it’s a hefty portion of the voting electorate for whom the promise fell short of their perceived reality. The answer lies within that detritus and those stories.
Obama spoke at the library opening for 34 minutes without mentioning the current president by name. In what was the central passage of his speech, he spoke of the essential values that he felt he shared with politicians with whom he ran the gauntlet: “Honesty, integrity, kindness, compassion, a sense of duty and honour; those things matter in our public dealings just as they do in our private lives.
[ Nobody gets under Donald Trump’s skin like Barack ObamaOpens in new window ]
“These are the values and traditions I believe in, and they are not Republican or Democratic values. They are American values we can all share regardless of party; values that every president here today, as different as we are, tried our best to uphold. Values that John McCain [Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 election] and Mitt Romney [Republican nominee in 2012] believed in no less than I did.
“It is our greatest inheritance: the story of America at its best because it reflects a basic faith in the decency of our fellow citizens. And that despite of all our differences we can see each other and understand one another and make common cause together.”
Fox News evening hosts such as Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity will, of course, have fun mocking the bleeding-heart liberal ideology – and that odd building. But it’s hard not to escape the sense that the July 4th speech the United States needs to hear took place on a mundane afternoon in Chicago. Obama told the crowd that the purpose of the artefacts in the building was not to “evoke nostalgia for some gauzy bygone era … some unattainable past that we can dream about”.
But for many Americans, the more troubling point is that even as his legacy is set in stone, Obama seems more representative of an unattainable future.
