Obama opens centre with celebrities, rebuke of Trumpian politics

Barack Obama opened his presidential centre with a call for Americans to remain politically active “even in the face of cruelty and bitterness” during a ceremony fitting in its pomp, the scorn of its political foes, and the jubilation of legions of supporters who lament the former president’s absence from the national stage.

The centre is an attempt to make permanent a presidential legacy that has been in flux throughout Obama’s years in national politics – and especially in the decade since he left office, as President Donald Trump has been determined to tear it down.

On Thursday in Chicago, Obama denounced “those who see some groups or people as more equal than others, and who see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils or punish enemies, or keep those who are different in their place.”

“I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails in the end,” he said.

The $850 million Obama centre dwarfs the libraries of the 44th president’s predecessors in both cost and scope. The 19-acre campus and five buildings, including a 225-foot museum looming over the city’s Midway Plaisance, are a monumental addition to the Chicago landscape – an attempt to echo in architecture Obama’s soaring rhetoric about democracy and community organizing.

But the towering “Obamalisk” has also drawn fire from critics who have cast the complex as self-indulgent, architecturally domineering and a usurpation of public parkland.

The current president – who wasn’t invited – was a notable omission from the ceremony, which featured former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden as well as former Vice President Kamala Harris. Former world leaders who have drawn Trump’s ire – including former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel – joined the Obamas on stage.

If the guest list was an implicit repudiation, Obama was more explicit in his remarks, saying the nation’s highest ideals did not include “trying to dominate and bully and squeeze every advantage just because we can” but rather showing that “even a country as big and diverse as ours can make democracy work.”

The former president spent Thursday leaning on a veneration of American ideals. In a familiar secular homily about brotherhood, shared sacrifice and common causes, he spoke of universal ideas like a free press and inclusive society extolled by both parties.

“A belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to our people and our Constitution,” Obama said. “A belief in the peaceful transfer of power after the people have spoken in fair and free elections.”

Other attendees included current political foes of Trump, such as Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and California Governor Gavin Newsom, and potential future ones like Rahm Emanuel, a former Chicago mayor and congressman who was Obama’s chief of staff.

All three are positioning themselves to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 – a contest that asks voters who can best stamp out the political movement Trump has fostered, and reverse an agenda that has largely erased Obama’s own policy legacy.

The structures reflect the interests and passions of the former president and Michelle Obama, the former first lady. The museum is decorated with commissioned works of art and a quote from one of Obama’s own speeches. The grounds include vegetable gardens, a public library branch and a full-scale basketball court.

As he often did during his presidency, Obama drew a flock of arts and cultural stars. Performers at the two-hour ceremony included Bono and The Edge, Stevie Wonder — the pop legend whose “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” provided the walk-off music to Obama’s rallies — and Bruce Springsteen, who has been inveighing against Trump and his administration since his return to power last year.

About 10,000 supporters gathered in Midway Plaisance park near the opening celebrations, with some arriving as early as 7:30 am to secure front row seats.

Many guests donned Juneteenth-themed outfits, custom T-shirts or campaign gear from Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Marci May, a Chicago native who volunteered on election night in Grant Park, said attending the day’s celebration was a full-circle moment for her. She wore her shirt from the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and her original campaign buttons.

“In our current political moment, this is a great reminder of a time when our nation came together,” she said.

The mood in Chicago was celebratory, even as it was shadowed by continuing tension between local and state elected officials and the Trump administration.

The city and its suburbs have been fiercely contested ground in Trump’s immigration crackdown. Reverberations continue from the attempt to prosecute protesters who opposed the detention of migrants outside the city. And Trump has continued to issue threats against Democrats in authority – including Pritzker – as midterm elections loom.

Michelle Obama, in her remarks, alluded to the fight, saying that recognizing the contributions of immigrants was essential to preserving the spirit of the nation.

“No one – no one – has the right to judge who is American enough,” she said.

The first lady’s speech was peppered with other implicit criticism of Trump, praising her husband for his “quiet dignity” and for refusing to lash out at a litany of attacks Obama faced as a candidate and president, including some that were false and others fanned by right-wing media into controversies.

They included the falsehood – popularized by Trump – that Obama wasn’t born in the US, and the criticism of Obama when he said after the killing of Trayvon Martin that his own son would have looked a lot like the slain child.

“The lies about your birthright,” Michelle Obama said. “When you stated the biological fact that if you had a son, that he too would be Black. Yes, you were unflappable.”

The crowd laughed and cheered when she mentioned another Obama achievement: winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the award Trump has openly coveted and been denied.

The ceremony in Chicago was in some way a looking-glass version of the event staged by Trump last weekend at the White House, where he spent his 80th birthday hosting a UFC cage match that included one fighter hurling a baseless slur at the former First Lady on a live broadcast from the South Lawn.

By contrast, Obama has largely avoided directly attacking his successor, even as Trump has devoted his two terms to eviscerating the policies and the tone that Obama left behind. It’s partially a continuation of the unofficial omerta of former American presidents to avoid criticism within the small fraternity of Oval Office occupants, and partially what Obama has acknowledged to be a desire to now coach rather than lead – despite those who wish he were more involved.

Among those is James Grossman, the former executive director of the American Historical Association and a specialist in African-American history, who has known Obama since they were neighbors in Hyde Park, before Obama’s rise to fame and political power.

“There’s a code among former presidents that you don’t criticise,” Grossman said in an interview, noting that neither Bush nor Clinton has been a fulsome critic of Trump either. “I think there are many of us who think this is an unprecedented crisis, and they need to.”

Obama has been edging back into the action, including with an endorsement of Democrat James Talarico, the state lawmaker who is mounting an uphill bid for the Senate from Texas. And Obama’s talent as an orator has led some to underestimate his skills at hardscrabble politics, said Grossman, noting that fervent – even rabid – opposition has been a persistent feature of his career.

Grossman compared it to the resistance to Reconstruction after the Civil War. “(W.E.B.) Du Bois was absolutely right,” Grossman said. “The one thing that White southerners feared more than anything else was Black success.”

Still, Obama has sometimes struggled to reconcile his sweeping rhetoric with the realities of the current moment and president. Trump just this week mocked Obama as “stupid” – among other vulgarities – while addressing reporters during a G-7 summit in Europe.

That tension was present again Thursday. The Obama centre itself, and Obama’s speech, represented yet another attempt to pull the country together while acknowledging its disparate identities, privileges, and wounds.

The former president said he was not “immune to anger or doubt.”

But, he said, “leadership has less to do with titles and rank or chasing attention than with helping others find their voice, reaching their potential.”

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