Can Obama save Chicago?

Last updated on: February 21, 2017 at 12:08 pm by Jane the Actuary

Can Obama save Chicago? 2017-02-21T12:08:59-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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That’s what Heidi Stevens, in a column in Sunday’s Tribune, imagines.

Soon enough, Jackson Park will give rise to the Obama presidential library. How about embarking on an even bigger legacy?

How about taking your community organizing, your diplomacy, your law degrees, your friendships, your networks, your gift for compromise, your desire for social justice and pointing them our way?

Come home. Bring your ideas and your knowledge and your power and get people to the table.

In the meantime, some updates on the Obama Library:

“Barack Obama’s presidential library may need $1.5 billion“:

The Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago could require a $1.5 billion endowment, its architects say, three times what was raised for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. . . .

The Obama Center is due to be so expensive because it will require the construction of both a presidential library and a museum about the lives of Barack and Michelle Obama. And federal requirements now stipulate that former presidents must have larger endowments to pay for annual operating costs at the libraries.

(The “library + museum” bit doesn’t seem new to me — all such complexes now contain a museum and a library, unless this reflects a more ambitious construction, but I had read the bit about the higher endowment requirements before, though a tripling of the cost seems much higher than I’d read before. What this all means isn’t clear to me — is this money that needs to be in the bank before they can break ground?)

“Obama Library to be ‘Center for Citizenship’”

Hours before the inauguration of Donald Trump, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama released a video outlining their plans for the future Obama Presidential Center.

The South Side center will be “more than a library or museum,” Barack Obama said in the video. “It’ll be a living, working center for citizenship. That’s why we want to hear from you. Tell us what you want this project to be.”

The center will have projects “all over the city, the country and the world,” he added.

And today, “Woodlawn sees another chance at revival in Obama library“:

More than 400 people showed up in the [Church of God in Woodlawn]’s banquet hall recently to talk about the prospect of a neighborhood renaissance — a painfully elusive goal for the long-idle South Side enclave but one that its backers say is within reach now that the Obama Presidential Center will be built next door in historic Jackson Park.

Could Obama actually use his library-museum to make a real difference?

The statement of “all over the city, the country and the world” doesn’t bode well — if they spread themselves too thin, if they don’t have defined objective other than “make a difference” or “create a legacy” then it’d be much more difficult to end up with something of lasting value. Could Obama, as local boosters hope, persuade his donors to engage in redevelopment projects that extend outside the walls of the museum itself into the neighborhood? I don’t know — it seems unlikely, but, then, I have a hard time imagining getting $1.5 billion in donations in the first place, when big-money donors generally want to get something out of it, even if it’s just the building-naming when you donate to a university or a hospital. (Maybe it’d be the “Pritzker Obama Library”?)

Could Obama come up with the right set of policy solutions, and work together with civic leaders to implement them? That’s doubtful. There’s nothing in his resume to suggest this.

But there is a large segment of the population around here for whom Obama is virtually a god. Heck, there were proposals to create a state holiday in his honor. (One more day off for state workers — but at least it would have been in the summer, rather than additional school day off.) And charismatic leaders can make a difference, to the extent that individual young men feel personally inspired to change their ways, with the fervor of a religious conversion. That’s how, after all, the Nation of Islam recruited its converts. But it can’t be done on a part-time basis. It can’t be a project to pass the time in retirement. And, while I think that the right person, at the right time, could indeed lead a movement of non-violence in Chicago, I don’t see Barack Obama being that person. In fact, seems to me that that sort of movement cannot just be with a religious-like conversion, it only happens if it is a religious conversion.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMichelle_and_Barack_Obama.jpg; By Pete Souza (White House (021913PS-0395)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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