Barack Obama’s monstrous carbuncle

Five years ago, the messiah came to Chicago. He was dressed in a dark suit and crisp white shirt. No tie, of course. The messiah is a laidback kind of guy. He was in Chicago to break ground for a temple where his spirit would dwell forever. After some  grandiloquent remarks , he grabbed a shovel, got down in the dirt and dug. Then, as he’s wont to do when cameras are around, he cracked a smile.

And as he planned it, so it is. Later this week, in Chicago, the Barack Obama Presidential Center opens its doors to the public, making it the 14th presidential library in the United States. For a $30 admission fee —  by far the most expensive of the lot  — visitors will be treated to the Obama greatest hits. It’s been a while, but surely you can intone them: Yes We Can, The Audacity of Hope, Change We Can Believe In.

Like other presidential libraries, the Obama Center is a vanity project that tells us how its namesake wants to go down in history. But it feels too on the nose to convince anyone beyond starry-eyed supporters. According to its website, the Center has four floors of “dynamic exhibits”  that “explore the promise and power of democracy through the legacy of President Obama and Mrs. Obama” and connect them to the “social movements that made their work possible”. Picture John Lewis leading civil rights activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, or Martin Luther King waxing lyrical about his dream in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The implications of all this dynamism: Obama is the moral conscience of America. And why not? After all, just like Dr. King, and unlike the sitting president, he has a Nobel Peace Prize .

To top it all off, there’s also a  full-size replica of Obama’s Oval Office , where visitors can sit at the resolute desk and play commander-in-chief for a minute or two. While that might sound like it’s worth the price of admission, former presidents  have been building replicas  of the Oval Office since Harry Truman in 1957. And  admission to the Truman Library , in Independence, Missouri, is only $12.

Modern US presidents all have their own  presidential libraries , financed by private donations. Though  these “presidential temples”  have gotten more extravagant since Truman’s time, they all serve the same dual purpose: they contain an exhibit on the tenure of each president, and house the archives of his administration. More than  a million people  visit them every year, according to the most recent figures. The most popular, with nearly 250,000 tourists, is the Reagan Library in California.

Not for long. Over the next year, 700,000 visitors  are expected  to flock to the South Side of Chicago, the high temple of the Midwest messiah. Like all auspicious sites, the location wasn’t picked at random. With presidential libraries, setting is storytelling. For instance, the Eisenhower Library is in his hometown of Abilene, Kansas (population: 6,000), which serves to underscore his folksy nature. The Reagan Library, meanwhile, sits atop a hill surrounded by open space. As the  historian Sarah Mackay  points out, this reinforced the conservative’s image as an intrepid cowboy. As for the power-hungry Lyndon B. Johnson, one location wasn’t enough for him. In addition to his official library in Austin, he also built a replica of the house where he was born in the Texas countryside. He wanted the world to be wowed by his hard-scrabble background.

“Over the next year, 700,000 visitors are expected to flock to the South Side of Chicago, the high temple of the Midwest messiah.”

Much has been made about how Obama chose — scrap that, insisted on — the South Side, historically where Chicago’s working-class black communities have lived. It was there, too, that the former president spent his formative years as a community organiser. “The best education I ever had,”  Obama later said . Placing his library on the South Side is a way to bring economic opportunity to the people who made him.

Or so the official narrative goes. But as David J. Garrow, author of the  definitive  Obama biography explains, the 44th president’s library is actually located at the top of the South Side, near Hyde Park, which “for decades has been this integrated, middle class, upper middle class island built around the University of Chicago and very separated” from the rest of the South Side. “Going further south,” Garrow says it’s important to realise, “there’s another 70-plus blocks”.

There are other question marks too. Obama’s first job in Chicago was deep in those blocks, in the neighbourhood of Roseland. And yet, Garrow says, “it’s still not connected to the public transit system,” and “it’s virtually all black”. Had the Obama Center been built in Roseland, it would have been a godsend for the people there. Instead, in Garrow’s laconic observation, “we just get a little bit of an extension of Hyde Park.”

In a similar vein, the almost mythical connection between Obama and Chicago’s progressive activist ci…