At the Obama Presidential Center there are several small dioramas marking events from Barack Obama’s presidency. One is of a Girl Scout campout that Michelle Obama hosted on the South Lawn in 2015. We see white tents, neatly arrayed, with the girls in a circle around a tiny campfire. It’s heartbreaking. How can we look at such a scene and not think about how Donald Trump has trashed the White House, and the presidency? It’s impossible to look at the Girl Scout diorama without getting choked up — which is how we spent most of our visit to the Obama Center during our trip to Chicago last week.
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My wife, Barbara, and I were lucky enough to get in because her sister, Mary, and Mary’s husband, Eric, had managed to score tickets, which are not easy to come by. The purpose of the center is to document Barack and Michelle Obama’s lives, and Barack’s presidency; of course, it’s done in as glowing a manner as possible. We didn’t mind. I happen to believe that Obama was an outstanding president, the best in my lifetime. (Dwight Eisenhower, who was in office when I was born, would qualify as the second best.) Obama was not perfect, but I would certainly like to have those years back.
What I had not expected was the emotional response that Barbara and I both experienced. It started with the first video about Obama’s life and extended through videos about his 2008 presidential campaign, his singing of “Amazing Grace” at a service to honor the nine people who were assassinated by a racist gunman at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and other, less emotional fare. I literally walked through the museum with tears in my eyes.
I thought it was notable that the 2008 election video includes the famous clip of his Republican opponent, John McCain, telling a woman at one of his rallies that Obama was “a decent family man” after she says “I can’t trust Obama” and asserts that “he’s an Arab.” (McCain could have added that there’s nothing wrong with being an Arab.) McCain was a good man, and the clip is yet another reminder of what we’ve lost. But what’s left unsaid is that his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate helped give rise to the madness we’ve been living with ever since.
There were a lot of videos, and I tried to watch most of them, which means that I didn’t have much time to pore over the artifacts and all the small type on the walls — which I would do if I got a chance to go back. We did spend some time reading the letters that members of the public sent to Obama. (It was his habit to read 10 a day and to respond to many of them.) The center is overwhelming in size in addition to emotional impact. About the only purely touristy thing we did was walk through a replica of the Oval Office and sit behind the desk.
We also visited the eighth floor, a conference and events space that overlooks Chicago, and walked the enormous grounds. It is a profound tribute to a great American, and I feel so much older now than I did when he was in office — not just in years but in a more constricted sense of what is possible. We now know in ways we didn’t before that elections are contingent, and that we can slide backwards just as readily as we can move forward. Maybe more readily.
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Thanks for this emotion-filled report, Dan. Let us see if we can return to a time when girl scouts camp on the South Lawn and political candidates are respectful to each other… Deep breath in. Deep breath out.