Repulsive, costly, and damaging to the lives of everyday people could describe the Obama Presidential Center or former President Barack Obama‘s presidency.
Several recent updates have come through about the Obama Presidential Center, and none of them appear to be good. For one, the project was dreamed up with a $300 million price tag, but the Obama Foundation has already spent more than $615 million on the project and reportedly is planning on spending another $200 million or so. Additionally, tax filings indicate the foundation has covered 0.21% of the money it pledged to an endowment fund to protect Chicago taxpayers in the event the project doesn’t come to pass. In that same vein, the project is also reportedly leading to rising rents and property taxes for residents in the area.
On top of all of that, the project is undeniably hideous. It looks as if a small prison, some concrete walls with few windows, was plopped down in the middle of a park. In short, it appears that everything about this project is terrible, and it makes everything it touches worse.
It perfectly represents the Obama administration, which began with similar optimism from everyone involved. The cost problem is a fun parallel to Obama’s effect on healthcare costs. You may recall that Obama’s big political project was the Affordable Care Act, which was supposed to bring down healthcare costs across the country. Instead, the bill has led to the doubling of healthcare premiums since 2010, and Democrats have spent the last decade pretending Obamacare never happened as they talk about bringing down healthcare costs. In fact, Democrats have decided to shut down the government in part to secure more bailouts for the ACA.
The Obama presidency was so disastrous for Americans that it led to the national wipeout of the Democratic Party. By the end of his presidency, Democrats held fewer elected offices than they had at any point since the 1920s, including a loss of more than 900 state legislators nationwide. Voters determined that Obama’s presidency was so disastrous that they voted Democrats out of power at nearly every opportunity, and then handed the White House to President Donald Trump when Obama’s term expired.
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The repulsive image of the ugly architecture of the presidential center also finds a parallel in the ugly racebaiting that Obama and his media allies played into during his presidency. Pew polling showed that 66% of Americans had favorable views of race relations when Obama took office, but just 38% held that same view by the time he left. The ugly racial divisions we see now in our politics can’t be traced to Obama’s presidency, just like the healthcare debate that has persisted over the past decade.
In that way, Obama’s presidential center in Chicago perfectly represents his time as president. It is excessively expensive, far more so than what was promised. It is making things worse for the everyday people it affects. It began with so much optimism, but turned into something ugly. Chicagoans couldn’t ask for something better to remember Obama’s presidency by, though, like the rest of us, they could definitely have asked for it to be something better.