Former President Barack Hussein Obama stood in Chicago on Thursday, opened a towering ugly monument to his legacy, and used the moment to, of course, lecture the country that made his life possible.
As America nears its 250th birthday, Obama said the founders “fell terribly short” of the Declaration's promise by leaving slavery intact and limiting the vote to white male property owners.
He did credit them for building a framework that let later generations improve the country.
That must've hurt the poor lad to make such an utterance.
Yet Obama's instinct was familiar: begin with America's sin, then ask the crowd to see national progress through grievance first.
The trouble isn't that Obama mentioned slavery. Slavery is evil, and voting rights were severely limited at the founding.. The trouble is the habit of turning every American anniversary into another courtroom scene where the country stands accused before people who live off its freedoms, wealth, patience, and fame.
Obama didn't become the 44th president because America refused to change; he became president because America did change, fought, bled, amended, argued, repented, and opened doors no other civilization had opened in the same way.
Slavery wasn't America's invention, and America wasn't the only nation stained by it. Slavery existed across ancient China, India, Greece, Rome, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. The transatlantic slave trade carried roughly 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century.
America's burden is real, but the modern left—primarily thanks to Obama—often tells the story as if the United States alone dragged slavery into human history.
History deserves more honesty than that.
America also paid in blood to end slavery: the Civil War killed at least 620,000 Americans, with later estimates reaching 750,000 or more. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, and the long, unfinished fight for equal rights continued through Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and beyond.
Any nation with basic decency remembers its sins without pretending it never sacrificed to overcome them.
Obama knows all of that; he's too smart not to. His problem has never been a lack of history; his problem is what he does with it. He built a political career by presenting himself as the healer of America's racial wounds, then spent years reopening them when unity no longer served his political brand.
His presidential center now sits on 19.3 acres of historic Jackson Park, an $850 million campus with a museum, library, concert hall, athletic space, and a public plaza.
I can only hope for the benefit of the Obamamanics: the public plaza sits underneath ground level, making it easier to gaze up at the Great Savior's navel. Fox News shares some important Obama navel-gazers in attendance.
While the Obama Presidential Center officially opens to the public Friday, the dedication featured a slew of former diplomats, officials and celebrities, such as former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Steven Spielberg, Hillary Clinton, and former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Joe Biden.
The center also came after years of legal and community fights over its location in public parkland. Protect Our Parks challenged the project, arguing that Jackson Park should have been off-limits and that the center belonged elsewhere.
Federal courts ultimately cleared the way, but the complaint was never some fever dream. Many people saw a self-proclaimed powerful former president claiming historic public ground for a private foundation's ego legacy project.
The opening arrived with another awkward cloud. Several trade contractors say they still haven't been paid for change orders and other work tied to the project. Lakeside Alliance, the prime contractor, says closeout disputes are common on large projects and that it remains committed to working through outstanding matters.
Fine. Whatever. Let the process play out.
Still, a former president who is lecturing the founders about moral shortcomings should probably make sure the men and women who helped build the monument to his blessed self aren't left begging for answers.
The contrast with President Donald Trump is hard to miss. Trump gets hammered for building, renovating, or restoring anything that's well overdue for work. Obama gets a star-studded ceremony, a civic halo, and gentle treatment for a massive project planted in a historic park.
One man is treated as evil incarnate, while the other builds an eight-story monument to himself and calls it democracy.
Obama could've used the opening to praise the country that made his story possible. He could've honored the founders' achievement while admitting their failures.
His Lightbringing would never allow his ego to do something our Founders did: put their name on a document that signed their death warrant if independence failed. Yet he smugly sits back watching an adoring media swoon over every speech he reads from a teleprompter.
The founders were flawed men; so are the presidents who judge them. Any country wise enough to correct its founding failures deserves better than yet ANOTHER lecture from a man whose greatest monument is his own confidence.
And one butt-ugly concrete monstrosity.
It's time for an old socialist to quickly fade away.
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