How the left looks from the Obama Centre’s perspective. Yes We Could

Chicago. It’s not as though we Europeans really understand these centres dedicated to American presidents, these foundations and libraries. They don’t belong to us; there’s no getting round it, especially in a country like ours where you can’t name a street after someone who’s still alive, as if only death, only the past – preferably the distant past – were entitled not so much to remembrance, but to a presence. This whole business of legacy, of future memory, simply isn’t part of our culture. So, on the bus heading for the remote South Side of Chicago and the newly opened Obama Presidential Centre, I didn’t know what to expect, other than perhaps the kind of hyper-rhetorical, bombastic, self-centred atmosphere that an institution created to celebrate the legacy of a president who is still young by our standards might suggest.

But how? It feels as if only yesterday. And now it is already an equestrian monument? Of course, there is the personal angle – the fact that Obama crossed paths with him – as if on that altar there were an infinitesimal grain from each of us too: middle age and the penultimate notion of an America that has vanished, as if it were a Norman Rockwell painting or Dolly Parton’s beaming smile – what a torment. And yet, the way it’s been designed and built – overlooking the lake, with a garden that’s part courtyard, part public park, a spacious square where one can overlook the statue of the couple for the obligatory photo and the queuing tourists, the library, the conference hall – this Centre feels a bit like a Martian who’s landed in a rough suburb, a Field of Miracles. Where nothing is left to chance, everything conceived as a tribute to the former First Couple, the Obamas – not just Barack, but to an idea of America that Trump has gone through with a flamethrower.

The Obama Centre suggests that Michelle and her husband’s personal history traces a path of liberation and emancipation that is not only personal, but national and global: the post-war era, the civil rights marches, the Kennedys, MLK, the Great Society, space exploration, Watergate and the Reagan reaction, and the Internet. A copy of "Silent Spring" and photographs of Angela Davis, a small poster of John Lewis and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves are interwoven with the lives of Barack and Michelle – the community organising, the law studies, and the civic and political commitment of the man who would become the first African-American president in US history. ‘We’ are a giant; ‘Yes We Can’ stands as both an election slogan and the destiny of a collective journey. A journey that cannot fail to end in the Oval Office, perfectly recreated just as it was in the good old days – the portraits of Lincoln and Washington, the apples on the side table, a still life of how things were before the barbarians arrived – a ‘Make America Decent Again’ with visitors queuing up to sigh, to feel, just by being there, that they are part of it all once more, back home again.

The nostalgia factor is unstoppable, just as it was back then: the evenings with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, the world welcomed to the White House without a drawbridge, even Michelle’s sparkling Versace dress for the state dinner with Matteo Renzi – all cited, remembered and named in a flawless ceremonial script, without omissions or slip-ups: Merkel, the Pope, Trudeau – a lifetime ago. The impression is not so much of a Kennedy-style Camelot – a bit too ‘dear underlings’ for that – but of a densely concentrated focal point for everything that is not Trump: a stronghold of resistance, the real White House, in Chicago, whilst the one in Washington stands vacant.

So that anyone who climbs the six storeys of the Obama monolith up to the rooftop to gaze at the stars – following the ascending layout of the African American museum on the Mall – may feel comforted for a few hours, weeping over how things used to be or finding motivation in the state we’ve been reduced to. I don’t know if you’ll emerge like Ulysses after Calypso—in a state of fleeting well-being with a tear or two—or ready to fight to reclaim Ithaca and free it from the Suitors.

Even the till operator who lets you in on the quiet because everything’s sold out – but shhh, keep it under your hat – seems so very Italian, so much at home here; nothing like ICE. A ‘de-Trumpified’ area, as if Donald weren’t there. What a comfort, what an illusion – it’ll pass. Outside, the Trump Towers loom, Barad-dûr in Chicago, just like in Mamdani’s New York. But here at the Obama Centre, you leave with your faded ‘Hope’ sweatshirts and pins begging you to ‘Bring change home’ (the lift takes you to the shop, anyway; you have to hunt for the exit as if playing hide-and-seek). Lofty ambitions, of course – there’s the midterm, but it’s in August; what can you do? An afternoon is enough. ‘Yes We Could’.