Excerpt: As the first neoliberal president, the first such to think about himself as not merely a public figure but as an economic entity, Obama needed to monetise his legacy and make himself a desirable commodity that could in turn create an empire of wealth and influence for the elites he had cultivated over his eight years.
Barack Obama turns 60 today. He was to host a giant birthday bash for himself but then, in the face of much criticism, swiftly recalibrated his plans. We might see all this as just another instance of a celebrity politician screwing up and retreating, but the event—or the non-event—reveals a lot about Obama as the first neoliberal president, and his connections to the neoliberal elites around him.
The news that Obama would be hosting an event for 475 guests, to be tended by 200 hired staff, raised eyebrows and ire. The response to the event was mostly of shock: We’ve not been out of the COVID woods for a long while, we’re barely at 50 percent of the total U.S population being vaccinated, and there is a new Delta variant raging in communities and causing breakthrough infections. The Obamas live on Martha’s Vineyard, in a mansion set in a 30-acre waterfront property—so perhaps social distancing would not have been a problem. But there was the sticky and icky question of … bathrooms, for 700 people. In a private house? Would there be port-a-potties? Would Oprah get her own real bathroom? Would George and Amal Clooney be allowed to use the one attached to the Obamas’ private bedroom? Would everyone be required to mask up indoors or not? What do actual designer masks look like, up close? Would guests really just be wandering around in the sun all day long, outside, in the hot August sun?
How many would get infected and possibly die? How many would take back the virus to their homes and communities and cause long COVID even among “mild” cases?
Provincetown, where an outbreak among the vaccinated is supposedly what caused the CDC to recommend that everyone should wear masks again, is about five hours away, depending on how you travel (I’m assuming there’s a helipad tucked away somewhere on the property, as well as an airfield for Oprah’s Gulfstream, but I know nothing about private jets and their requirements). As the news of a potential superspreader event at the Obamas’ house bubbled around, their friends came to their defense. Foremost among them was David Axelrod who assured the New York Times that “They’ve been concerned about the virus from the beginning, asking invited guests if they had been vaccinated, requesting that they get a test proximate to the event…But when this was planned, the situation was quite different. So they responded to the changing circumstances.”
This implies that the event was planned perhaps sometime during May, when the mask edict was dropped and we were lulled into believing we were over the hump.
But, in fact, oh, this is such a lie.
Allow me to explain, Dear Reader.
Let’s pretend my birthday is coming up in October. That’s about two months from now. Let’s say I decided to throw what would be, for me, a large-ish bash: 50 people. Let’s pretend there isn’t a pandemic raging on. Let’s say I wanted to do this as extravagantly as possible, that I had the money to plan a lovely event with plenty of catered food and drinks and bartenders and all the rest (I am only guessing at all this—it’s been a while since I organised such a thing and even the thought of it right now is giving my pandemic-isolated self the hives). Two months would still not be enough time to get everything I wanted in place, to align everything just so. October is party time in Chicago because Halloween starts at the end of August and Christmas starts on the 15th of October, so finding the right place with the food and drinks I’d want will be near-impossible since everything will have already been booked.
Are you exhausted yet? I am. Then there’s the question of whether or not my beloved friends will all be available on the same date because Chicagoans, who are very fond of parties and gatherings are always booked up and my radqueerlefty friends are also all busy with the million events they have to plan while truly changing and making the world infinitely better. Will a doodle link help? Or I could send out an email to ask what dates work best for people and make sure I bcc everyone so that inboxes aren’t flooded with responses…
By now, I’ve chewed my fingernails down to bloody messes and I’m ready to just vomit quietly all evening from the stress and anxiety. I should have started all this at least four months ago.
You get the point: Barack Obama doesn’t plan a party for 500, one that includes international luminaries and celebrities, over the course of even a few months. This event was probably being planned since at least his last birthday, August 4, 2020. The best case scenario is that Obama genuinely thought that, surely, there would at least be an ebb in the pandemic a year down the line. It’s much more likely he simply thought he deserved a giant birthday bash no matter what. Let’s put this bluntly: the Obamas thought they didn’t need to even think about the risks involved in planning a superspreader event (by the time they started their planning, that word was firmly embedded in our lexicon). With the world’s finest healthcare at their fingertips, with guests who were similarly positioned jetting in and out, they gave no thought to the fact that viruses spread … as viruses do, that COVID in particular has the most unpredictable and deadly results on different people. Most of all, the event was never designed to be a birthday party the way you and I, Dear Reader, might understand such: it was to be an occasion for Obama to gather with his neoliberal elites and consolidate their power. And while Obama might live on Martha’s Vineyard, one of his major power bases is in Hyde Park, on the south side of Chicago where he first made his mark.
Barack Obama is the only president who encouraged a bidding war for his presidential library which, in the end, went to the University of Chicago (well, kinda, sorta, as we’ll see in a minute). Every other president has simply had his library in his hometown but Obama, who retired at the relatively young age of 56, needed a next stage of his career to take advantage of all the different kinds of capital he’d accrued over his eight years. Understandably, he wasn’t going to retire to a garden somewhere to plant tomatoes or paint, like his buddy George W. Bush. As the first neoliberal president, the first such to think about himself as not merely a public figure but as an economic entity, Obama needed to monetise his legacy and make himself a desirable commodity that could in turn create an empire of wealth and influence for the elites he had cultivated over his eight years. Obama created and staged a race to acquire his “library” and the honour went, ostensibly, to the University of Chicago. This might seem to make sense given that Obama has always claimed his roots as an “organiser” (many scoff at his credentials) on the south side of Chicago, where the University is located and where he’d lived for a period as the Senator from Illinois. You might imagine then, that the University, already home to several famous buildings, would either house the presidential library in one of them or build a new abode for it.
Instead. The actual presidential library will be digitised by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and made accessible in a building called the Obama Presidential Center (OPC). What will technically be the Obama Presidential Library will actually be the first fully digitised presidential library. The NARA will obtain and maintain hardcopies of documents and other artifacts in a separate location and occasionally make materials available to the OPC and its visitors.
Where will this OPC be? Not on the University of Chicago campus, which is privately owned, but smack in the middle of Jackson Park, one of the last remaining parks designed by Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1893 (Olmsted was also the creator of New York’s Central Park). Jackson Park is a gorgeous landscape, consisting of spots like a Japanese Garden (which has, near it, a sculpture by Yoko Ono) and the Museum of Science and Industry. The place throbs with history and is acres of a beautiful winding area that southsiders have treasured for over a hundred years, through often tumultuous times in a city with a long and complicated history. Jackson Park is on the U.S National Historic Register of Places. The OPC, which is a private foundation, not a public entity, will, in its current plans, be a massive and ugly 235-foot high behemoth, set senselessly and brutally in the middle of an internationally acclaimed jewel of a park that has always been public land.
The story of how a privately owned foundation, the purpose of which is ominously fuzzy since it’s not technically a presidential library at all, landed itself in the middle of a beautiful park is almost as long and complicated as the history of Chicago and the south side. Among some of the interesting details: “the City of Chicago gave the Obama Foundation, which owns the OPC, a 99-year lease on the parkland, tax-free, for $10,” as this piece by Leonard Goodman points out. But the short version of the story is: corruption and gentrification.
The University of Chicago owns most of Hyde Park. Built in 1890 to look like Oxbridge, with a historical chip on its shoulder and a determination to prove itself one of the great institutions of the world, the university has all through its history been engaged in a long drawn out and largely successful seizure of the surrounding area. In this, it has pitted itself against generations of mostly Black families but also worked with them to push out the poorer, unwanted occupants deemed unsatisfactory. Margo Jefferson and others have written extensively about the collusion between the university and Black middle and upper class residents, and Mike Nichols famously declared that “Hyde Park is where Black and white unite against the poor.” In a city torn apart by gentrification, many people are forced to leave the areas in which they grew up and have to move around the city, barely steps ahead of the gentrifying forces that keep nipping at their heels. Hyde Park and the surrounding area has long been one of the rare majority Black neighbourhoods that is still home to multigenerational families, over several decades, but that’s swiftly changing. As early as 2014, the university began buying up chunks of land near Washington Park, in a neighbourhood once thought to be a favourite spot for the presidential library, anticipating that properties there would become sought after commodities. Even as plans for the current OPC were finalised, rents in HP began to shoot up, and longtime residents who have grown up here find themselves forced to leave.
Obama’s collusion with the University of Chicago is typical of what neoliberal elites set about to do in a world where land is simply to be owned as a hedge against a possible future. There are vast and empty tracts of land here in Hyde Park and the surrounding area and several historic and architecturally stunning empty buildings, including the shells of the 50 public schools Rahm Emanuel closed in 2013. The OPC could have been housed in any one of them or built on any one of the tracts, without disrupting the neighbourhood as it will now. As Goodman points out, “the Jackson Park plan calls for the closing of two major roads—Cornell Drive and the southern half of the historic Midway Plaisance—necessitating a rerouting of traffic and the widening of Lake Shore Drive and Stony Island Avenue.” It’s going to be a mess for commuters and residents.
Since the OPC was cleared, Hyde Park has been relentlessly sprucing itself up and the university—which owns most of the buildings in which local businesses are housed— has been changing the character of the main strip, 53rd Street, so that it looks exactly like Anytown, USA. There are now expensive boutique hotels like Sophy and restaurants like Virtue that, while justly famed, are not for everyday eating (I’ve written about how Hyde Park is where food goes to die); the aim is not to provide more amenities for Hyde Parkers but to create a tourist destination of sorts. On the east side of Hyde Park, the Promontory, a manmade but lush and idyllic and unique part of Hyde Park’s lakeshore is, like Jackson Park, on the National Register of Historic Places— for how long, it remains to be seen (there’s a battle over its preservation going on). When I moved here, I wondered aloud to a resident and local archivist whether it too might be swallowed up and developed for condos with spectacular views of the lake and I was gently dismissed: it seemed unlikely, especially after its placement on the Register. But Hyde Park is changing swiftly, and people who might have had a stake in resisting the rampant gentrification represented by the university and Obama are being phased out. In addition, the fact that Obama is the first Black president makes it awkward, in some contexts, to voice any opposition to his decimation of the neighbourhood. As long as the university, a corporate and white-led entity, was The Enemy, it was easier to mount and voice resistance. But criticising Obama can be an awkward matter.
To placate its critics, the OPC has made several vague and vacuous promises to provide job opportunities and to engage the community and so on. None of it is grounded in anything concrete and as far as I can tell, all it means is that neighbourhood youth and adults will be hired as security guards and baristas in the places that will serve wealthy students’ parents and the tourists drawn here, supposedly, to the grand OPC. Jobs as guards and baristas would be great if they came with excellent benefits, but that’s highly unlikely in a worsening and more exploitative economic market.
It’s also unclear what, exactly, tourists are likely to come to see. My educated guess (based on conversations with local activists) is that a southside dominated by the OPC will function in much the same way as so much of Manhattan: empty and largely unoccupied buildings, literal shells for corporate capital and investments, generating wealth for non-residents while the area slowly crumbles. The University of Chicago will continue to thrive, profiting from its partnership from the first neoliberal president who is effectively an iconic brand unto himself, creating a massive media empire that will sustain him and his family for generations. The university will continue to provide housing for its faculty and students (at exorbitant rents to the latter), and it will maintain 53rd Street as a tourist trap to make it look like there’s a bustling neighbourhood somewhere in there. But it will decimate and sell off everything around the neighbourhood, caring only for profits and creating fake “partnership” projects to make it look like it has a social conscience.
In its summation of the kerfuffle around the birthday bash, CNN reported that “in lieu of gifts for the former President, guests are being asked to consider giving to programs that work to support boys and young men of color and their families in the United States, empower adolescent girls around the world, and equip the next generation of emerging community leaders including the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, the Girls Opportunity Alliance, or the Obama Foundation’s Global Leadership programs…”
This is in line with the OPC’s vague promises of empowerment and revitalising of the economy in the southside in exchange for taking away its treasured parkland: Give us this beautiful lush area with gorgeous views and in return we’ll maybe let your kids guard the gates of the building. The birthday bash might have led to potentially hundreds of new infections, sure: But look: Empowerment!
Obama has just announced that the event will be scaled back, but what does scaling back mean for a man who, until this very week, thought that an event that put 700 people, 200 of them hapless servers and staff, in close contact with each other in an ongoing pandemic, was a fine idea? I imagine there is a sense of bitterness and disappointment in the Obama household tonight. I imagine the rest of the month will be spent placating the many wounded egos of wealthy, privileged, and deeply entitled people who, supposedly, were told to stay home unless they were already on the island. The party was to be where deals were to be struck, connections were to be made, and the wheels of the Obama Empire would continue to roll along.
None of that will end. There will be more parties and more deal-making. I doubt that Obama thinks much of Hyde Park or the south side when he’s not forced to be here to cement more deals and lure more investors towards the giant hedge fund that the area represents. Years from now, will there even be a Hyde Park to remember him?
***
Resources for further reading:
Yasmin Nair, “On the Obamas as Nouveaux Riches.”
Rick Perlstein, “There Goes the Neighbourhood: The Obama Library Lands on Chicago.”
Leonard C. Goodman, “The Obama Center and the Fight to Preserve Jackson Park.”
Michael Murney, “It’s Not About Obama.”
Sam Cholke, “U. of C. Buys 26 Properties on South Side Ahead of Obama Library Decision.”
Michael Lipkin, “The Way Things Work: Land Ownership.”
Kate Mabus, “The University’s Expansion into Commerical Real Estate Wavers Between Economic Catalyst and Gentrifying Force.”
Shia Kapos, “It’s Been Hard Opposing Barack Obama.”
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