According to the New York Times, the planning for Barack Obama’s post-presidency started as soon as his second term began. The conversations began with director Steven Spielberg and studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg impressing upon the president the need to employ cutting edge technology in the presidential library to be built to honor him. Their goal, which has apparently been reinforced in many other late night conversations at the White House with a variety of other well-heeled and influential Obama fans, is that the aim of the new institution will be to develop, as the Times tells us, a “narrative” for his post-presidency. The reaction to that from most of the country, including the many who don’t think he’s been a good president (a group that has included a clear majority of Americans for most of his disastrous scandal-ridden second term), is so what? As long as the Obama library isn’t being built on our dime, what do we care what it contains or how it spins his historic yet flawed presidency? I share that sentiment, but I also think the plans to build Obama a mausoleum that will dwarf the ones built for his predecessors and to re-write history to burnish his reputation provide us with new proof of the moral vacuum at the heart of his administration.
The practice of building ever-bigger presidential libraries for each retiring president is not something that we can halt but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Due to security requirements as well as the entourages and taxpayer-paid perks we give former presidents we may not be able to go back to the 19th and even early 20-century practice of retiring presidents going back to being ordinary citizens rather than assuming the status of dowager emperors as they do today. But there was a great deal to be said for a system that reinforced the idea that presidents were just people who had been given a great honor but then asked to return it once they were done.
As I noted in 2013 when George W. Bush’s presidential library in Dallas was opened, when we speak of these things it’s worthwhile remembering that only a generation or two ago, ex-presidents were not treated as the demigods as they are now. Matthew Algeo reminded us in his book Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, that it was possible in 1953 for a retired president to simply hop in a car with his wife and drive around the country on their own without Secret Service escorts just like everybody else.
The growth of the ex-presidency to its current state is a function of the way the power of the executive expanded in the 20th century as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the exigencies of a World War and then the Cold War built an imperial presidency that bore little resemblance to the institution that had existed before then.
Presidential libraries began merely as repositories for documents and other government papers that would allow scholars to conduct vital research. That function continues but they are now primarily museums. While George W. Bush’s edifice seems to focus more on educating citizens about the choices the 43rd president was forced to make about war and peace, there’s little doubt that Obama’s will be a paean to his glory. The estimated cost of Obama’s library is expected to be over $1 billion, more than twice the amount spent on Bush’s place. The building that will go up in Chicago will probably make the more modest edifices honoring the Bushes, Clinton, Reagan and all of the other 20th century presidents, look like shacks.
But with Hollywood honchos already thinking about how they will help brush up Obama’s “narrative,” the main point of the Obama library won’t be so much grandeur as it will be to exalt the legacy of the 44th president. While the tone of Bush’s opening remarks when his library opened was humility (a theme reflected in its exhibit if not in the concept of a half-billion dollar museum), one suspects there will not be much of it in the place built to honor a man who has shown precious little of that quality in his presidency.
As our first African-American president, Barack Obama is an important historical figure. Even if think little of his primary accomplishments — a dubious health care program that may wind up doing as much harm as good and a Iran nuclear deal that is strengthening a dangerous Islamist regime — that fact will influence history’s view of him.
Yet there is something distinctly unhealthy for democracy in our new tradition of building bigger and bigger museums for each president as if they were pharaohs in ancient Egypt trying to construct bigger pyramids than those erected for their predecessors. Such institutions are a reflection of the inflation of each president into something earlier Americans would think of as a monarch rather than the elected leader of a republic. The harnessing of Hollywood and Silicon Valley high-tech to Obama’s ego in a billion-dollar pyramid ought to trouble us a bit even if it is only his admirers who will pay for it.
Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House do prove that any American — regardless of race — may grow up to be president and that is a good thing for which we should be grateful. But the problem with these libraries and the cult of the presidency of which they are the tangible expression isn’t a matter of taste. They are the essential building blocks of a process that turns each presidential family into royalty and then a dynasty carrying over their influence in politics and culture long after they have been sent home.
Even more troubling is the prospect that Obama will link his pyramid to a new foundation that will be cut from the mold of the Clinton’s efforts. Their family foundation is a toxic mix of influence peddling and a thinly veiled political slush fund. There’s little doubt that Obama could match or even exceed their efforts. And that’s why we should worry about the post-Obama presidency and that of future presidents who will similarly use their positions to create new hybrid institutions that pose as philanthropies while actually performing a very different less exalted non-charitable purpose. As it is difficult to imagine him operating with the humility of either Bush, it’s likely Obama will become a permanent presence in which his library and foundation will be bases from which he will continue to influence our political life for the worst for many years to come.
