In an on-stage conversation about the process of choosing a location for President Barack Obama’s presidential library, Michelle Obama said that a lot of people across the entire globe view him as “their president,” Breitbart reported.
“Barack’s presidential library could have been anywhere in the world, because there are so many people who feel like he is their president,” she said while talking about the selection of a Jackson Park site on the lakefront of Chicago.
The former first lady said the location of the facility is especially meaningful because it is close to where the couple lived before Barack was elected president and is also near her childhood home on Chicago’s South Side.
“There’s power in the selection of Jackson Park,” Michelle said during the interview at the Obama Foundation Summit. “Barack and I don’t do things incidentally. There’s a strategy.”
Site selection criticized
Advocacy group Protect our Parks had filed a lawsuit to prevent the construction of the Obama Presidential Center on the Jackson Park site because it would convert public park land to a alternate use and amounted to a “massive giveaway” of valuable lands. A federal judge, however, ruled earlier this year that plans for the complex could proceed.
The library center is expected to cost $500 million to build. Presidential libraries are usually privately funded, but are part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Obama’s library will be part of the Obama Foundation and will not actually house documents and artifacts from his administration. Instead, the records will be digitized, and the actual artifiacts will be stored at existing NARA facilities.
“New York wanted it. Hawaii wants it. Because it’s also an economic engine,” Michelle said of the library center. Barack Obama spent part of his childhood in Hawaii.
President Michelle Obama?
As Democrat 2020 presidential candidates have continued their struggle to gain support from the American people, some have speculated that Michelle Obama might jump into the race to challenge President Donald Trump’s re-election bid, but she hasn’t been showing much interest in doing so.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, who has coyly suggested that she would enter the fray if an opportunity presented itself, it sometimes appears that Mrs. Obama is more interested in rubbing elbows with celebrities and taking expensive vacations than in doing the hard work of running the country.
Can anyone blame her? It’s actually rather astounding that someone like President Trump, with decades of wealth and success under his belt, would willingly subject himself a constant barrage of criticism from a hostile media establishment, or be willing to sustain the type of financial losses that inevitably result from having to distance himself from his business empire while in office.
Michelle Obama hasn’t had true wealth for a particularly long time, though, and therefore it is not surprising that her head would be easily turned by a $5 million beach home and a jet-setting lifestyle.
Luckily, Donald Trump has been willing to put the future of this country ahead of the luxurious, carefree retirement he could be enjoying right now.
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