Barack Obama’s goal for his library: ‘I want them to put my presidency in context’
By Nomaan Merchant, CNN
(CNN) — Weeks before he opens his presidential library in Chicago, Barack Obama is expressing his hopes for what the building will achieve for his legacy.
“I want them to put my presidency in context,” Obama told CBS’ Stephen Colbert in an interview taped at the library and aired on “The Late Show” Tuesday.
“I assume in my eulogy, somewhere it’ll be mentioned, ‘He was the first African American president,’” said Obama, 64. “But what I want people to understand is that there was this extraordinary journey this country took to get to that point, and I was an episode in that.”
The 44th president’s time after leaving the White House has been shaped by Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president. He has increasingly expressed public and private fears about Trump’s targeting of longstanding American institutions and warned of what he called in one appearance the “rising wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe.”
Obama remains one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures, someone sought out by candidates for campaign events and to promote pushes in California and Virginia for referendums to redraw maps in the ongoing redistricting war launched by Trump.
He told The New Yorker in a piece published Monday that he tries to balance his political activities with his and former first lady Michelle Obama’s desire to spend more time together.
“It does create a genuine tension in our household, and it frustrates her,” he said of campaign events. “I’m more forgiving of it, in the sense that I understand why people feel that way, because people aren’t looking at me in historical comparison to other president. They don’t care about the fact that no other ex-president was the main surrogate for the party for four election cycles after they left office.”
Speaking to Colbert in Tuesday’s interview, Obama was asked about what direction he wanted to see the Democratic Party take.
“Within the Democratic Party, and I would argue a bunch of independents and even some Republicans as well, there’s an overarching belief in equality, fairness – if you work, you should be able to make a living wage and support a family and retire with dignity and respect,” he said, before name-checking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom Obama joined recently for a visit to an early childhood education center in the Bronx.
Obama called Mamdani “an extraordinary talent.”
“He wants people to be able to afford housing in New York,” Obama told Colbert. “I would assume liberals in New York want the same thing, and so I don’t worry as much about some of these issues within the Democratic Party. What I’m more interested in for Democrats is, do you know how to just talk to regular people like we’re not in a college seminar, right? Can you talk plain English to folks?”
And as he – and other former presidents – have often been pushed to do, Obama was asked to reveal the government is concealing evidence of alien life. (He ended up clarifying comments he made earlier this year when asked whether he knew if aliens real.)
“One of the things you learn as president is the government is terrible at keeping secrets,” he told Colbert, insisting that any secret evidence would have leaked by now before offering himself as an emissary to aliens if they do arrive on Earth eventually.
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