Former first lady Michelle Obama said Tuesday that her husband, former President Barack Obama, could have built his presidential library anywhere in the world because many feel he is “their president.”
Obama, speaking at the Obama Foundation Summit at the Illinois Institute of Technology, explained Chicago’s Jackson Park was selected as the site for the Obama Presidential Center because it was close to the couple’s former home and situated near her South Side childhood home.
VIDEO
“There’s power in the selection of Jackson Park,” the former first lady said. “Barack and I don’t do things incidentally. There’s a strategy.”
Obama then argued the library could have even been built outside of the United States.
“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 stated.
“New York wanted it. Hawaii wants it. Because it’s also an economic engine,” she added.
Michelle Obama appeared at the fireside chat with her brother, Craig Robinson, and interviewed by The Warmth of Other Suns author Isabel Wilkerson.
In June, a federal judge ruled plans to build the $500 million presidential center on Chicago’s lakefront could move forward, dismissing advocacy group Protect Our Parks’s lawsuit objecting to the use of public park land.
Pollak: Barack
Obama Wrote the Playbook on Political Division
JOEL B. POLLAK
Left-wing pundits have accused President Donald Trump of using his
tweets last weekend to launch a divisive re-election campaign.
David
Axelrod, former adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted : “With his deliberate, racist outburst,
@realDonaldTrump wants to raise the profile of his targets, drive Dems to
defend them and make them emblematic of the entire party. It’s a cold, hard
strategy.”
That is
debatable — but if so, Axelrod should know; Obama did it first.
By 2011,
Obama knew that re-election would be difficult. The Tea Party had just led the
Republicans to a historic victory in the 2010 midterm elections, winning the
House and nearly taking the Senate. The economy was only growing sluggishly,
and Obama’s stimulus had failed to keep unemployment below eight percent, as
projected. Moreover, the passage of Obamacare had provoked a backlash against
Obama’s state-centered model of American society.
Facing a
similar situation in the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton had “triangulated,”
moving back toward the middle, frustrating the GOP by taking up their issues,
such as welfare reform.
But Obama
rejected that approach. Having watched his icon, Chicago mayor Harold
Washington, settle for an incremental approach when
faced with opposition in the 1980s, only to die of a sudden heart attack before
fulfilling his potential, Obama chose the path of hard-left policy — and
divide-and-rule politics.
The first
hint of his strategy emerged during the debt ceiling negotiations in the summer
of August 2011. As Bob Woodward recounted in his book about the
crisis, The Price of Politics , then-Speaker
of the House John Boehner (R-OH) had wanted to reach a “grand bargain” with the
president on long-term spending cuts. But Obama blew up that agreement by
demanding $400 billion in new taxes, to his aides’ surprise. Obama wanted an
opponent, not a deal. (Last week, Boehner told Breitbart
News Tonight that Obama’s decision was his worst
disappointment in 35 years of politics.)
In the
fall of 2011, a new left-wing movement, Occupy Wall Street, was launched. A mix
of communists, anarchists, and digital pranksters, the Occupy
movement cast American society as a struggle between the “99 percent” and
the “one percent.”
Obama and then-House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) embraced the movement — and
failed to distance themselves from it even as it collapsed into violence, sexual assault, and
confrontations with police.
Instead,
Obama picked up on Occupy’s themes and used them to shape his campaign.
In
December 2011, Obama gave a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas — a
place steeped in radical symbolism — at which he
doubled down on his left-wing policies. He focused on the issue of economic
inequality, and attacked the idea that the free market could lift the middle
class to prosperity. “This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the
nation’s welfare,” he insisted.
Then, in
the spring of 2012, Obama made a controversial play on race. When a black teen,
Trayvon Martin, was killed in Florida during a scuffle with neighborhood watch
volunteer George Zimmerman, Al Sharprton — who was serving as an informal
adviser to Obama at the time — made the local crime story into a
national racial controversy. Obama, following Sharpton’s lead, weighed
in: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said at the time.
Poll
numbers suggest that race relations, which had
been improving, dropped precipitously after that. But to Obama, it was worth
it: the campaign needed to find a way to motivate minority voters. (Vice
President Joe Biden did his part, telling black voters that GOP nominee Mitt
Romney was “gonna put y’all in chains.”)
Trump is
pushing a non-racial, nationalist message. But if he actually wanted to divide
America for political gain, he could learn from the master.
Joel B. Pollak
is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social
Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a
winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the
co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a
Revolution , which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter
at @joelpollak .
Heading for civil war
Donald Trump’s opponents are completely unhinged. The hate and
slander directed towards the president and his supporters is off the charts.
The vitriol comes not just from the Democrat party, the media, and the world of
entertainment, but also from a sizable proportion of the federal
bureaucracy and many seemingly ordinary people.
The media coordinates this campaign and amplifies the hate at
every opportunity. Media twist every event, be it big or small, into a
criticism of the president. The goal is always to present Trump in not just an
unfavorable light but to make him appear too loathsome for polite society. And
Trump is not the sole target of this demonization. It is directed at his
supporters, too.
Where will all this lead? No less than Angelo
M. Codevilla fears it could
ultimately result in a bloody civil war. And if it comes to that, there's no
doubt where he places the blame.
The story of the contemporary American Left's sponsorship of hate
and violence began around 1964, when the Democrats chose to abandon the
Southern constituencies that had been its mainstay since the time of Jefferson
and Jackson. In less than a decade, the party found itself increasingly
dependent on gaining super-majorities among blacks, upscale liberals, and constituencies
of resentment in general -- and hence on stoking their hate.
For the past half century, America's political history has been
driven by the Democrats' effort to fire up these constituencies by
denigrating the rest of America.
Codevilla notes that prominent Democrats like Barack Obama, Nancy
Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton have led millions of their followers "to think
and act as if conservatives were simply a lower level of humanity, and should
have their faces rubbed in their own inferiority."
It’s not surprising that many ordinary followers have concluded
that harassing conservatives in restaurants, airports, and public functions is
"not just permissible but praiseworthy ,
and if thousands of persons who exercise power over cities, towns, and schools
have not concluded that facilitating such harassment and harm is their duty."
This is the toxic environment that the Democrats, in conjunction
with the media, have created. Has Pandora's box been opened? Are we beyond the
point of no return? Are leftists and their liberal soulmates too obtuse not to
expect that hate and violence will someday be answered in kind? These questions
are up in the air. Right now, one thing is clear. As Yeats wrote: "The
best lack all conviction while the worse are full of passionate
intensity."
Just to touch on a few of the changes that Strauss and Howe see:
today's soft criminal justice system will become swift and rough. Vagrants will
be rounded up and the mentally ill recommitted. Criminal appeals shortened and
executions hastened. Pension funds will go bust and Social Security checks
become iffy. The full spectrum of society will be under distress. All
the problems will be combined into one -- the survival of society.
Aren't the seeds already planted for a crisis? Trust in Washington
and in government institutions is at an all-time low. Political violence is
tacitly condoned and often openly encouraged by Democratic officeholders. The political establishment encourages massive Illegal
immigration. The mainstream media is highly partisan and corrupt beyond reform.
The American flag, the country's history, and even its nationhood are openly
despised in universities. American public schools are a disgrace despite
the money poured into them. The country is burdened by a $22 trillion
national debt to which many trillions more of unfunded government liabilities
must be added. Students owe a trillion dollars in school loans that can never
be repaid.
Someday there has to be a reckoning for all this dysfunction.
Irrespective of the election results in 2020, the time frame of 2020-2022
sounds about the right for things to come to a head. It would be prudent to be
ready.
SCRATCH
THE SURFACE OF BARACK OBAMA IS A PRO-MUSLIM, ANTI-AMERICAN, ANTI-CHRISTIAN,
ANTI-JEWISH DICTATOR IN THE MAKING FOR GLOBALIST BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES.
When Obama found religion (or feigned the motions of doing
so for future electability), he chose out of the near 1,000 available
options to him in Chicago a church whose pastor
was an outspoken anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Semitic conspiracy
theorist. For the next 20 years, Obama and Michelle chose to sit in the
pews of that swine and devour the filth he shoveled out from the trough at his
altar.
The
Crisis Obama Let Go to Waste
Barack Obama's legacy is nothing if not consequential. In
his decades as "community organizer" among Chicago's poorest, most
desperate neighborhoods, he did nothing other than perpetuate complete
dependence on Big Brother. His Affordable Care Act, and its accompanying
criminal penalties for not engaging
in commerce, scythed a mile-wide berth into the already frayed concept of a
citizenry living free from government coercion. More ominously, Obama
was able to entwine his instinctive Marxism with a vision for America's path
forward in a way his predecessors had been unable to.
The singular cunning of Obama was his success in realigning the
"victim" hierarchy almost completely from class to race. Free
citizens in a market society can climb or descend the social ladder, but race
remains a constant throughout. Race is our most recognizable difference,
no matter its superficial nature. In the deepest recesses of our
prejudices, race is pure tribalism. And in the darkest hours of human
history, at our most trying moments, and during our most vicious wars, people
of all tribes have taken refuge not within their class, but within their race
or ethnicity. The examples of Nazi Germany, of Bosnia, of Rwanda, and of
the Armenians in Turkey are but a few examples of the horrors lifelong friends
and neighbors of the same class can inflict on one another in the name of
racial identity politics.
This isn't to say Marxism hasn't been peddled before under the
guise of racial identity grievance. Indeed, Lenin himself was able to
provoke satellite regions like Ukraine and Kazakhstan to revolt from czarist
Russia in the name of ethnic separatism. In the United States, it has
been tried repeatedly since the 1960s. But as our nation's first (half)
black president, Obama was able sow division with absolute authority, and with
minimal criticism by a political class that either openly supported his aims or
was petrified of soliciting unsubstantiated accusations of racism.
And sow division he did, with every chance he got.
When Obama found religion (or feigned the motions of doing so for
future electability), he chose out of the near 1,000 available
options to him in Chicago a
church whose pastor was an outspoken anti-American, anti-white, and
anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. For the next 20 years, Obama and
Michelle chose to sit in the pews of that swine and devour the filth he
shoveled out from the trough at his altar. When asked to justify his close association with this
shameless bigot, Obama shrugged off such concerns, comparing Wright to "an old uncle who sometimes will say things
that I don't agree with." Obama distanced himself from Wright only
when it started affecting his poll numbers.
When armed Black Panthers were caught threatening voters outside a
Philadelphia polling station in 2008, the Department of Justice under the Bush
administration charged (and convicted) them with violations of the Voting
Rights Act. Once in office, Obama had political appointees in the
DOJ dismiss the charges.
When Cambridge Police (both white and black, not that it should
matter) arrested his black friend Henry Gates for disorderly conduct, Obama,
after admitting that he didn't know all the facts, stated that the police "acted stupidly."
After Trayvon Martin was shot by Afro-Peruvian (AKA "white
Hispanic") George Zimmerman, Obama intoned , "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." This
implies that Martin was shot because he was black, and not because he was
repeatedly pummeling Zimmerman's head into the pavement. Even Eric
Holder's investigation concluded otherwise.
After black nationalist Xavier Micah Johnson opened fire and
murdered five Dallas police officers in 2016 (as they protected a Black Lives
Matter march), Obama gave a eulogy at their funeral. The eulogy itself
stands as perhaps one of the most despicable moments of the Obama
presidency. He used the podium to equate the murder of the Dallas police officers with the recent shootings
of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (both of which were investigated and
found justifiable, and neither man was "unfairly targeted" because he
was black, as Obama asserted).
It was a speech as deft as it was cynical. Reading through
the text, one realizes more clearly the manipulation taking place that, when
spoken, is less detectable. He subtly but unmistakably steers the speech
from a tribute to the murdered officers to a damning indictment of our alleged
systemic racism, coupled with a defense of the paranoid style of the Black
Lives Matter movement. By the end of the speech, Obama had skillfully
twisted the events to the point where theoretical, faceless white racism was to
blame for the actual, documented racism of Xavier Johnson.
One wonders if, had he attended Sterling's funeral, he would have
lectured the audience about murdered police.
At this point, I must interject a side note regarding the
aforementioned shootings. Philando Castile was shot in a horrible case
of mistaken
identity . He closely matched the
description of a suspect from a recent armed robbery, and the officer thought
he was reaching for a gun he admitted to having. Alton Sterling (who had
a long arrest
record that included battery, burglary,
and weapons charges) was shot because he was physically fighting with police,
despite being tasered several times. Police shot him when he reached for
the loaded .38 caliber revolver in his pants. His shooting was completely
warranted, and Baton Rouge is a safer place without him. Neither the
tragic shooting of Castile nor the justified shooting of Sterling can in any
reasonable way be attributed to racism, nor can they be remotely likened to the
premeditated slaughter of the five Dallas officers. But such are the dots
that Obama connected to hustle his race narrative.
Obama is notoriously thin-skinned to criticism, or to the
suggestion that someone, somewhere, might be smarter than he. This is the
guy who claimed , with a straight face, that he was a better speechwriter than his
speechwriters, more knowledgeable about policy than his policy directors, and a
better political director than his political director. Still, one assumes
he was adroit enough to recognize that objections to his policies, or questions
of their constitutionality, were not the default reactions of repressed
racism. If he had thought they were, he would have said so. On
a fundamental level, Obama understands that America is not the systemically
racist cesspool he allowed it to be portrayed as under his watch. Yet he
was Machiavellian enough to let this yarn spin itself for the purpose of
political advantage.
Obama also understood the political pitfalls inherent in hiding
behind the race card in efforts to deflect policy debates he could not
win. So he did one better. He let his media sycophants do it for
him. For the duration of his presidency and beyond, these shrieking curs
claw the flesh off their faces at the slightest hint of criticism of Obama, his
policies, or his style of governance. I am unaware of a single instance in
which he publicly censured his groupies for their utter lack of nuance.
Therein lies the biggest tragedy of Obama's legacy. As a
biracial president, he had a foot in both black and white America. He was
uniquely positioned to use this to the advantage of the entire country, to
serve as a bridge of healing and progress between races who have butted heads
for far too long. Instead, for eight continuous years, he chose to do the
exact opposite. He entrenched identity politics as deeply as he could,
ripping open wounds in the process, and divided this great nation perhaps past
the point of no return. He did this to spread a thoroughly debunked
ideology, the achievability of which his ego will never allow him to admit he
was mistaken about.
In a 2008 speech in which Obama attempted to justify Jeremiah
Wright's irrational hatred, he said , "At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin
up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own
failings." Never before has a poker player so inadvertently revealed
his own hand. When Obama spoke those words, he was no doubt doing what he
does best: thinking of himself.
*
Michelle was the next to attend Harvard, in her case Harvard Law School.
“Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren’t good enough for
an Ivy League school,” writes Christopher Andersen in Barack and Michelle,
“Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway.”
GOOGLE
WHAT THE OBOMB DID FOR HIS SAUDIS PAYMASTERS
Barack Obama’s back door, however, was unique to him. Before prosecutors
send some of the dimmer Hollywood stars to the slammer for their dimness, they
might want to ask just how much influence a Saudi billionaire peddled to get
Obama into Harvard.
“Of
course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful
and angry” is because race-baiting,
Islamist, class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was president
for eight long years." MATTHEW VADUM
MICHELLE OBAMA ANNOUNCES SHE WILL RUN FOR THE WHITE HOUSE AND BE
BARACK’S THIRD TERM FOR LIFE.
MEXICO WILL ELECT HER!
The
main objective of “political animals” like Obama and the Clintons is to get
elected; it’s not to fix a broken America, nor to protect her. There are people
who govern and there are people who campaign; Obama and the Clintons are the
latter. Just look at the huge Republican electoral gains under Obama and the
Clintons. It’s amazing that Democrats who still care about their party still
support the very people who have brought it down.
“Of course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful
and angry” is because race-baiting, Islamist,
class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was president for eight
long years. MATTHEW VADUM
Editorial
Reviews: Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
GET
THIS BOOK!
Obamanomics:
How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends,
Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY
TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial
Reviews
Obama
Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman
Sachs , GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests”
Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely
from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses,
and consumers. In Obamanomics , investigative reporter Timothy P.
Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes
you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate
socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s
corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE THE RICH AND
GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.
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