RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2026. Today marks the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. In the middle of so much so wrong about the USA today, the event reminds us that some sides of the American past, present, and future still look “close enough for jazz.”

Every US President since Herbert Hoover (1929–1933) has at the end of their time in office acquired a “Presidential Library and Museum,” ultimately operated “under the federal system managed by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA),” and “spread across the country, usually in a location tied to the president’s home state or personal history.”

I have only visited one of these now 14 (and soon enough to be 16) presidential libraries myself — the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum in Independence, Missouri. I was in the adjacent Kansas City, MO contemplating the urban geography that initially bred the world’s greatest saxophonist, Charles Parker Jr. I visited the nearby Truman library to occupy a spare afternoon without prior intention. But I found my visit interesting, and even at a few points moving.

In keeping with Barack Obama’s unique contribution to US politics and even American life more broadly, the new Obama Presidential Center tries to do something more and at least somewhat different than its predecessors. The Truman library, eg, “was established to preserve the papers, books, and other historical materials relating to former President Harry S. Truman and to make them available to the people in a place suitable for exhibit and research.”

The Truman library itself is more than a strictly academic research operation, catering to political historians and other professional researchers. Many of its exhibits have a popular edge, and the place is “ranked among the top tourism destinations in the Kansas City region.”

The new Obama Center, however, is also trying to attract eg the struggling local youth of South Side Chicago where it is located. It offers a presidential museum in a tall building. But it also has a local branch of the Chicago public library for ordinary young readers, and some 19 acres of parkland dotted with recreational facilities for younger local visitors just looking for a place to hang out (including a regulation NBA-size basketball court).

It finally makes sense as well that the new Obama Center is located in Chicago. A number of years ago I spent some time in Hawaii — particularly in Kailua on Oʻahu where the Obama family typically spent Christmas during his presidency.

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and spent much of his youth there. I was struck by how much the largely Asian American culture of Hawaii, rooted in the concept of ohana (“creating loving relationships with more than just blood relatives … developing a sense of familial care and devotion to all members of the human family”) helped explain Barack Obama’s ultimate progressive political career.

It nonetheless seems more than arguable that the Barack Obama who grew up in Hawaii with his white mother and white maternal grandparents was in at least some respects an essentially white American who had an absentee black father.

It was in his adult relationship (and eventual marriage) with Michelle Robinson from the South Side of Chicago — and with her widowed mother Marian — that Barack Obama finally created and anchored both his identity as an African American first and foremost, and the historic African American political career that would finally take Barack and Michelle Obama to the White House.

Very early on the morning of June 18, 2026 — the day when the Obama Presidentisal Center on the South Side of Chicago officially opened — Barack Obama posted a video of some remarks he had made the night before to the young people he and Michelle Obama have been working with since the end of his presidency in 2017, to help keep building Democracy in America.

The short written message former President Obama included with the video when he posted it on Twitter/X eg struck me as an oh-so-welcome, refreshing change from what the world has been hearing from the US presidency more recently.

I quote directly :”It was great reconnecting with our alumni tonight … Michelle and I will always be grateful for the chance to work side-by-side with so many brilliant, selfless people who believed in something bigger than themselves.”

This kind of American free and democratic high-mindedness is one valuable quality that Barack Obama brought to his presidency from 2009 to 2017. It is of course something all too sadly lacking in the White House today.

It is also a timely reminder that Democracy in America can do much better than it is doing right now. Such good things as President Barack Obama (who did win a real-world Nobel Peace Prize) have happened in the past. As the USA, USA does seem to be starting to recognize at long last, good things like this can happen again in the American future.

And with any luck this future can begin seriously with the US midterm elections this coming November 3, 2026.