Barack of Ages
16th October 2026
The Obama Presidential Center, located on Chicago’s South Side, opened in June 2026, nine years and five months after Barack Obama’s term in office concluded. The politicians who build these centers force themselves to run one final fundraising gauntlet, not to finance an election campaign but to leave behind an edifice that makes an enduring case for their probity, sagacity, and historical importance.
What sets Obama apart is that he began publicly discussing the greatness he hoped for prior to occupying, winning, or seeking the nation’s highest office. “My attitude about something like the presidency is that you don’t want to just be the president,” Barack Obama told journalist Jacob Weisberg in 2006. “You want to change the country. You want to make a unique contribution. You want to be a great president.” Later in the interview he said, “There are, what, maybe 10 presidents in our history out of 40-something who you can truly say led the country? And then there are 30 who just kind of did their best.”
At the time, having been elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 after serving eight years in the Illinois state legislature, Obama was still a Washington, D.C. newcomer. The author of The Audacity of Hope (2006) lived up to his book’s title in October 2006, during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “When I think about great presidents, I think about those who transform how we think about ourselves as a country in fundamental ways,” Obama said. Specifically, “they transformed the culture” rather than “simply promoted one or two particular issues.”
By that measure, Trump is one of the greatest U.S. Presidents of all time.
Notably absent from the latter takes, however, were claims that Obama had fulfilled the lofty expectations he had set before being elected. His admirers, rather, had long since concluded that he was a capable leader but not a world-historical figure. Jacob Weisberg, reflecting in 2017 for Slate on the career of the young politician he had interviewed eleven years before, wrote that Obama’s “legacy of integrity, eloquence, and patient commitment” qualified him as an “inspirational” president. But not a “transformational” one.
He was a legend in his own mind.