Former President Barack Obama is working furiously to secure what is left of his legacy — but he was just betrayed in one of his own.
Obama has been sent reeling by black community organizers in Chicago that are protesting his multi-million dollar Obama Presidential Center, which they say is being built at their expense.
Welcome to the reality of the Democratic Party. It’s a bunch of big promises to poor minorities by the political elite… until they’re done using you. Then they line up the bulldozers and point them at your town.
The very same community that Obama used to further his political career — and the academics that cheered his meteoric rise to the White House — have turned around and delivered the former president a stinging dose of reality.
It seems that no one wants Obama’s “legacy” to taint their backyard.
“The center’s troubles became clear last September, when Jeanette Taylor, the education director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, walked into the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago with something on her mind,” Politico Magazine reported.
“She was there for a public meeting with officials from the Obama Foundation, the entity that is building the Obama Center—a monument to the career of former President Barack Obama.”
“The first time investment comes to black communities, the first to get kicked out is low-income and working-class people. Why wouldn’t you sign a [Collective Bargaining Agreement] to protect us?” Taylor asked at the public meeting.
Obama’s response “infuriated” her.
“I was a community organizer … I know the neighborhood. I know that the minute you start saying, ‘Well, we’re thinking about signing something that will determine who’s getting jobs and contracts and this and that’ … next thing I know, I’ve got 20 organizations coming out of the woodwork.” Obama replied.
“He got a lot of nerve saying that,” a still angry Taylor told Politico months later. “He’s forgotten who he is. He forgot the community got him where he is.”
Taylor isn’t alone. Since 2016, over a dozen local groups — Democratic power centers like community organizers, labor unions and liberal activists—have formed a coalition opposing the Obama monument in their neighborhood. The proposed Obama Presidential Center has also aroused the opposition of a group of University of Chicago professors, faculty and staff.
About 120 people from the university have signed a letter asking that the center of former President Barack Obama be moved from Jackson Park to another location.
In its letter, the group expressed concerns the center won’t be a “bold vision for urban living,” but instead will become “an object-lesson in the mistakes of the past.” The group also complains the center abandoned plans to be a library and instead will have only electronic archives on site.
The letter comes as the Obama Foundation continues to tweak plans for the center planned for Chicago’s South Side. The foundation announced Monday a planned above-ground garage has been dropped in favor of an underground one.
After eight years of failure, it seems no one — not even his own city — wants Obama back.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article