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The Obama Presidential Center will be dedicated tomorrow in Chicago. It isn't technically a presidential library but instead a massive campus with gardens, playgrounds, basketball courts and an eight-story tall museum tower. NPR senior political correspondent Tamara Keith takes us through the museum.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: It makes sense that the life and career of former President Barack Obama is at the heart of this museum. But his story is far from the only one it tells.
VALERIE JARRETT: So when you walk in, it doesn't begin with President Obama's time in office because he said, I stand on a lot of shoulders of people who came before me.
KEITH: That's Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation. She's talking about the first exhibit in the museum, called Toward a More Perfect Union. It's an optimistic idea about America's founding and future that Obama often included in his speeches.
JARRETT: It begins with the history of our country - the Declaration of Independence, the suffrage movement, slavery, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement - all of the different ways in which ordinary people brought about the change that led to his presidency.
KEITH: Further into the museum, there's a large section dedicated to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.
And just dozens and dozens and dozens of campaign buttons. I think some of these are probably unofficial campaign buttons, truth be told. Brat Obama, which is a Wisconsin-themed button that includes a photo of a brat sausage.
Four hundred and 40 buttons, to be exact. A short, documentary-style video takes people back to Election Night 2008.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I can't believe this, bro. I cannot believe this, man.
KEITH: John Roberson heads operations for the center.
JOHN ROBERSON: And then you hear President Obama say, if there is anyone who still doubts in the promise of America - and I'm paraphrasing - tonight is your answer. That gets me every single time. It gives me goosebumps.
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BARACK OBAMA: Tonight is your answer.
KEITH: In a section called The People's House, there's a detailed model of the White House, and the East Wing is still intact. Last year, President Trump ordered it torn down to make way for his ballroom. But in the Obama museum, time is frozen in a pre-Trump era, when hope and change were something millions of Americans believed in. A full-scale replica of the Oval Office is decorated just as Obama had it.
I am sitting at the resolute desk, which is something visitors will be able to do here in the Oval Office. And if you open the drawer, you can see a BlackBerry, not the fruit, the thing that was around before iPhones.
A timeline of administration accomplishments includes numerous items since reversed by Trump, like the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. Tina Tchen is executive vice president of programs for the Obama Foundation.
TINA TCHEN: The challenge that we're trying to express is representing a time when, you know, hope propelled, you know, an unlikely person to become president of the United States, but to also convey that hope is always with us.
KEITH: It all represents an early draft of the Obama legacy, as guided by the former president himself. It is not, however, part of the National Archives presidential library system. Obama's papers and artifacts, not loaned to the museum for display, are stored in Maryland. It's a break with past practice and something former Nixon presidential library director Timothy Naftali sees as a missed opportunity.
TIMOTHY NAFTALI: And I worry that we are going to have fewer and fewer professional nonpartisan spaces for national memory. And we need more of them, not fewer of them.
KEITH: Naftali hasn't seen the museum yet, but Tchen says it does include some failures, like not getting comprehensive immigration reform over the finish line.
TCHEN: We were very careful to be balanced, you know? And we wanted - you know, we had historians who advised us. President Obama himself was wanting always tell the contrary story.
KEITH: They do also want this presidential center to leave people hopeful and inspired to make change, even if many Americans find those feelings hard to conjure these days,
Tamara Keith, NPR News, Chicago. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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