As the political stages got bigger for Barack Obama on the way to a historic presidency, so did the size of the rooms he commanded in his adopted city.
Small, at the beginning. The cozy Hyde Park Ramada Inn near the lake to kick off his 1996 state Senate bid. To launch his underdog 2004 U.S. Senate run, a slight upgrade to a small room at Hotel Allegro, a Loop spot long favored by Democrats.
Then the biggest stage of them all, Grant Park, where he and 240,000 supporters celebrated a landslide 2008 victory that made him the nation’s first black president.
As Obama returns to Chicago for the final time in office, the venue is a bit smaller. Some of the same faithful who gathered at McCormick Place to mark his 2012 re-election will be there again Tuesday night as the president delivers a farewell address he’s described as “a chance to say thank-you for this amazing journey.”
What Chicago has meant to Obama is clear: It remains a part of his core, the home base where he’ll build his presidential library and headquarter his foundation — even if it’s not where he’ll call home in his immediate post-White House days.
But ask the city’s political and community leaders what Obama’s presidency has meant to Chicago, and the perspectives are as diverse as the city’s 77 neighborhoods.
Top aides who worked with him in the West Wing point to key projects Obama’s administration awarded to Chicago, from a new runway at O’Hare and improvements to CTA lines to an expanded Riverwalk and a new high-tech digital manufacturing hub. They stress that Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act has provided insurance to hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans who wouldn’t have it otherwise. And they give the president credit for restoring a cratering national economy and saving an American auto industry rooted in the Midwest, moves that helped lead Chicago out of its recession.
These Obama allies also acknowledge Obama didn’t achieve everything he sought. A national infrastructure program that could have meant more big projects and jobs for Chicagoans eluded him. So, too, did securing tougher gun control measures — an issue that remains prominent as the city’s homicides and shootings have surged.
His backers argue those type of achievements were unattainable in large part because of the challenges posed by the Great Recession at the outset of his presidency and Republican control of Congress in Obama’s final six years that made it difficult for him to win legislative victories in the face of constant obstruction on Capitol Hill.
“I’m sure there are many areas in which he would have liked to have done more, and there are many areas in which if he had some cooperation, he could have done more,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime political strategist who served as a White House senior adviser. “But the disappointments don’t go away even as you take satisfaction in your accomplishments. You have to accept that you’re there for a short period of time in the big scheme of things, and you do as much as you can and then spend the rest of your life trying to make contributions in other ways.”
To some Chicago community organizers and activists — the very role in which Obama sowed his own political seeds — the president’s track record is more mixed.
They laud the president and First Lady Michelle Obama for setting an example as role models for young African-Americans, but lament that Obama didn’t do more to tip the scales of inequality they see in city schools that lack proper resources and in Chicago neighborhoods void of economic opportunity.
“I think Barack Obama has ignored the black community for eight years, and now he’s coming to take a bow in Chicago while our neighborhoods are suffering from disinvestment and soaring unemployment,” said Ja’Mal Green, who rose to Chicago prominence among a group of young activists who decried police misconduct following the release of the Laquan McDonald police shooting video.
“We are seeing young black men getting gunned down at a horrific rate,” Green said, “and he has shown no willingness to seriously address these issues.”
For his part, Obama has sought to reconnect with Chicago ahead of his farewell speech. On Thursday, he sat for a rare round of short White House interviews with reporters from the city’s five major TV stations. The White House declined multiple Chicago Tribune requests for an interview with the president.
In his Saturday radio address, Obama explained why he picked the city for his speech.
“I chose Chicago not only because it’s my hometown — where I met my wife and we started a family — but also because it’s really where my career in public service began,” he said.
Projects that ‘stand the test of time’
Ask Rahm Emanuel what Obama’s presidency has meant for Chicago, and the mayor immediately launches into a list of projects that have received federal funding — most of them on his watch.
But funding first started to flow to Chicago in the early months of Obama’s presidency when Emanuel still was working as the president’s first chief of staff. With the economy plummeting, Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress pushed through an $840 billion stimulus program.
Illinois received nearly $12 billion in grants, contracts and loans for projects ranging from new roads and repaved runways to research grants and faster rail lines. That ranked the state fourth nationwide in overall funding, but 22nd when measured per capita, at $921 per citizen.
Chicago received 76 stimulus awards worth $513 million, in the form of money for neighborhood stabilization, homelessness prevention, airport paving, resurfacing major arterial roads and rebuilding Congress Parkway in the Loop. Other state transportation projects funded by the stimulus benefited the city, such as the $126 million Englewood flyover that separated two major railroad crossings on the South Side.
Transportation money also flowed: an additional $155 million for a new O’Hare runway that opened in 2013, $345 million for a sixth east-west O’Hare runway and new taxiways. The CTA got several grants, including $47 million for Blue Line work, $20 million to expand the 95th Street Red Line station and a commitment for $1.1 billion to revamp the Red and Purple lines between North and Devon avenues.
The lakefront and riverfront also were helped. Emanuel secured a $98.6 million federal loan to expand the Riverwalk from State to Lake streets, while Chicago benefited from a $2.2 billion Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, an effort to restore wetlands and clean up pollution.
“If you think about it, these are all major economic and culture investments that will stand the test of time,” Emanuel said. “Those are things that have, and will, going forward, drive Chicago’s economic and cultural growth and keep the city a world-class city.”
Chicago also was awarded two other competitive grants from the Obama administration, including $70 million in federal money to build a public-private digital manufacturing institute on Goose Island, beating out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and aerospace hub Huntsville, Ala., among other competitors.
Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Lemont won a $120 million grant from the Department of Energy to create a so-called Energy Innovation Hub to advance battery technology through a partnership with researchers at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Michigan.
Emanuel lobbied heavily for some of the projects, making nearly 50 trips to Washington in his five-plus years as mayor. His official calendars showed him meeting with Defense officials before the digital manufacturing grant was awarded and several meetings with transportation officials in the months running up to grant announcements.
The mayor said Chicago projects had to meet a higher standard because the Obama administration did not want any deals for the president’s hometown to “come under the political microscope.”
“It’s a double-edged sword. One side is you’re his first chief of staff, helped assemble the administration and you’re also a former member of Congress and know that process, so it’s helpful,” said Emanuel, who represented a North Side district before leaving that post to work for Obama. “On the other hand, the projects had to be better than good, they had to be great. It was getting double scrutiny, because it couldn’t be a gift.”
William Daley, the son of one former Chicago mayor and the brother of another, said he saw firsthand the aversion in the Obama White House toward any perceived favoritism for Chicago. That was particularly true, he said, when Chicago did not win any of the initial education grants under Obama’s Race to the Top program, even as former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan was serving as secretary of education.
“The president was rightfully very sensitive to an allegation that somehow they were rigging the system to help Chicago,” said Daley, who served as Obama’s second chief of staff. “A lot of people in Chicago were ticked off because they didn’t make the cut. There was an expectation by a lot of the press that Chicago was going to get a ton of (education) money, because Obama was from there and Emanuel was mayor … but that wasn’t the case.”
Obama, though, did tap plenty of Chicagoans to take top positions in the administration. In addition to Emanuel and Daley as chiefs of staff, Axelrod as a senior adviser and Duncan as education secretary, Valerie Jarrett served as a top Obama confidant and adviser for all eight years and billionaire businesswoman Penny Pritzker was tapped for commerce secretary. Scores of other Chicagoans filled key advisory and staff positions and could emerge as key political players down the line, Obama’s top advisers agreed.
Emanuel often has said he didn’t want to take the chief of staff job, content with his family settled in Chicago and a leadership role in Congress. But, the future mayor said, he abided by his grandfather’s rule of only offering one of two answers to a request by the president, “yes” or “yes, sir.”
The high-profile job did position Emanuel to move back to Chicago and run for mayor once Richard M. Daley announced his retirement. Asked if it’s unlikely he would have become mayor otherwise, Emanuel laughs.
“That’s a hypothetical that neither you or I can answer, OK?” Emanuel said in an interview last week. “I do know this: It helped.”
‘Sick of Barack Obama the politician’
Some community activists and organizers, however, aren’t as quick to paint a rosy picture of Obama’s Chicago legacy.
Jitu Brown, a longtime community organizer who helped lead a hunger strike to save Dyett High School in the Washington Park neighborhood after Emanuel tried to close it, termed Obama’s impact on Chicago as “complicated.”
Brown said he used to take Chicago students to visit then-state Sen. Obama in Springfield, and said his legacy as a role model for young people in the city can’t be overstated. And he applauded Obama’s successes on the economy and health care reform, saying working-class and poor Chicagoans have better lives because the president chose to emphasize those initiatives.
But Brown termed the Obama administration’s reliance on competition among states for federal education grants and the pro-charter school ethos exemplified by Duncan’s tenure as education secretary “a major disappointment, and a missed opportunity.”
Brown said many urban education activists hoped Obama’s background in Chicago would lead to a re-examination of ways to fund local schools so children in all parts of the city would be able to get a good education near their homes.
“They aren’t addressing the fact a child in a school at Diversey and Ashland is learning Mandarin and enjoying a strong arts program and a host of after-school activities, while at 45th and King Drive you have schools with 52 kindergartners in a classroom,” Brown said. “That’s an ugliness I think the Obama administration failed miserably on.”
Green, the young activist who has been vocal on Chicago police misconduct, was unsparing in his assessment of Obama’s disappointments. He said the president hasn’t done enough to spur jobs in black neighborhoods, confront unjustified killings by police or work to prioritize solutions to the city’s violent crime woes.
“I’m sick of Barack Obama the politician. We need somebody who’s actually going to care about the issues,” Green said. “Young people and black people are the reason he’s in office, and I think he’s lost a lot of that support. I hear about people crying in Grant Park when he won in 2008, and now eight years later those same people are saying ‘What happened?'”
Green gave Obama credit for efforts to pardon people in prison for drug crimes, but said the president has done too little to respond to the local and national outcry over police shootings. “How can you be a black president coming from Chicago and not speak out at this time?” he asked. “Black Lives Matter started during your administration. Where’s your voice on this?”
Amid concerns over police-neighborhood relations as an outgrowth of police-related shootings across the nation, Obama spoke to the International Association of Chiefs of Police at McCormick Place in October 2015. He sought to strike a balance between concerns of overaggressive policing and urging law enforcement to support tougher gun-control laws.
But community organizer Amisha Patel said Obama too often tried to walk a fine line on such issues.
“I think the president was afraid to be clear on an urban agenda. I don’t think he thought he had room to move on that, and so you get a really hands-off approach, these half-solutions,” Patel said. “There was tremendous pressure on Obama, being the first black president of this country, and I think he was focused on being seen as the president for everybody in the country, and so he moved away from urban issues.”
Patel applauded Obama’s success with Obamacare and noted the great pride many Chicagoans feel in him, but said the high expectations many locals had when Obama took office because of his background and understanding of city problems were met with disappointment.
“When he campaigned in 2008, he campaigned as a community organizer, but he didn’t govern as one,” she said. “I think that’s a missed opportunity.”
Obama, though, did campaign repeatedly for stronger gun control laws, often referencing crime in Chicago as an example for why such measures were necessary.
The Jan. 29, 2013 shooting death of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton struck a chord with the president.
Pendleton died in a park about a mile north of Obama’s Kenwood home just a little more than a week after the King College Prep honor student performed in Washington during Obama’s inauguration festivities. Michelle Obama attended her funeral.
Days later, as the teen’s parents attended the State of the Union address, Obama spoke to the nation of her life and of her loss. And to close out the week, he came to Hyde Park Academy High School, where he spoke not only of the need for more gun laws, but community intervention and economic opportunity in impoverished neighborhoods.
“There was something profound and uniquely heartbreaking and tragic, obviously, about a group of 6-year-olds being killed,” Obama said, referring to the Newtown, Conn., elementary school gun massacre from two months before, where 20 children and six adults were killed.
Citing the gun deaths of victims 18 and under in Chicago, Obama said, “That’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months.”
Pendleton’s death clearly “was a bracing moment” for Obama, Axelrod said. But he also said Obama, who represented a South Side district in the state Senate, “never lost touch” with the violence and continually pushed for tighter gun laws particularly because of the effects of gun crimes on youths.
“He is someone for whom children mean everything, and I remember him emailing me after Newtown and saying, ‘This is the first time I cried in the Oval Office,'” Axelrod said. “So the killing of these children and innocent kids and kids like Hadiya Pendleton, someone so obviously filled with life and promise, there’s no doubt that that weighed on him.”
As for the inability to overcome opposition in Congress on gun control, Axelrod said, “I think this is something that he will leave the White House in disappointment.”
Those who criticize Obama’s lack of an urban agenda often overlook the impact of the Affordable Care Act, said Democratic U.S. Rep. Danny Davis of Chicago. “Some people don’t remember those times people had to sit two, three days in the emergency room of a hospital and never got any servicing until the staff finally got around to them,” he said.
According to the Census Bureau, about 900,000 Illinoisans, or 7.1 percent of state residents, lacked health insurance in 2015, far fewer than the 1.6 million residents without insurance in 2013 before many Obamacare provisions took effect.
When it comes to African-American unemployment in the city, Davis said “the needle probably didn’t move a great deal” under Obama, but he noted it could have been much worse had the president not taken the steps he did to stabilize the economy and save the auto industry.
“You have to look at the depths from which you’ve come,” Davis said, “not only the heights to which you’ve ascended.”
Chicago’s reputation
For good and bad, Obama’s presidency also elevated Chicago’s national political status — and put a renewed spotlight on its history of corruption.
Obama’s opponents used the city’s historical legacy of shoddy political shenanigans to question the president’s political skills, and cast Chicago’s entrenched violent crime and its deep financial problems as examples of a failed ideological and political background.
Scarcely a month after winning election, Obama found his Chicago-based transition efforts ensnarled by the arrest of Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich on federal charges that included attempting to sell off the incoming president’s U.S. Senate seat. Obama quickly called for Blagojevich to resign.
Obama, Emanuel and Jarrett were all questioned by federal agents in the Blagojevich probe. The transition team conducted an internal review that found no indication of dealmaking between Obama’s team and the Blagojevich administration over the Senate seat.
Yet the Blagojevich saga set a tone for early and continued GOP attacks on a White House led by Obama and run by a cadre of top Chicago aides.
“Can you imagine coming out of Chicago politics where ‘politician’ and ‘felon’ are synonymous?” John Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff to George H.W. Bush, said during Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. That year’s GOP nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, assailed Democratic criticism about his finances and tax returns as “Chicago-style politics at its worst.”
Early in last year’s campaign, President-elect Donald Trump recited a major embarrassment linking Obama and Chicago — the city’s failed 2009 attempt to win the 2016 Summer Olympics — to attack Obama’s foreign policy initiatives. In essence, Trump asserted Obama should have “known the result” before committing to back the city’s bid.
Obama traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to urge the International Olympic Committee to award the games to Chicago, one of four finalists. Instead, the city lost in the first round and the games went to Rio de Janeiro.
Obama gave Chicago and Emanuel a consolation prize of sorts, the role of hosting the 2012 NATO summit after lobbying by his former chief of staff. Despite fears, protests did not get out of hand and the city was on the world stage. Acknowledging Chicago residents may have had difficulties getting around, Obama said, “That’s part of the price of being a world city.”
William Daley said Chicago is “a good whipping boy.”
“It sticks with whoever is from Chicago, whether it’s Emanuel, whether it’s Obama. That’s just a game and Trump, they all beat up Chicago in the campaign. It’s just a fact of life.”
Trump has used Chicago’s violent crime problem as a frequent refrain in attacking Obama as failing the nation’s inner cities. In accepting the GOP nomination in Cleveland in July, Trump cited thousands of homicides “in the president’s hometown of Chicago” during the Democrat’s tenure.
More recently, Trump noted the city’s 2016 murder surge and chided Emanuel on Twitter by saying if “Mayor can’t do it he must ask for Federal help!”
On Thursday, Obama said in an interview with NBC-5 that he has been “pushing everybody” for an answer to what is happening in Chicago that has created an increase in homicides that isn’t occurring in other big cities.
“It appears to be a combination of factors,” Obama said. “The nature of gang structures or lack of structure in Chicago, the way that police are allocated, in some cases the need for more police, the easy accessibility of guns, pockets of poverty that are highly segregated.”
The president then mentioned the civil rights investigation his Justice Department initiated into the Chicago Police Department after the release of dash-cam video of a white Chicago police officer firing 16 shots at McDonald, a black teenager.
“I do think it is going to be incumbent on all of us to really work on this,” Obama said of Chicago’s struggles with gun violence. “I’ve assigned my Justice Department to work directly with the mayor’s office to provide them additional incentives, resources, best practices.”
The Justice Department report is expected to drop as soon as this week, before Obama leaves office.
Next chapter
Obama is expected to focus both personally and professionally on myriad social issues, including crime, as part of projects involving his presidential library and foundation in Jackson Park.
Like his iconic “O” campaign logo, which Obama initially derided as looking too “corporate,” the foundation represents an attempt to come full circle in Chicago from his community organizing days to post-presidential social programs and economic development efforts.
“We’re going to be making a huge investment of time and energy in making this presidential center really a world-class center to train young people to bring about change, to work on the issues we’ve worked on all our lives,” Obama told ABC-7.
Emanuel said the project will forever link Obama to his adopted hometown.
“When people from around the country and around the world are seeking to come to see America, they’ll come to the president’s library,” the mayor said. “It will be one of the biggest draws, one of the biggest beacons around the world, his presidential library. And the economic impact will be felt for decades and the educational gains will be felt for decades.”
Among projects that Obama said he wants to reinvigorate is My Brother’s Keeper, the program he launched nationally in 2014 involving mentoring, support and skills for at risk minority youths. Emanuel said that issue will be one of many where Chicago will benefit from Obama’s post-presidency activism, noting he recently launched a goal to provide a mentor for each of the city’s most at-risk young men.
Axelrod recalled that he and Obama discussed the advantage of serving as president and leaving from office relatively young — Obama is 55 — so “there’s room for many new chapters in his life.” Chicago, Axelrod said, “will run through all of them because this is going to be the hub of his activity.”
As for Obama’s big speech Tuesday, Axelrod said while it may be a farewell speech to the country, “it would be wrong to term it as a farewell from public service or a farewell to Chicago.”
Asked recently if his personal success story was dependent on Chicago, Obama told CBS-2 that it’s where he “came of age” as a community organizer, even as he acknowledged there is much work left to be done to improve the city.
“I understood my mission when I moved to Chicago. I never claimed I was wildly successful in bringing about the changes that I wanted in some really tough neighborhoods, but I met such wonderful people,” Obama said. “I always say Chicago’s got challenges, but it is really a microcosm of the country. There’s no city, in some ways, that’s more representative.”
Chicago Tribune’s Katherine Skiba contributed.
