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Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department are overhauling a slew of outside advisory boards that inform how their agencies assess the science underpinning policies,the first step in a broader effort by Republicans to change the way the federal government evaluates the scientific basis for its regulations.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is reviewing the charter and charge of more than 200 advisory boards, committees and otherentities both within and outside his department. EPA and Interior officials began informing current members of the move Friday, and notifications continued over the weekend.

Pruitts move could significantly change the makeup of the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), which advises EPAs prime scientific arm on whether the research it does has sufficient rigor and integrity, and addresses important scientific questions. All of the people being dismissed were at the end of serving at least one three-year term, although these terms are often renewed instead of terminated.

EPA spokesman J.P. Freire said in an email that no one has been fired or terminated and that Pruitt had simply decided to bring in fresh advisers. The agency informed the outside academics on Friday that their terms would not be renewed.

Were not going to rubber-stamp the last administrations appointees. Instead, they should participate in the same open competitive process as the rest of the applicant pool, Freire said. This approach is what was always intended for the board, and were making a clean break with the last administrations approach.

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says he is not convinced carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change and wants Congress to weigh in on whether CO2 should be regulated. (Reuters)

[EPA website removes climate science site from public view after two decades]

Separately, Zinke has postponed all outside committees as he reviews their composition and work. The review will effectively freeze the work of the Bureau of Land Managements 38 resource advisory councils, along with other panels focused on a sweep of issues, from one assessing the threat of invasive species to the science technical advisory panel for AlaskasNorth Slope.

The Secretary is committed to restoring trust in the Departments decision-making and that begins with institutionalizing state and local input and ongoing collaboration, particularly in communities surrounding public lands, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said by email Monday. As the Department concludes its review in the weeks ahead, agencies will notice future meetings to ensure that the Department continues to get the benefit of the views of local communities in all decision-making on public land management.

Greg Zimmerman, deputy director of the non-partisan advocacy group Center for Western Priorities, said in an interview that it just doesnt make any sense they would be canceling meetings as they do this analysis. BLMs regional advisory councils include officials from the energy and outdoor recreation industry as well as scientists and conservationists, Zimmerman added. The only reasonable explanation is they dont want to be hearing from these folks.

The moves came as a surprise to the agencies outside advisers, with several of them taking to Twitter to announce their suspensions.

John Peter Thompson, who chairs Interiors Invasive Species Advisory Panel, tweeted Monday that he had been notified that all activities are suspended subject to review by Depart of Interior.

Members of EPAs Board of Scientific Counselors had been informed twice in January, before President Barack Obama left office, and then more recently by EPA career staff members that they would be kept on for another term, adding to their confusion.

I was kind of shocked to receive this news, Robert Richardson, an ecological economist and anassociate professor in Michigan State UniversitysDepartment of Community Sustainability, said in an interview Sunday.

Richardson, who on Saturday tweeted, Today, I was Trumped, said that he was at the end of an initial three-year term but that members traditionally have served twosuch stints.Ive never heard of any circumstance where someone didnt serve two consecutive terms, he said, adding that the dismissals gave him great concern that objective science is being marginalized in this administration.

Courtney Flint, a professor of natural resource sociology at Utah State University who had served one term on the board, said in an email that she was also surprised to learn that her term would not be renewed, particularly since I was told that such a renewal was expected. But she added, In the broader view, I suppose it is the prerogative of this administration to set the goals of federal agencies and to appoint members to advisory boards.

[EPA just buried its climate site for kids]

Ryan Jackson, Pruitts chief of staff, noted in an email that all the board members whose terms are not being renewed could reapply for their positions. Im not quite sure why some EPA career staff simply get angry by us opening up the process, he said. It seems unprofessional to me.

Yet Terry F. Yosie, who directed EPAs Science Advisory Board from 1981 to 1988,noted in an email that theBoard of Scientific Counselors does not report directly to the administrator or his office. Its quite extraordinary that such a body would receive this level of attention by the Administrators office, he said.

And Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, expressed concern and said he hoped Pruitt reconsidered his decision. Academic scientists play a critical role in informing policy with scientific research results at every level, including the federal government, he said.

Pruitt is planning a much broader overhaul of how the agency conducts its scientific analysis, said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Pruitt has been meeting with academics to talk about the matter and putting thought into which areas of investigation warrant attention from the agencys scientific advisers.

The agency may consider industry scientific expertsfor some of the board positions as long as these appointments do not pose a conflict of interest, Freire said.

Conservatives have complained for years about EPAs approach to science, including the input it receives from outside scientific bodies. Both the Board of Scientific Counselors and the 47-member Scientific Advisory Board have come under criticism for bolstering the cause for greater federal regulation.

A majority of the members of the Board of Scientific Counselors have terms expiring this fiscal year, along with the terms of 12 members of the Scientific Advisory Board. GOP lawmakers have frequently criticized the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC)a committee within the Scientific Advisory Boardfor its recommendation that the EPA impose much stricter curbs on smog-forming ozone. The seven-person panel, which is charged under theClean Air Act to review the scientific basis of all ambient air quality standards, is legally required to have a medical doctor and a member of the National Academy of Sciences as members.

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who questions the link between human activity and climate change and has several former aides now working for Pruitt, said in an interview earlier this year that under the new administration, theyre going to have to start dealing with science, and not rigged science.

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) held a hearing on the issue in February, arguing that the Scientific Advisory Board should be expanded to include more non-academics. The panel, which was established in 1978, is primarily made up of academic scientists and other experts who review EPAs research to ensure that the regulations the agency undertakes have a sound scientific basis.

The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government, Smith said at the time. The conflict of interest here is clear.

In a budget proposal obtained by The Washington Post last month, the panels operating budget is slated for an 84 percent cut or $542,000 for fiscal 2018. That money typically covers travel and other expenses for outside experts who attend the boards public meetings.

The document said the budget cut reflects an anticipated lower number of peer reviews.

Joe Arvai, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board who directs the University of Michigans Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, said in an email that Pruitt and his colleagues should keep in mind that the boards membership, just like its standing and ad hoc panels, already includes credible scientists from industry and that its work on agency rulemaking is open to public viewing and comment. So, if diversity of thought andtransparencyare the administrators concerns, his worries are misplaced because the SAB already has these bases covered.

So, if you ask me, his moves over the weekendas well as the House bill to reform the SAB areattempts to use the SAB as a political toy, Arvai said. Bymaking these moves, the administrator and members of the House can pander to the presidents base by looking like theyre getting tough on all thosepesky liberal scientists. But, all else being equal, nothing fundamentally changes about how the SAB operates.

Chris Mooney contributed to this report.

More from Energy & Environment:

Scientists are conspicuously missing from Trumps government

Trumps signs order at EPA to dismantle environmental protections

New EPA documents reveal even deeper proposed cuts to staff and programs

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Washington Post reporter Dennis Brady talks with Mustafa Ali, a former EPA environmental justice leader who served more than two decades with the agency, to discuss the consequences of President Trump's budget proposal. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)

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EPA dismisses half of key board's scientific advisers; Interior suspends more than 200 advisory panels - Washington Post

CreditIllustration by Tom Bachtell

A year ago, during the Democratic Presidential-primary debate in Flint, Michigan, Senator Bernie Sanders was railing against the crooks on Wall Street when he turned to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and said, One of us has a super PAC. One of us has raised fifteen million dollars from Wall Street for that super PAC. One of us has given speeches on Wall Street for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clinton had a ready response: If you were going to be in some way distrusted or dismissed about whether you can take on Wall Street if you ever took money, President Obama took more money from Wall Street in the 2008 campaign than anybody ever had! Obama had still stood up to Wall Street, she said, and so would she. But there was a problem with that argument: although Barack Obamas two campaigns had raised about twenty-five million dollars from Wall Street, he had not personally received large fees from the industry. Meanwhile, since 2001, Hillary and Bill Clintons paid speeches had earned them a hundred and fifty-three million dollars.

Obama may yet catch up. Last week, it was reported that, having returned from sailing around Tahiti with friends, he would embark on the working stage of his post-Presidency by giving a speech for which the financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald would pay him four hundred thousand dollars. During his time in the White House, Obama made his share of mistakes, but he worked hard. While enduring insults about his family and his citizenship, he won landmark progressive victoriesincluding the expansion of health-care access to millions of Americansall without a hint of sordidness or scandal, and then he campaigned tirelessly for Clinton. He deserves a comfortable retirement. But isnt that what the joint book deal that he and Michelle Obama recently signed, for a reported sixty-five million dollars, is supposed to provide? For that matter, what should a post-Presidency provide? A reason that Obama has been criticized for the Cantor Fitzgerald fee may be not that he would take the money but that he would do so before his identity outside the White House has been solidly defined. Now almost the first thing that the public is learning about this next stage in his life is the one thing they think they already know about politicians: they are financially beholden to corporate interests.

Obama will not run for office again. And, unless the Obamas have learned nothing from the Clintons experience, his decision to accept the speaking fee should finally put to rest any notions that Michelle might run. Still, one hopes, and Obama has said, that he is not done with public life. Last month, in Chicago, he talked about wanting to inspire young people to feel good about politics as a profession. He might consider how the financial decisions he makes in the next few years could compromise that goal, and others. He is committed to working with Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, in the battle over congressional redistricting, which will require fund-raising for state campaigns.

Obama has also begun accepting money from donors like John Doerr, the venture capitalist, and Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn, for the Obama Presidential Center. The design for the twenty-one-acre library-and-museum complex, on the South Side of Chicago, was revealed last week, at an event near the site. Obama announced that he and Michelle would donate two million dollars to a youth-jobs program, and emphasized that, while other Presidential libraries had involved retrospective ego-tripping, his would look forward. According to the Times, the fund-raising target is eight hundred million dollars, to cover construction costs and the initial endowment. The modern imperative for a former President to collect cash for a monument to himself as soon as he leaves office allows little respite from the culture of political financing. The minute you stop being pharaoh, you have to start building a pyramid.

Until quite recently, it was considered perfectly proper for a former President to trade his conversation and his companionship for a check. Jimmy Carter, who eschewed personal enrichment in favor of quietly effecting humanitarian advances around the world, was viewed as an outlier. Yet, if the tradition was ever a healthy one for our democracy, voters no longer seem to see it that way. Russian hackers may have been a factor in Hillary Clintons defeat, but so were a number of Americans who believed that the Clintons had sold their independence. The Democratic super PAC Priorities USA recently commissioned a study of voters in Wisconsin and Michigan who had chosen Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, and found that thirty per cent had voted not for Trump but against Clinton. Many also distrusted the Democrats economic allegiances. The G.O.P., meanwhile, was short on elder statesmen who had enough credibility with its populist wing to halt the lurch toward a demagogue who said that all politicians were crooks, and that he knew it because he had bribed them himself.

Obama may feel that hes had enough of this kind of headache, but the fact is that his party still needs him. If he could just hand over the reins to successors with national reputations and, crucially, the ability to articulate what the Democratic Party stands for, it would be fine for him to focus on his own projects until the next time hes called on to give a Convention speech. The Democratic field, however, is in a state of unproductive entropy, in part because the Party has not resolved the divisions and the contradictions that drew younger voters, in particular, to Sanders. The list of potential standard-bearers includes everyone from Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, who will be in their seventies in 2020, to traditional machine politicians, like Andrew Cuomo and Terry McAuliffe, and younger senators, such as Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, and Chris Murphy, who as yet lack the constituencies and the institutional support that they will need in order to succeed on the national level. But, if any of them are standing on a primary-debate stage in 2020, they are going to have to offer better answers than the ones Clinton gave in Flint.

Her campaign was full of confidence after that debate, but Sanders, in an upset, won the Michigan primary, and Clinton went on to lose the state, narrowly, to Trump. Many observers wondered why the candidate hadnt done more polling, or deployed a better field operation, or, at least, made better use of a surrogate who would have been a great asset there: President Barack Obama. Maybe next time.

Read more here:
Obama's Life Post-Presidency - The New Yorker

CHICAGO The best thing about President Barack Obamas historic presidency is that its over. We can now look back on it and him in far fonder terms than it was experienced live.

After the news about Obamas upcoming $400,000 speech at a health care conference sponsored by the Wall Street financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders called the gig distasteful. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she was troubled.

The terms fat cats and hypocrite were bandied about, and newspaper op-ed pages chimed in with delightfully colorful headlines like $400,000 for an Obama speech: Tacky but not corrupt, from the Los Angeles Times.

It was fun to watch the opposite-day dueling op-eds at the major papers. The Wall Street Journals editorial board declared: Let the man make a buck, as long as he pays the top marginal rate, while The New York Times editorial board grimly mourned that it was disheartening that a man whose historic candidacy was premised on a moral examination of politics now joins almost every modern president in cashing in.

But in total, even his less ardent fans have to be thinking: Awwwwwwww, leave Obama alone, already!

This is why fewer and fewer good, smart people of modest means will grow up dreaming of becoming president: Not only does every aspect of your life get skewered and put through a funhouse mirror, but after youve served your country even your former supporters will have the long knives out for you should you want to cash in on your incredibly unique experience.

But more so than that, peoples disgust at Obamas new opportunities to make a living speaks of a pervasive bias against those with high ambitions and who happen to be minorities.

Most high-achieving minorities grew up with hard-core parents who drummed into them the idea that in order to succeed in America they had to be not twice, but three or four times as good academically, in their work ethic and in their behavior as their white peers.

There was no wiggle room you were either undeniably better or you had to prepare to take a back seat to people whose names typically were easier to pronounce or spell.

So, yes, what Im saying is that even if liberals dont understand it, criticizing President Obama for failing their purity test of not turning down a big payday for doing what he does best speechifying is, if not exactly racist, then at least a harmful double-standard.

By all accounts, most modern former presidents parlay their time in office into lucrative speaking engagements, book deals and other options. Why should Obama be held to a different set of rules?

People who otherwise wouldnt blink an eye at a rapper, an actor or an athlete making millions seem to think that Obama should be above financial incentives and, in fact, should give away his experience and expertise.

Speak, Obama, speak. Just not for money, wrote Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, in The Guardian.

Stunning.

Just imagine if all experts and all who excelled at their disciplines were expected to provide their knowledge for free. For one, no one would ever pay for a newspaper or a book again.

Trevor Noah, the host of Comedy Centrals The Daily Show, put it best: So, the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards? No, no, no, no, no, my friend. He cant be the first of everything.

Noah threw it into perspective why should Obama be the one to break the mold of making money after the presidency? After all, he didnt forge it. Why isnt the expectation that there should be a first white president to not take the money?

Go on and break the mold of having to be so much better, saintlier and humbler than your predecessors and peers, President Obama. Feel free to dispense with the silly double- and higher standards that minority firsts are held to.

You will be making a very big statement one that has the capacity to set a precedent that even after theyve proved themselves, firsts dont have to forever be at least twice as good as everyone else.

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Cepeda: Must Obama be more saintly than his predecessors? - The Mercury News

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Posted: May 07, 2017 12:01 AM

President Obama didnt just leave his military assets sitting in the garagehe set them to playing useless global warming games. Recently I reviewed the U.S. Navys planning documents from 20082015. Its no fault of the Navys, but they were directed to accept the IPCCs overheated claims of parboiled disaster as ultimate truth.

Thus, the Navy planned that many of their naval bases would be put out of action by rapid sea level rise and far stronger storms, just as the calamity criers predicted. They were told to expect an ice-free Arctic swarming with Russias subs and undersea miners. New trade though the suddenly ice-free Northwest Passage would require more Coast Guard cutters and more icebreakers. Fuel prices would soar, making biofuels crucial to our military. Meanwhile, the ships would have to rescue hundreds of thousands of people from sinking islands and failed coastal states like Somalia.

Now that Barack Obama has resigned his commission as Commander in Chief, however, his militarys global warming plans have been overtakenby new technologies, by unforeseen weather, and by radical political changes.

The Navys weather guys must have known back in 2008 about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is the cause of the pause (though the alarmists wont admit the cause is natural--and predictable. The PDO was recognized in 1996 by two fisheries experts exploring the decline of the salmon in the Columbia River. The researchers found that when the salmon declined in the Columbia River, they were abundant in the Gulf of Alaska, and vice versa. The PDO thus massively shifts the currents and sea surface temperatures in the Navys biggest bathtub the Pacific every 30 years.

After the Pacific shifts warm again in another dozen years, well get a solar sunspot minimum that will drop earths thermometers well below even todays non-warming levels. Coupled with the pause that would give us a full century of non-warming. Who knew? But most of us doubted.

Obamas Green Navy declared a culture of energy efficiency, including LED light bulbs in the ships, and sailing on one engine while the other propellers blades were set to minimize drag. The Navy said this draglining was meant to increase time at the action site between refuelings, but Obamas demand for a Greener Military was the real decision factor. We might even thank Obama for pushing one actually useful gimmickinstalling stern flaps on the vessels to improve water flow efficiency (like those rear spoilers on sports cars).

The Navys cleverest Green PR gimmick the Great Green Fleet it sent to sea in 2016. It was a carrier strike force keyed by a nuclear aircraft carrier and surrounded by nuclear submarines and hybrid-electric ships with beef tallow mixed into their marine diesel. Its aircraft flew (briefly) on 100-per-cent-renewable fuel from plant material and algae. Some of the aircraft fuel may have been camelina oil, a very expensive relative of mustard seed now grown in Montanamainly for cosmetic cream. Some of this camelina oil cost the Navy almost $30 per barrel, against less than $4 for marine diesel. Amazingly, the Naval Petroleum Reserve has no camelina oil. How would we scale up camelina production in the event of a sudden enemy attack?

Today, of course, the U.S. Navy is drawing up an entirely new set of plansbased on cheap and abundant fossil fuels, costly biofuels and the normal storms at sea expected during a global warming like this one. (Storms are vastly worse during the little ice ages.) And of course there is still a tiny annual rise in sea levels due to the moderate ice-melt of the Modern Warming. (The massive glaciers of the Ice Age are long gone and the sea has already risen nearly 400 feet since.) The rate of sea level rise has not increased during the last century.

The Coast Guard has not yet orders extra icebreakers to shepherd merchant ships through a sun-warmed Northwest Passage. However, a 70,000-ton cruise liner, the Crystal Serenity, recently sailed successfully from Seward, Alaska, through the Arctic Sea to New York. (It paid for its own privately-owned icebreaker.)

Neither Obama, the UN nor the U.S. Navy ever imagined a whole 21st century with no rise in temperatures, but that now seems the most likely scenario.

As baseball great Yogi Berra famously said, Its hard to predict, especially about the future.

Michigan Targets Parents in Genital Mutilation Investigation

Read more from the original source:
Obama Steered America's Navy Off Course - Townhall

As Barack Obama took on the role of salesman-in-chief for his Jackson Park presidential library last week, he engaged the audience with some blunt assessments of his adopted hometown.

Minority construction job numbers get rigged. Parks on the South Side aren't always as nice as those on the North Side. Neither are the playgrounds. And the first thing people mention about Chicago is its violence.

Not exactly traditional talking points from the fifth floor of City Hall. That's where Mayor Rahm Emanuel, already eyeing a 2019 run for a third term, is fine-tuning his political messaging: amenities and spending are being spread across the city, schools are improving, the police department is being reformed and the post-recession economy is booming with construction cranes and the jobs they bring.

Obama's comments undercut some of that, drawing surprised reactions and applause inside the South Shore Cultural Center at a time when Emanuel could stand to regain support among African-Americans who have soured on him since the 2015 city election amid revelations about the Laquan McDonald police shooting and a federal probe into the department.

"(Obama's) positions were frank. They are the types of things that we more often have said privately among ourselves, because they are difficult to put out there," said South Side Ald. Roderick Sawyer, 6th, who chairs the City Council's Black Caucus. "Now that he's out of office, he can make those type of statements with ease, and it was refreshing for someone to address them in terms that everyone understands."

Going forward, it's a political dynamic to watch. With the presidential library still in the planning stages, how often will Obama be back in Chicago? When he surfaces, will the former president continue to draw attention to the city's problems or embrace the mayor's work to fix them? Emanuel, after all, was Obama's first White House chief of staff, and in turn, the president greatly helped him become Chicago mayor in 2011 with an East Room send-off that ended up in a campaign TV ad.

North Side vs. South Side

The former president volunteering that Chicago's predominant national image is tied to its surging gun violence doesn't do Emanuel any favors.

"As somebody who has not been right here in Chicago over the last several years, whenever I visit, I tell people, 'Chicago has never looked more beautiful. It has never sparkled more,'" Obama said Wednesday. "And yet, if you ask a lot of people outside of Chicago about Chicago, what's the first thing they talk about? They talk about the violence."

The mayor already finds his city a frequent target of Republican President Donald Trump for its inability to tamp down the killing, most of it on the South and West sides. Last year, Chicago had 762 homicides, the most in two decades. So far this year, the city has seen a similar rate of killings.

Obama suggested he and Michelle Obama weren't willing to wait until the library's completion in 2021 to get started on their work. The couple announced they would start apprentice training programs for young adults and would donate $2 million to summer jobs programs "so that right away young people can get to work, and we can start providing opportunities to all of them."

The focus on summer jobs programs does endorse one of Emanuel's approaches to curtailing violence. The mayor, who declined an interview for this story, has increased funding for the city's program over the past several years.

The Rev. Torrey Barrett, a South Side pastor who attended the library event, said Obama's willingness to openly discuss the city's violence and other challenges also tackles a criticism the former president has faced head-on.

"When he was in office, a lot of people criticized him for not doing enough for Chicago, particularly the black community of Chicago," said Barrett, who is the CEO of KLEO, a community nonprofit in Washington Park. "Now that he's out of office, it looks like he's going to use all the weight that he has as an ex-president to address some of these issues that people have criticized him for."

In his remarks, Obama also made it a point to emphasize how the home for his presidential center, Jackson Park, doesn't measure up with parks in other areas of the city.

"Jackson Park is beautiful, but let's face it. ... When you drive through the park, it feels different than Lincoln Park does. It feels different than Millennium Park does. It is not used in the same way. It is not accessible in the same way. It does not have features of the same sort. It's not as good as it could be," Obama said. "So part of what we said is ... how do we transform the park, so it starts looking like Millennium Park and Lincoln Park and thereby stitches the entire city together, so that it's not things are that way on the North Side and a different way on the South Side?"

Obama made a similar point on inequity when discussing his vision for a children's playground area at his presidential center. He said he'd like to see features like climbing walls and other activities and programs.

"One of the things I wanted the community to do is look at what they're doing in places like Brooklyn in their parks, or Seattle in some of their parks, or what they're doing, frankly, in some of the parks up on the North Side in terms of how to engage young people," Obama said. "What we want to make sure of is the park is not just a dead zone."

Sawyer, the 6th Ward alderman, said such statements could pressure the city and Emanuel into doing a better job on the issue.

"The president can acknowledge a disparity does exist between the South and North sides and the West and North sides, and the mayor is starting to have to make accommodations and also acknowledge the disparity exists," Sawyer said. "I think the mayor is being pushed to make these changes. ... The president's comments help that."

A narrative that the South and West sides lack top-quality parks and amenities cuts against some of Emanuel's efforts on those issues.

The mayor frequently points to his Chicago Plays! program that he says built or renovated hundreds of playgrounds in neighborhoods across the city. Emanuel has been quick to point out he was the first mayor to place public art along the lakefront on the South Side. He's also highlighted the soaring suspension bridge along 35th Street, connecting Bronzeville to Burnham Park along the lakefront, which he has suggested is so beautiful it makes Lincoln Park envious.

Barrett, who has supported Emanuel, applauded second-term efforts such as hiring businesswoman and former U.S. Senate candidate Andrea Zopp as deputy mayor and an effort to siphon off money from downtown developments for neighborhood projects. But Barrett also thinks the spotlight on Obama's library will push Emanuel to do more.

"If you're going to be attracting people from all over the world to the South Side, you're forced to invest in it so people who come here are safe, have options and are able to take full advantage of the area," he said. "The president is making a charge, and I think the mayor will step up to make sure he meets that demand."

'Cook the numbers'

Obama also waded into the longtime Chicago controversy of minority contracting, with city ordinances requiring a certain percentage of public contracts to be dedicated to women- and minority-owned firms.

"We will exceed whatever historic or legal goals have been mandated in terms of minority- and women-owned business participation," Obama said. "I also want to point out, though, that and again, this is from somebody who lives here you know you can cook the numbers to make it look like people are participating. I mean, that's just true. I'm sorry."

The former president's comment about minority jobs cuts to an ongoing problem for Emanuel.

Black aldermen routinely complain the city is failing to bring enough African-American-owned businesses and black employees in on lucrative city contracts. The mayor mustered the bare minimum of 26 City Council votes last fall to let him borrow up to $3.5 billion to bankroll aviation projects, with several black aldermen saying they voted against the measure to send a message that the Aviation Department must do more to make sure the firms that get the bond work have minorities well-represented on their staffs.

At the same time, Obama said his foundation would not hire firms just because they are run by African-Americans, Latinos or women.

"If we have to choose between somebody who is not a woman- or minority-owned vendor and who does really great work and is going to make this whole thing terrific, and somebody who's raggedy, we will choose the folks who do the work," Obama said to a loud roar of laughs.

Sawyer said that remark drew a joke from Emanuel.

"I was sitting next to the mayor, and when the president made his statement about raggedy businesses, the mayor said, 'Alderman, do you really think I could say that at the City Council?' I said, 'No, you shouldn't, and you better not either,'" Sawyer said with a laugh.

Obama-Emanuel relationship

While Obama's airing of Chicago problems may make things uncomfortable at times for Emanuel, tying himself to Obama's legacy helps the mayor politically. Emanuel introduced Obama at the library event and spoke wistfully about his former boss' time in the White House and of his influence in Chicago something the mayor said he sees frequently when visiting schools to teach civics classes.

"Invariably, there is always a photo of the president or a quote of his, just like if you go to Boston, there is always a picture or a quote from John F. Kennedy, their favorite son," Emanuel said. "It's a sign of a strong connection we all have to our friend, our president. President Obama's contributions to the city of Chicago are already immeasurable, and his legacy is just beginning."

In his first bid for mayor in 2011, Emanuel aired ads with highlights of Obama praising him at his White House departure ceremony as outgoing chief of staff. In the mayor's 2015 re-election bid, Obama cut a radio ad for the mayor and visited Chicago days before the election to embrace Emanuel's re-election bid and announce the Pullman district would become a national monument.

Barrett said he believes Emanuel will continue to benefit from his association with the president, even if Obama draws attention to the city's challenges under the mayor.

"It shows that while there are some things that have happened, the president still supports him as the mayor of the city he's called home and the city of his library," Barrett said. "Will that sway everyone? Probably not, but as he continues to do what's needed and makes investments, I think he'll be successful again, and I think his relationship with the president will continue to help in the black community."

Chicago Tribune's John Byrne contributed.

bruthhart@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @BillRuthhart

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Obama's talk of Chicago problems undercuts Emanuel's message - Chicago Tribune