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The Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago could require a $1.5 billion endowment, its architects say, three times what was raised for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

Husband-and-wife architectural team Tod Williams and Billie Tsien noted that it will be difficult to raise such a huge sum because Obama scrupulously declined to do much fund-raising while he was still in office.

The Obama Center is due to be so expensive because it will require the construction of both a presidential library and a museum about the lives of Barack and Michelle Obama. And federal requirements now stipulate that former presidents must have larger endowments to pay for annual operating costs at the libraries.

It wont be easy, Williams said. Its not just about preserving the past. Its about the future.

The actual buildings were slated to cost $200 million. But I told them it will cost $300 million, Williams said.

Williams and Tsien spoke about the project with architectural critic Paul Goldberger on Wednesday, at the annual benefit for East Hamptons LongHouse Reserve.

The event was held in the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, which the duo designed theyve also designed the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago.

Listening in rapt attention were LongHouse founder Jack Larsen, its president, Dianne Benson, and stem-cell guru Dr. Christopher Calapai.

Read more from the original source:
Barack Obama's presidential library may need $1.5 billion - Page Six

Chris Wallace sparred with White House Chief of StaffReince Priebuson Sunday over President Donald Trumps attacks on the media.

The Fox News Sunday host said the president crosses a line when he describes the media as the enemy of the American people, referencing a tweet Trump sent last week.

Heres the problem, Wallace said. When the president says that were the enemy of the American people, it makes it sound like if youre going against him, youre going against the country.

Priebus defended Trumps attacks, and continued criticizing the medias coverage of the new administration.

Heres the problem, Chris, Priebus said. You get about 10 percent [media] coverage on the fact you had a very successful meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of the UK, the prime minister of Canada ...but as soon as it was over, the next 20 hours is all about Russian spies, how no one gets along, how nothings happening. Give me a break.

But you dont get to tell us what to do, Reince, Wallace shot back. You dont get to tell us what to do any more than Barack Obama did.Barack Obama whined about Fox News all the time. But I gotta say, he never said that we were an enemy of the people.

Wallace isnt the only Fox News anchor to call out Trump for his treatment of the press.Last week, Shep Smith harshly criticized the president for undermining the media and failing to answer reporters questions during a lengthy press conference.

Your opposition was hacked and the Russians were responsible for it, and your people were on the phone with Russia on the same day its happening, and were fools for asking the questions? Smith said. No, sir, were not fools for asking the questions, and we demand to know the answer to this question. You owe this to the American people.

Read the original here:
Chris Wallace: Obama Didn't Like The Media, 'But He Never Said We Were An Enemy' - Huffington Post

On February 17, Publishers Weekly reported that former President Barack Obama and his attorney are shopping a memoir among the Big Five trade publishers in New York. The price is expected to be high for one unusual reason, unusual at least for a political figure.

Explained the New York Times Gardiner Harris in September 2016, Mr. Obamas writing ability could make his memoir not only profitable in its first years but perhaps for decades to come. Harris speculated, in fact, that given Obamas literary skills, his newest book would perhaps rival the memoir of Ulysses S. Grant for durability.

Then again, it may not. In the months since the deal was first bruited about, publishers have had sufficient time to evaluate the evidence for Obamas literary genius. In truth, there is not much to evaluate. Before his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had only two named articles in print. Publishers who choose to read these articles might well have second thoughts about investing in Obama the writer at any price.

The earliest of the two is an 1,800-word article titled Breaking the War Mentality published in Columbias weekly news magazine, Sundial, at the height of the KGB-generated anti-nuke craze in 1983. The second is an article titled Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City that originally appeared in the 1988 edition of a publication called Illinois Issues.

Obama was 21, at the time he wrote Breaking and on the verge of graduating from an Ivy League university. Had he been raised by wolves in an Indonesian cave and then unleashed on the Columbia campus a year earlier, the reader might cut him slack for such a low-C effort. In fact, though, he was completing his fourth year of college after spending eight years at Hawaiis best prep school. His formal training as a writer culminated in this essay. If Obama worked at improving his skills after this essay, his next published effort, Why Organize, does not reflect it.

The following exercise may seem a bit pedantic, but it will help the reader see the literary capabilities of the young Obama. The problems cited like the five sentences in which the noun and verb do not agree suggest that Obama was far from gifted, very far.

The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents wartime memories, or incorporating into our framework of reality as depicted by a Mailer or a Coppola.

This is your classic dangling participle: the words discussing, sensitizing, and incorporating modify the subject, the more sensitive among us, but three other nouns stand between the participles and the subject. Also, note that incorporating should have an object. It makes no sense as is.

But the taste of war the sounds and chill, the dead bodies are remote and far removed.

The subject here is taste. The predicate should be is not are.

We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are occurring, but bringing such experience down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.

Another problem with noun-verb agreement. This time the subject of the but clause is plural bringing and taking. The verb should be become although can be would make more sense. The last two commas, both inappropriate, may have confused Obama.

These groups, visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.

Here, the participle is placed appropriately, but at sentences end Obama throws three awkward metaphors, all clichs, into a nearly indecipherable mix. Also, how does one grasp a tendency?

Along with the community Volunteer Service Center, ARA has been Dons primary concern, coordinating various working groups of faculty, students, and staff members, while simultaneously seeking the ever elusive funding for programs.

Coordinating is another participle left to dangle.

One wonders whether this upsurge stems from young peoples penchant for the latest happenings or from growing awareness of the consequences of nuclear holocaust.

This whole sentence clunks. Upsurge is the wrong word. Happenings should be singular, but even then it sounds like something Mike Brady would have said to Greg or Marcia.

Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets.

The subject is focus, but it is isolated from its predicate by a needless comma, and that predicate should be suits, in any case. Erector sets is another cringe-inducing metaphor.

The very real advantages of concentrating on a single issue is leading the National Freeze movement to challenge individual missile systems, while continuing the broader campaign.

Here is still another problem with agreement. This should read, advantages are leading, but only if advantages could lead. The last phrase dangles.

ARA encourages members to join buses to Washington and participate in a March 7-8 rally intended to push through the Freeze resolution which is making its second trip through the House.

Join buses? This sounds like something you would hear in an ESL class. A rally cannot push a resolution through the House. Now on its second trip?

An entirely student-run organization, SAM casts a wider net than ARA, though for the purposes of effectiveness, they have tried to lock in on one issue at a time.

Organization is singular, and thus they has no antecedent. The wider net clich is lazy.

By organizing and educating the Columbia community, such activities lay the foundation for future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.

People organize and educate, not activities.

The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAMs energies alive.

Again, an agreement issue: This should read, The belief . . . keeps SAMs energies alive. The random use of commas throws everything off. Plus, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama warns his readers about the the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country. In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are moribund that is nearly dead. How their debilitated state keeps the energies of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) alive is not exactly clear.

Regarding Columbias possible compliance, one comment in particular hit upon an important point with the Solomon bill.

The subject of hit upon, not an apt verb to begin with, should have been a person not a comment.

What members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.

Infuse is the wrong word. One infuses something into something else. There should be an and after situation, not a comma. Obama utterly mangles the bring to bear phrase. It should read something like, bring the words of those formidable men on the face of the Butler Library Thoreau, Jefferson, Whitman to bear. As to how or whether we are part of a twisted logic, that is best left to the readers imagination.

After the Sundial article, Obama had nothing in print for another five years. Obama biographer David Remnick reports that Obama took a stab at a short story or two, but Remnick shares no samples. In Dreams, Obama cops to only the occasional journal entry during this period. Not surprisingly, when Obama makes his next serious literary effort five years later, many of the problems on display in Breaking manage to find their way into Why Organize.

Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.

Facing these realities modifies nothing. Strands do not face reality.

The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods.

Of course, it should read, The election was.

neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace.

The grammar is passable here. The logic is not. Obama means, I think, Companies willing to base themselves in the inner city, new or established, will not be able to compete in the international marketplace.

Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.

Agendas do not have anathemas.

But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts.

Organizing does not face. Efforts do not leave skeletons.

Obama wrote this essay in 1988, perhaps to pad his rsum for Harvard Law at which he would enroll that same year. It shows a modest improvement over his Columbia essay from five years earlier. This may simply be due to more vigilant editing. That said, the essay exhibits many of the same problems as in Breaking awkward sentence structure, inappropriate word choice, a weakness for clichs, the continued failure to get verbs and nouns to agree. More troubling for the Obama faithful, this essay shows not a hint of the grace and sophistication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Two years later, this same writer would be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. At Harvard, Obama had nothing in print under his own name save for a letter defending affirmative action in the November 1990 Harvard Law Record, an independent Law School newspaper. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing: his inability to make subject and predicate agree. Since the merits of the Law Reviews selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues, wrote Obama, Id like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works.

A year or so after publishing this letter, Obama landed a book deal that would culminate in what Joe Klein of Time has called the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician. Only in Obamas uniquely myopic slice of America could a writer of such modest talent achieve so much and expect to achieve so much more.

Excerpt from:
Has Obama's Would-Be Publisher Read 'Breaking the War Mentality'? - American Spectator

WASHINGTON First, the Democrats got clobbered in the election by the Republicans.

Now theyre squaring off against each other in a civil war.

This political Gettysburg pits the Democratic Party base against the Obama machine called Organizing for Action, or OFA, the community-organizing army left over from the former presidents election campaigns.

How bitter is the battle?

Two Democratic operatives recently called OFA The Devil.

When former President Obama issued a call to arms to his OFA troops in order to protect his legacy, particularly Obamacare, Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, wrote in a private email to fellow party leaders, This is some GRADE A Bullst right here.

President Obama

He added, It also to me seems TONE DEAFwe have lost over 1,000 seats in the past 8 years all because of this crap.

What do YOU think? Sound off on Democrats calling Obamas shadow government The Devil. Take part in the WND Poll!

The email was obtained and then published Friday by the Daily Beast, which reported: It is difficult to overstate just how enraged state Democratic activists and leaders are with Organizing for Action.

How powerful is OFA?

Just a week ago, WNDs former Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry portrayed OFA in the New York Post as an army gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country manned by 32,525 volunteers nationwide, run by old Obama aides and campaign workers armed with his 2012 campaign database.

Sperry called it Obamas army of agitators numbering more than 30,000 who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

Sperry warned Obama would be working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration, and that its drawing battle lines on immigration, Obamacare, race relations and climate change.

Obama may have an army, but who will they follow?

I love and adore everything about President Obama except for OFA, said South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Jaime Harrison, according to the Washington Post.

He was just one of numerous Democratic Party leaders who have insisted their beef is with OFA, not Obama.

But OFA is Obama, the way Sperry describes it.

He is their supreme leader. And running OFA is his new job. The former president who would be shadow president.

Obama will be overseeing it all from a shadow White House located within two miles of Trump, wrote Sperry. It features a mansion, which hes fortifying with construction of a tall brick perimeter, and a nearby taxpayer-funded office with his own chief of staff and press secretary.

So, what happened? While Obama tools OFA to become a potent threat to Trump, why do Democratic leaders feel threatened by OFA? How did their common desire to go to war with the Trump administration turn into a fratricidal battle royale for control of the party?

It appears to have been a battle long brewing beneath the surface that is now emerging into public view.

[With] all due respect to President Obama, OFA was created as a shadow party because Obama operatives had no faith in state parties. So I hope the OFA role is none. I hope OFA closes their doors and allows the country and state parties to get to the hard work of rebuilding the party at the local and grass-roots level, Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb told Politico.

She further explained why it has not, on the whole, been a winning strategy: OFA had no faith or confidence in the state parties so they created a whole separate organization, they took money away and centralized it in D.C. They gave us a great president for eight years, but we lost everywhere else.

If we were having a conversation about state parties, I would say OFA hurt state parties badly, Handwerk told The Daily Beast, elaborating on his leaked email. It certainly had an undercutting effort. And there is a lot of work state parties do that isnt very sexy and that becomes incredibly difficult when budgets are cut in half because people are trying to curry favor with the president and his allies.

Compounding what Politico called a period in which the party suffered tremendous losses at the state and local levels since Obama won in 2008, was what it described as a degree of mistrust rooted in the idea that OFA was always primarily interested in advancing the presidents political interests, often at the expense of the party.

And now that OFA wants to take the lead in rebuilding the party, the party is fighting back. Democratic leaders see it as a matter of self-preservation and survival.

[OFA] created a shadow organization that was recruiting the same volunteers [as the Democratic National Committee], using resources from a very limited number of donors, and therefore, as a result it weakened the DNC and the impact that the DNC and state parties could have on politics during his tenure, South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison told Politico.

He added, Youve got five organizations knocking on the same door with five different messages. Thats not conducive. In the age of Trump we need to be a lean, mean, strategic machine.

Another key problem seemed to be the perception that OFA wasnt about the party, it was all about Obama.

Weve seen over the last eight-plus years a deterioration of permanent state infrastructure, a Democratic operative anonymously confided to the Daily Beast.

And, he explained, OFA built an alternative infrastructure that was very top-down. OFAs actions were wasteful, duplicative, and it made no sense There were these tensions on the ground that we saw that all over the country. Local officials felt tossed aside. A lot of these red states were abandoned. The OFA model was never a 50-state strategyit was about the presidents agenda.

That revelation may be clear now to party leaders, but former Rep. Michele Bachmann mused, I wonder if rank and file democrats understand Obama was about advancing his personal agenda through his OFA community organization?

That Democratic operatives reaction to seeing OFA trying to get back in the game?

Its like seeing an ex-girlfriend show up.

On top of the explicit animosity toward OFA, and the implicit resentment of Obama, is a legacy the party must now face.

The former president doesnt get Democrats elected, he gets them defeated.

Obamas coattails were strongest before he became president, sweeping into office with majorities in the House and the Senate, allowing him to push through Obamacare without a single Republican vote.

Democrats have been losing power and elections at an astonishing rate, ever since.

Bachmann told WND, Next to Jimmy Carter, Obama single handedly did more to destroy the Democratic Party than the GOP could have ever hoped or planned.

Under Obamas reign, Democrats lost a net total of 1,042 state and federal posts, including congressional and state legislative seats, governorships and, ultimately, the presidency.

By the time the 2014 midterm elections rolled around, as WND reported, Democrats were running away from Obama.

Only one Democratic senator running for reelection wanted Obama to appear with him on the campaign trail in 2014.

And even at that, candidate Gary Peters less-than-enthusiastically observed, The president will come to Michigan to campaign, and Im going to stand next to the president.

But, Democrats didnt just shun Obama on the campaign trail. They actually campaigned against him.

That was illustrated by campaign quotes from desperate Democratic candidates in the key races that caused the party to lose control of the Senate.

Kentuckys Democratic candidate for Senate, Alison Lundergan Grimes declared in an ad, Im not Barack Obama. I disagree with him on guns, coal and the EPA.

The Democrat refused to say during an interview whether she even voted for Obama in 2012,calling it her constitutional right to stay mum.

Let me tell you, the White House, when they look down the front lawn the last person they want to see coming is me, warned Democrat Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado during a debate.

Sen. Mark Begich, the Democratic incumbent from Alaska insisted he took on Obama to fight for oil drilling in Alaska and would bang him over the head a few times on the need to drill.

Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas paused during his debate before making his closing statement to make sure everyone knew, I voted against every budget that President Obama has offered.

Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu made a point of emphasizing during her debate, I do not agree with President Obama on his energy policies, later adding, I havent agreed with President Obama on everything. She also damned the president with faint praise, giving his job performance a 6-to-7 out of 10.

When asked on MSNBC if she thought the president had shown strong leadership, Democrat Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina hedged a bit before conceding, Certainly there are issues I think on um, no.

During her debate in New Hampshire, Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was asked if she approved of Obamas job performance, Yes or no? The incumbent evoked a wave of laughter from the audience when she responded instead, In some things I approve and in some things I dont approve.

The former presidents campaign guru, David Axelrod, told NBCs Meet The Press it was a mistake for Obama to claim his policies were on the ballot.

I think Obama being so unpopular is the biggest factor in this election, predicted Tom Jensen, a Democratic pollster with the firm Public Policy Polling. And I think at the end of the day, it may be too much for a lot of the Democratic Senate candidates to overcome.

He was right.

Now, in the disastrous aftermath, Obama is calling upon Democrats to regroup and unite behind OFA.

But, judging by the initial reaction of party leaders, he may be trying to lead an army of rebels.

See the original post here:
Now Democrats call Obama's shadow government 'The Devil' - WND.com

WASHINGTON (AP) Just in time for Presidents Day, a new survey of historians on presidential leadership gives the top five slots to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.

Its C-SPANs third survey on presidents, and the first in which Eisenhower cracks the top five. In 2009, Eisenhower ranked eighth and in 2000 he ranked ninth.

Barack Obama ranks 12th on his first time in the survey of 91 presidential historians.

A member of the survey advisory team, Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, says its fitting that Lincoln, Washington and Franklin Roosevelt are the top three. And he says its quite impressive for Obama to come in at 12 in his first survey. Brinkley also notes that George W. Bush moves up from 36 to 33.

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Original post:
C-SPAN survey lists former Pres. Obama as 12th best president - NBC4i.com