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Obama Center Gets Massive Words of Wisdom From the Man Himself, and It Sounds Like a Threat

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The gray, forbidding, prison-like structure that is going up in Chicago
to honor our sainted 44th president is now in its final stages of
construction, and soon the Obama Presidential Center, “A Global Center
for Change,” will become, as its website promises, “a lively community
hub, economic anchor, and beacon of democracy right here on the South
Side of Chicago.” Yeah, sure it will, and Danny DeVito is going to
become an NBA star.  

Whether or not the Obama center is really going to become the jewel of
its neighborhood, the relentlessly ugly structure is being adorned with
words of wisdom from the man himself, and so the area of Chicago that is
unlucky enough to feature this monstrosity will become, if not a beacon
of democracy, at very least a beacon of BS. 

As president, Obama was famously windy and verbose, couching his
socialism, race resentment, and radicalism in avalanches of verbiage
that would hide the hard edges of his agenda. Lost and stuttering
without a teleprompter, the anointed one relied on a battery of
speechwriters to turn out reams of portentous-seeming nonsense that gave
an immediate impression of profundity that dissolved with about five
seconds’ thought. The Obama Presidential Center is going to feature a
choice morsel of that pseudo-profundity on its outer façade, trumpeted
in five-foot-high letters as if it were a nugget of actual wisdom, on
the order of “BURMA SHAVE” or “HOLLYWOOD.” 

Instead, what we’re getting at the Obama State Prison, er, that is,
Presidential Center is this, which began to be installed on the building
on Monday (it will take a couple of weeks for the whole long-winded
thing to be there): 

You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by
what is, ready to seize what ought to be. For everywhere in this
country, there are first steps to be taken, there is new ground to
cover, there are more bridges to be crossed. America is not the project
of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the
word “we.” “We The People.” “We Shall Overcome.” “Yes We Can.” That word
is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we
are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. 

Really, that's what the building is going to say. If you think "This
isn't exactly 'With malice toward none and charity for all' or 'All men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness," you're quite right. Pithier, punchier, and more apt as a
summation of the Obama presidency would have been one that PJ’s Matt
Margolis suggested: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
Another fitting quote would have been “If you've got a business, you
didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.” 

The quote we actually are getting, however, calls to mind H. L.
Mencken’s characterization of a Warren G. Harding speech: 

He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a
string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it
reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking
idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur
creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to
write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of
posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and
dash. 

Old Warren, who was actually a fine president who rescued us from the
worst authoritarian excesses of the Woodrow Wilson years, had nothing on
Obama as a prose stylist. Obama’s wet sponges and tattered washing (“You
are America”) in this case, however, is meant, like so many of his
utterances, to get people nodding along with a radical socialist
manifesto without realizing what they’re doing. 

Obama’s America, you see, is “unconstrained by habit and convention,”
such as the outmoded ideas that men can’t become women, countries should
have borders, and people should be allowed to keep a bit of what they
earn. Instead, we should be “unencumbered by what is, ready to seize
what ought to be”: if reality doesn’t validate leftist delusions and
fantasies, reality is what will have to go, not the delusions. 

America, meanwhile, is no good in Obama’s view, but it can be fixed if
we reject the idea of individual rights and embrace socialism, for
“America is not the project of any one person,” and “the single most
powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘we.’” We should embrace
three slogans: first from the Constitution (“We The People”), then from
the anthem of the civil rights movement (“We Shall Overcome”), and
finally from the 1970s Philadelphia Phillies (“Yes We Can”). (Yeah, that
last one was also the name of an Obama campaign song in 2008.) 

This is all supposed to be inspiring; the quote comes from a 2015 speech
Obama delivered on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in order to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights marches from Selma
to Montgomery. But the quote is too long, too uninteresting, and
ultimately far too ominous even to come close to being inspirational.  

Like the forbidding building that will bear this quote, the Obama quote
itself embodies a kind of warning. If you’re not careful, leftists are
going to “seize what ought to be.” It’s a thinly veiled threat as ugly
as the building it is going to adorn. 

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/12/30/obama-center-gets-massive-w
ords-of-wisdom-from-the-man-himself-and-it-sounds-like-a-threat-n4947698 

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