Barack Obama confronts the work that remains for Democrats — and for him

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

Chicago (CNN) — Former President Barack Obama on Thursday is getting what he wanted for so long: his words carved into stone, a monument to his presidency entering the Chicago skyline.

Walking through his $850 million, multiuse presidential center the past few months, Obama went down the slide in the playground and tried out the chairs, noting which ones needed stoppers to keep from scuffing the floors. He asked for the whole text of an exhibit on sports to be redone, frustrated that the original text didn’t seem written by a true fan.

But he also told a gathering of his campaign and administration alumni, the night before the center’s opening, that he didn’t believe in nostalgia and didn’t intend to wallow in it.

“I think nostalgia implies this sentiment that there’s this thing in the past that was somehow golden and better, but is unattainable now,” he said Wednesday. “And it lets us off the hook, because it makes us feel like, ‘Well, you know, that was wonderful, but now, this is the reality, and there’s not much we can do about it.’”

The 44th president isn’t ready to fade into history. And many top Democrats don’t want him to.

“Hope and change still remain incredibly powerful as a counter-narrative to what the Republican Party at this moment stands for in America,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN.

A decade after he walked out of the Oval Office, Obama is still the most popular living president and the primary unifying figure in a party racked by leadership disputes and fights over its direction on key issues. But his legacy beyond those elbowing for their spots in the VIP section of Thursday’s opening is more complicated.

To some, talk of hope and change can come off as naïve or a disconnected relic after President Donald Trump’s two successful campaigns. Particularly to his critics on the rising left, Obama’s perceived lack of boldness while president, particularly on foreign policy and economic issues, is exactly what led their party and the country overall to now.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, an old Obama friend, described the presidential center as an “active, engaged endeavor to lift up and train leaders for the future.”

“I really reject the notion that somehow Barack Obama is responsible for what came after,” he added. “I guess we’re all responsible in many ways for where we are. I mean, I didn’t vote for it, but we all have a share of responsibility for where the country is today.”

Throughout the presidential center, there are signs Obama asked to be added throughout, all on the same theme: “The Work That Remained,” a phrase that popped up in his second-term speeches and throughout his post-presidency.

Voices are featured in several spots through the museum arguing that Obama went too far or didn’t go far enough, including on topics such as immigration, climate change, healthcare and gun violence — the last of which he has often cited as a great failure of his presidency.

Hagiography comes with every presidential library. The “Economic Crisis and Recovery” exhibit, for example, notes the banking collapse Obama inherited and explains how he “responded boldly to rescue and rebuild it on a new foundation for growth and prosperity.” The “Work That Remained” plaque blames Congress for not addressing what Obama believed were the underlying problems of the economy, including “to make it easier for employees to form unions, for guaranteed paid sick and family leave, and for a higher minimum wage,” according to a preview photograph shared with CNN.

“He took the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and traded it to Wall Street,” said Matt Stoller, a writer on economics who leads the liberal American Economic Liberties Project. Added Stoller: “He lit the fuse for authoritarianism under Donald Trump. He created the world for Donald Trump to come into.”

But top Democrats are eager to stand with Obama whenever they can.

“It’s very hard to sit 10, 20 years later and cast judgment. I was a beast of an athlete back in my day, but there’s not a game that I played that I can’t think of things I could have done better if I could go back and relive them,” said New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who played football at Stanford. “But in the time, Barack Obama was a hero and saved our economy and advanced our nation along really specific indices that are lasting and still are making a difference.”

Jeffries is frequently on the phone or in rooms with Obama. Their conversations range from the personal to gut checks on strategy to political advice like supporting what became last year’s government shutdown.

Jeffries, who is on track to be House speaker if Democrats take the majority in November, offered a Chicago sports reference to describe how central he sees Obama’s ongoing role for the party.

“President Obama was Michael Jordan while he was in office,” Jeffries said, “and he’s Phil Jackson out of it.”

A retirement that was never very retired

Obama, 64, has bristled publicly and privately about how involved he’s been in politics, in part due to Trump’s enduring influence and the way that former President Joe Biden’s time in office turned out.

But despite his annual reluctance to campaign more than a few days in each election cycle, Obama still loves the dominance he has in Democratic politics – even as his closest advisers, several of whom spoke to CNN for this story, argue his engagement is about more than ego.

“It’s certainly flattering, but points to something more important: the country is still largely aligned with his vision and his story,” said Eric Schultz, an adviser who’s been helping Obama craft his post-presidency since working for him in the White House. “It’s a dark time, but if elected officials from across the country are seeking his voice, that’s a pretty good sign that his theory of the case still very much resonates.”

An easy measure of how Democratic candidates feel about Obama is the rate of endorsement requests coming into his office that, according to people familiar with the matter, has remained as high as ever. Another is the focus groups in California last year that showed him the best messenger for Democrats’ ballot proposition to newly gerrymander the state. Or all the ways he’s invoked, from Republican Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt arguing, “I feel like him and I have the same experience,” to Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz announcing she would run in a majority-Black district in a video with a vintage “HOPE” poster displayed over her shoulder.

When Obama got involved with the spring campaign for Virginia Democrats’ successful but since-overturned gerrymandering referendum, Jeffries noted that ads on both sides of the issue featured comments from the former president.

Not long after Zohran Mamdani won his primary for New York City mayor in June 2025, Obama was on the phone, giving advice on getting governing right, offering to be a sounding board. Both got a credibility bump: Mamdani with skeptics of a then-33-year-old democratic socialist, Obama with the young change-makers he always wants to be counted with.

According to people familiar with the matter, toward the end of a meeting earlier in the year, Obama made his standard offer to let him know if there was more he could do to help. Mamdani pitched one idea that didn’t gel, then came back asking for help promoting his push for universal childcare.

Obama joined Mamdani to read to preschoolers and sing “Wheels on the Bus” at a childcare center in the Bronx, arranged around a trip to New York the Obamas were making to see a performance of the play they are co-producing on Broadway. It felt an especially long way from Mamdani’s 2013 tweets, like the one still up from the then-21-year-old Bowdoin student, “Hasnt Obama shown that the lesser evil is still pretty damn evil?”

Though he has not been officially bringing in prospective 2028 presidential candidates as he was already doing at this point ahead of the 2020 election, Obama has hosted both Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro at his Washington office for longer meetings.

“I understand the frustrations that people have right now with the way things are going,” Moore said. “I share them. I think there are people frustrated with the level of defensiveness, I think the people frustrated with the direction the country’s going right now. President Obama is not the reason for it. It was leadership like his that was the antidote when we saw this before.”

It’s not just in the museum where Obama is debating his own legacy.

“Of course I would have wanted something better and single-payer and the rest,” Arizona Rep. Yassamin Ansari, who introduced him last year at a meeting with other freshman House Democrats and described his eye-opening rundown of dealing with the politics of passing the Affordable Care Act, which passed in 2010. “But this was the 2000s and that wasn’t going to happen.”

As a junior in high school, Ansari was knocking on doors for Obama’s campaign. She said seeing him 20 years later in the room with her, just a few months after she got her own congressional pin, was surreal.

“We have a new generation of leaders coming up right now, current members, people running for office at different levels across the country who represent hope and change for the new group of high schoolers that are out there right now,” Ansari said. “That’s Obama’s entire legacy.”

Hope and Trump

Obama sees his role at this point more as ensuring a different worldview will win out through carefully chosen moments of speaking out, according to people familiar with his thinking. He is building his Obama Fellows civic engagement programs. He wants to keep doing more of the bending of “the arc of the moral universe,” as Martin Luther King Jr. said in a quote he often cites, while also trying to provide a rudder to keep his party from moving in directions he fears will be self-defeating.

Neither Obama nor Trump is letting the other go, given the issues like healthcare and the Middle East that shaped both their presidencies. Trump often posts about Obama using his middle name, Hussein. And just on Wednesday, Trump said in comparing their respective negotiations with Iran, “They laughed at Obama and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch.’”

That was, of course, after Obama in an interview with “Good Morning America” leading up to the library opening criticized Trump’s war in Iran and said, “It is doubtful that any agreement that arises is going to be significantly different or a significant improvement from the deal that we had in the first place.”

Obama decided not to invite Trump to the opening, eschewing the traditional bipartisanship around presidential centers last seen at George W. Bush’s library in 2013. Trump posted an AI-generated image showing a garbage bag atop Obama’s tower and saying it will be “a ‘Mecca’ for those who hate America!”

Obama’s despair about Trump’s second term remains high, particularly around Republicans not pushing back. But he was pleased when he heard GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, who lost his Louisiana primary last month after failing to re-ingratiate himself with Trump for his vote in an impeachment trial to convict him over the January 6 riots, made an unannounced visit to the center two weeks ago.

Cassidy was in the area for his granddaughter’s graduation from the University of Chicago a few blocks away, and staff reached out for advance tickets to the soft launch. The two don’t have an active relationship and didn’t talk after. According to a person familiar with his reaction, Obama said that’s part of the spirit he wants for the center.

Appearing with her husband on Wednesday night at the campaign and administration alumni event, Michelle Obama offered a more pointed goal. She said the center was there “to lay this legacy so that nobody — nobody — can act like this didn’t happen.”

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