TWO WEEKS FROM TODAY THERE WILL OCCUR a signal event for US presidential history. And like many a journalist would be, I’m prompted to get ahead of the general coverage.

The event will be on June 19 - Juneteeth itself, the Federal holiday recalling African American emancipation from slavery. This year, it’s the chosen day for when the nation’s favorite president will be celebrated with the formal opening of his Presidential Library. Such a material, physical kind of commemoration, a library, has long been considered appropriate for retired presidents, in fact ever since Rutherford Hayes whose single term of office was in the late 19th century.

That current popular favorite is Barack Obama. I doubt that you’re surprised, with his high ratings verified, nearly a whole decade after he left the White House, by pollsters from Gallup to Ipsos to Harris Polls. And the new building where he’s being honored will actually be a lot more than mere bookshelves - thus it will be called more fully a Center, the Barack Obama Presidential Center. It’s situated in of course his home city of Chicago, and will also contain a sizeable museum, with exhibits that range from little things like historic campaign buttons (remember the slogan Yes we Can?) through to a full-size replica of the Oval Office as it was in Obama times. Not an inch of gilding to be seen back then.

Overall it’s an extensive campus (below right), with a Great Lawn, a Fruit and Vegetable Garden, a children’s playground and a basketball court (again, no surprise) as well as a new branch of the city’s Public Library system. But most prominent is its massive tower (of granite, piled 225 feet high) which has one architectural feature that’s strikingly attention-grabbing, in that it’s made from words.

Again, there’s no surprise there perhaps, since Obama stands out from the overall presidential field by being an evidently effortless, and certainly very fluent and elegant writer. When in office he inevitably employed a strong team of speechwriters — who wouldn’t in that role? — but he was also by all insider accounts an exacting editor of other people’s words.

THE WORDS THAT WILL TOWER over Chicago are taken from one of his most memorable speeches, known as the “You are America” address - the one he made in 2015 at the Selma, Alabama bridge that played such a crucial role in the history of our nation’s Civil Rights marches.

The words are installed at the very top of the tower. Made of man-sized - well, just over five-feet high - capital letters cast in concrete, they wrap around a corner of the building, so you have to be to the Southwest of it, and I’d say a few blocks away, to read the whole message. One of the architects responsible, Billie Tsien has said that from within the tower’s topmost “skyroom” space, looking out at the city through what she called “the screen of those words,” the effect will be “kind of like you’re inside his head.” Hmm, there are many presidents’ minds, and I can think of one in particular, that I would certainly not want to be inside. But Obama’s mind? Could be pretty interesting.

To quote directly from that now-monumental text:

“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.”

There is more … but those central few sentences are enough to clearly present us with an extraordinary contrast to the current occupant of the Oval Office. The word ‘we’ doesn’t come that readily to his lips.

The evident resurgence of interest in Obama being brought about by the Library’s opening has unavoidably renewed the cries of many Democrats for the ex-president to play a fuller part in reducing the now-untrammeled power of Donald Trump and the seried ranks of Trump yes-men and yes-women. This is after all the year of mid-term elections. Now could certainly be the time to play some fuller part.

A recent New Yorker magazine article by Peter Slevin. who’s the author of a Michelle Obama biography, very pointedly raised the matter of Democrats hankering, and not just sentimentally, for Obama’s kind of leadership, while Trump has steadily gotten more entrenched. Slevin wrote: “And the worse things got, the more you heard the question ‘Where is Obama?’”

Slevin cited Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington State, who said to him about Obama, “Why isn’t he out there?” She went on to suggest that the former leader could give the American people a “North Star” in what she sees as our “really difficult” times.

JUST WHAT, IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES, Obama could actually do turns out — according to his interview with Slevin — to be something that “I think about … every day.” So says this famously cerebral president. But his longtime political guru, David Axelrod, who advised him in Chicago and then in DC, says that his former boss is “still searching for just the right formula” with which to effectively intervene now in national politics.

Obama has for his part, with Slevin and again more recently in conversation with Stephen Colbert when that TV host still had his late-night platform, insisted that he is doing more than people realize. It’s not always that visible publicly — or in his own words: “The media environment is so difficult that people don’t even know all the stuff I am doing.”

*OBAMA: Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, March 2015* [Photo: Pete Souza]

He needn’t be all that defensive. The fact is, he has hosted major fundraisers and recorded dozens of video ads and robocalls. He’s marketed Netflix entertainment projects (made by his and Michelle’s production company Higher Ground, that takes its name from the Stevie Wonder song), projects that always carry messages of liberal uplift. And he’s made a point of appearing in what his team calls “unexpected places” — meaning for instance podcasts with the likes of Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has twenty-two million followers across various platforms and gets billions of views on TikTok. Oh, and with the young barber and influencer known as VicBlends. While the two chatted, VicBlends gave the former president a haircut on camera – and an estimated 33 million people watched it (see bottom picture). And perhaps most usefully, Obama has mentored — and also helped to train — candidates and potential candidates.

BUT WHAT ABOUT HIM JOINING THE HUSTINGS WHOLE-HEARTEDLY? And bringing some of his considerable rhetorical skills to bear, in gaining for the Democrats vital electoral success in winnable Congressional districts and States? Maybe even in some that appear now to be unlikely Democrat territory?

Well, signs are that there will be much of such hustings work (a lot more than there has been) as November’s voting approaches. Already, in April, he accompanied the Democratic mayor of my hometown, Zohran Mamdani on a visit to a pre-K center in the Bronx, underscoring and promoting the mayor’s push for free universal child care. He’s made it clear he’s impressed by Mamdani’s ability to get across a clear political message, especially via social media, and by his talent for inspiring armies of young volunteers. Obama agreed with his interviewer Slevin that someone like Mamdani is a far better spokesman than himself on issues such as affordability as our cost of living continues to rise. His phrasing for it was that leaders like the New York mayor can “tap into the Zeitgeist of the moment.”

Indeed, an expression of caution is needed – perhaps of cold, political realism. The plain-speaking US Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, with not much delicacy (a bit bluntly you might well say) has asked this:

“Is it realistic to think that Obama — on the horizon, rising from the ashes — is going to lead us forward? … In the political world that I’m in, there is an understanding that we are now in a different time.”

The next few months will make clear whether an Obama surge can usefully assist in winning back Congress for the Democrats this year (and even maybe the White House in 2028) … or if it all turns out to be just Barack-nostalgia.

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