Bidding for Obama’s Library

By Dale McFeatters

Scripps Howard News Service

Even before his inauguration, there was discussion about where Barack Obama should put his presidential library, although a final decision on that happy choice was at least four to eight years off.

Chicago was confident of getting it, and there was discussion that his library might be incorporated in the planning for the 2016 Summer Olympics, which the city was fully confident of getting now that Obama was president-elect.

We know what happened there. Even though the president personally lobbied for his city, the Olympic committee took a flier on Rio de Janeiro.

Obama hadn't even been in office a month when a Boston Globe columnist, arguing that presidential libraries had become too big, too expensive and too self-aggrandizing, urged the new president to turn his down in the interests of a less imperial president.

The law says that the construction of presidential libraries must be paid for privately, but once built they become the responsibility of the National Archives. The estimated cost of President George W. Bush's library at Southern Methodist University is more than $200 million.

The conventional wisdom became that the Obama library would likely be on or near the University of Chicago campus, where the president with his Nobel Prize would feel comfortable at an institution with more than 80 of them and where he had taught constitutional law for 12 years. And it is walking distance from his home.

Presidential libraries can be quite a draw. President Bill Clinton's library revitalized a seedy section of Little Rock, Ark., and President Ronald Reagan's draws over 300,000 visitors a year to Simi Valley, Calif.

Now Hawaii, where Obama was born and was educated from fifth grade through high school, has thrown its lei into the ring of bidders for the library. The Hawaii legislature is preparing a resolution asking that his library be built in the Aloha State.

There seems to be an obvious solution. Build two. A winter library on the beach in Oahu and a summer library on the lakeshore in Chicago. When you're an ex-president, you can get away with that kind of thing.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).