A short while ago… 68 workers at Obama’s $909 million presidential center signed a letter announcing a union. Against his own foundation.
Somebody find the man his shoes.
And that is not even the best receipt. I watched a nine-minute clip roasting the Obama Presidential Center. Since I grade things for a living, I graded it. Some of it was dead on. Some of it was flat wrong. A few lines were just ugly, and they are not in here.
What survived the red pen is worse for Obama than the clip was, because it is TRUE. And the building turns out to be the best summary of the man’s legacy anyone could have designed. They spent $909 million to prove my point for me.
— THE SHOES —
Start with the promise, because everything in this story starts with a promise.
November 3, 2007. Spartanburg, South Carolina. Senator Obama, chasing union endorsements, told the crowd that if workers were denied the right to organize while he was in the White House, he would personally walk the picket line with them. It wasn’t an ad-lib, either. It was in his prepared remarks.
February 2011. Wisconsin. Public employee unions packed the Capitol in Madison over collective bargaining. Rep. Keith Ellison asked him to go stand with them. He didn’t. Jay Carney, his press secretary, said the President stood with working people “whatever shoes he’s wearing.”
Fifteen years later, the workers at his own museum are organizing. I checked the news. He still has not found the shoes.
— THE PRICE TAG —
Early planning put the center around $300 million. By 2017 it was $500 million. By 2021, roughly $700 million. By opening day, $850 million. Last month the Obama Foundation released the final figure: $909 million. Valerie Jarrett said the extra $59 million went to “additional amenities.”
Slight oversight!
That budget never made the same mistake twice. It made it five or six times, just to be sure it got it right.
On that same clip, Eric Trump said they were “billions” over budget. They weren’t. It’s hundreds of millions. I hold my own side to the same rubric, and the real number is embarrassing enough without help.
The schedule was just as bad. Per the Wall Street Journal, Bill Clinton’s library opened 1,398 days after he left office. Obama’s took well over 3,100 days, a modern record. Part of that was a lawsuit over building in a public park, part was federal review, and part was fundraising. All of it was planning.
— THE “PRIVATELY FUNDED” GIFT —
The pitch was a privately funded gift to the South Side. The building was. The roads were not.
Chicago’s transportation department says it has spent $123.3 million since 2022 rebuilding roads and green space around the site, drawn from a $174 million pot the state created for the center back in 2018. IDOT acknowledges roughly $229 million in state-managed spending tied to the project and still has not produced one reconciled total. Cornell Drive, a four-lane road through the park, simply no longer exists.
The land? 19.3 acres of public parkland in Jackson Park. A 99-year lease. Ten dollars.
Ten.
When neighborhood groups and unions asked him back in 2017 to sign a community benefits agreement, a written promise on jobs and housing for the people already living there, Obama said one wasn’t needed because the process would be transparent and everyone would have input. Hold that thought. We are about to see how that worked out for the neighbors.
— THE SAFETY NET WITH NO NET —
To protect taxpayers if the center ever runs dry, the foundation’s own 2020 annual report said $470 million of its fundraising would seed an endowment to keep the place running “for generations.”
Amount deposited, per the filings: $1 million. That’s about one fifth of one percent.
As a safety net, that is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
The foundation’s answer is that the city agreement required an endowment but never named a dollar amount, and that “significant investments” are coming. Technically true. They’re muddying the water to make it look deep. A pledge printed in your own annual report is still a pledge. No rush, though.
Meanwhile, ProPublica’s copy of the foundation’s tax filings shows about $210 million in revenue for 2024 and total assets around $1.1 billion, most of that the campus itself. Fox News reported the foundation ended 2024 with about $116.5 million in cash while still owing roughly $234 million in construction costs.
Billion-dollar balance sheet. Million-dollar safety net. Plumbers waiting on checks. Let’s go meet the plumbers.
— THE PEOPLE WHO BUILT IT —
Adamson Plumbing worked the job under the name Marsh-Adamson. The owner, Mike Owen, says the project left his company nearly $4 million in the hole after years of delays, rework, and changing demands. He says his crew did last-minute work before the grand opening on a promise that part of the money owed would be released, and it didn’t arrive on time. He suspended operations, laid off 25 union workers, walked away from other jobs, and filed a $1.72 million mechanic’s lien against the property.
He is not alone. Three subcontractors on the Home Court building have filed liens totaling close to $900,000, and Fox News found three more liens worth about $557,000 on other parts of the campus.
One correction to the clip: Obama did not personally refuse to sign a check. The payment disputes run through Lakeside Alliance, the construction manager, which did not address the layoffs or the lien when Fox asked. A lien also doesn’t settle who legally owes what. But the Obama Foundation oversees construction, and the name on the tower is his. When a union plumber on the South Side loses his business building a monument to a community organizer, “not my department” is a weak answer.
The project sold itself as an engine for local and minority-owned contractors. The foundation’s own reporting through 2024 showed 49 percent of workforce hours went to city residents against a promised 50, and 33 percent to South and West Side workers against a promised 35. Close. Not kept.
The clip also said a Black engineering firm got hit with a $40 million discrimination suit. Backwards. II in One, a Black-owned concrete subcontractor from the South Side, sued Thornton Tomasetti, a New York engineering firm, alleging racial discrimination and roughly $40 million in costs that it and its joint venture partners covered themselves. The foundation disputed the discrimination claim. That is an allegation in federal court, not a verdict, and I’m grading it as one. What it does show is a Black-owned South Side company, one of the businesses this project was supposed to lift, saying it ended up near bankruptcy.
— THE PEOPLE WHO WORK THERE —
Per the foundation’s own tax filings, CEO Valerie Jarrett was paid $740,000 a year in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Several other former Obama officials have drawn $300,000 to $400,000 a year running the place.
Before opening, the foundation recruited around 100 unpaid volunteer “ambassadors” to greet guests. In fairness, museums use volunteers all the time. Still. Some hogs have all four feet and their snout in the trough, and the volunteers get a name tag.
Then came the union. Obama Workers United, organizing with AFSCME Council 31, says it will cover more than 250 workers in Chicago, the D.C. office, and remote roles. Their letter, first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, cites heavier workloads, benefit rollbacks, and turnover so high that people keep leaving and taking their know-how with them. Leadership, they wrote, met their concerns with “vague responses.” Other outlets report staff were told their health care costs would rise and promotions were on hold.
Health care costs going up. At the OBAMA Foundation.
If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. PolitiFact named that line its Lie of the Year in 2013. Thirteen years later, it’s apparently also the employee handbook.
The clip mocked these workers as entitled ticket punchers. I won’t. The people running coat check asked for a seat at the table at a nonprofit that pays its CEO three quarters of a million dollars. They just joined the list of people who believed an Obama promise and got handed the bill.
— THE NEIGHBORS —
Remember the community benefits agreement he said nobody needed?
Tenants in a longtime low-income Woodlawn building, a few blocks from the campus, have organized their own tenants’ union to fight rent hikes and possible displacement they blame on development pressure from the center.
So in one South Side neighborhood we now have a contractor in the hole, workers forming a union, and renters forming a union. That is a lot of organizing around one former community organizer. It almost sounds like the people he said he’d stand with are standing against him.
— THE PHOTO ID HYPOCRISY, GRADED HONESTLY —
The clip said you need photo ID to get in, or you will be “turned away or arrested.” False. General admission needs no ID, and PolitiFact rated a similar claim from a sitting senator false. The park, the gym, the library branch, and the plaza are open to anyone.
The real rule is narrower. If you are an Illinois resident and want the free or discounted museum ticket, you show a valid photo ID, a driver’s license, a state ID, or a city ID to prove residency.
So. To prove you live in Illinois and get a free ticket to a museum honoring a Democrat president, show ID. To prove you are a citizen before helping choose the next president, Democrats call that voter suppression.
Somebody explain to me how ID is a reasonable request for a free museum ticket and a racist barrier at the ballot box. I’ll wait. I’ve got grading.
In that spirit, I would like to propose the Obama Free Tuesday Act. Every Tuesday, every visitor walks in free, nobody shows anything, and the foundation eats the cost out of that endowment. If ID is a barrier to democracy, it must be a barrier to a museum ABOUT democracy. This is not a radical idea.
— THE SCHOOLS —
The clip opened with Barack Obama Elementary in Richmond, Virginia, shut down over mold and rats. Mostly true. Mold from an HVAC outage and a leaking pipe, plus rodents, pushed back the first day in late August, and the district closed the building “indefinitely” after teachers found mold on laptops and music equipment. It reopened September 3, about nine days later. Not forever.
And Obama did not run that school. Richmond Public Schools did. Education is a state and local responsibility under the 10th Amendment, which is exactly why a busted air handler in Richmond is Richmond’s mess and not his.
Still, you’ll enjoy this part. The superintendent, Jason Kamras, was an education policy adviser on Obama’s 2008 campaign. And the school used to be J.E.B. Stuart Elementary before the board renamed it for Obama. They took down the Confederate and put up a mold problem.
It isn’t even the first Obama elementary to have a rough go. Asbury Park, New Jersey renamed a school after him in 2010. It closed the next year for low enrollment.
— WHAT THE CLIP GOT WRONG, AND WHAT I THREW OUT —
“Woefully short of projections”? The foundation reports 175,469 ticketed museum visitors in the first 100 days, and the library branch on campus drew more than 206,000. Presidential libraries usually see attendance fall after year one, so ask me again in 2028. Right now, it is not failing, and I won’t pretend it is.
The clip also claimed the statue makes Obama taller than Michelle, that the building is “not structurally sound,” and that donations are being funneled to “targeted groups.” I couldn’t find a source for any of it.
Now, I could play that game too. I could tell you a reliable source told me the missing $469 million is hidden inside the hollow left shoe of the Obama statue, guarded by a retired unicorn on a union contract. See how easy that was? No source, no story. If you have one for the clip’s claims, send it. Unlike the people in this story, I’ll actually read it.
I also cut two lines that mocked the workers’ backgrounds and blamed “DEI hires.” Neither had evidence behind it, and the receipts don’t need help.
One more fact the clip missed. The Obama Presidential Library is not a National Archives presidential library at all. It’s a museum, a foundation headquarters, and a Chicago Public Library branch. A presidential library with no presidential library in it might be the most honest thing on the campus.
— THE PART ERIC TRUMP GOT RIGHT —
The last third of the clip was Eric Trump saying Obama was behind the Russia collusion story. Overstated as a one-liner, but the paper trail is real.
The Durham report in 2023 found the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on raw, unverified intelligence and leaned on the Steele dossier, which it never corroborated. In July 2025, DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified a timeline showing that several intelligence assessments before and right after the 2016 election found Russia did not alter vote results through cyberattacks, that a December 2016 brief saying so was killed before publication, and that on December 9, 2016 the Obama White House convened its top national security officials and ordered a new assessment “per the President’s request.” Gabbard’s memo says that assessment, released in January 2017, relied in part on the dossier.
To be fair to the other side, a bipartisan 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report still backed the 2017 assessment’s finding that Russia interfered and favored Trump. Reasonable people still argue about what the documents prove. What nobody can argue about is who requested the assessment, because the email subject line literally names him.
That is the same pattern as the building. Announce the conclusion first. Send somebody else the bill.
— THE GRADE —
o Promised a privately funded gift. Delivered public roads, public parkland for ten dollars, and more than $100 million in taxpayer infrastructure.
o Promised a $470 million safety net for taxpayers. Deposited $1 million.
o Promised an engine for small South Side contractors. Delivered liens, layoffs, and a federal lawsuit.
o Promised to walk the picket line. Got a union drive against his own foundation, plus a tenants’ union down the street.
o Promised you could keep your plan. His own staff’s health costs are going up.
That is the Obama legacy in one zip code. A beautiful promise up front, and the invoice mailed to someone else later.
“You didn’t build that,” he told business owners in Roanoke in 2012. He was right about one thing. Mike Owen built it. He is still waiting to get paid.
Honestly, I wouldn’t hire these people to run a food truck.
But what do I know, I’m only a teacher who reads the lien filings before he laughs at the building.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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