INSIDE THE HOUSE THAT HOPE BUILT
INSIDE THE HOUSE THAT HOPE BUILT
By the escalator to the third floor, above a podium, hangs words addressed to the nation by presidentelect Obama on election night in 2008:“ America can change,” he said that night.“ What we’ ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”
For some visitors, this floor plays less like history than like memory.
A woman from Washington, D. C., who works in local government, lingered on this floor.“ The people are what America is about,” she said— a belief she feels many people in this country have misplaced in recent years.“ I want people to remember the good times”— the Obama years, she meant—“ and where we can go from here. I was proud to be an American then,” she continued.
But like so many others moving through the galleries, she admitted that she feels disconnected now. What she wants back is almost quaint in its modesty— she wants civility, more understanding, less division, a politics focused on the issues, not petty grievances.
Photo courtesy of the Center for New Media
On the third floor, an exhibit, titled“ Working for a Common Good,” contains one of the museum’ s most unexpected spaces. Democracy 101 is best described as a sensory space for future leaders: columns of light studded with buttons, dials and switches that pose questions and ask, simply,“ What do you think?” On one podium stands a line from Salman Rushdie, the novelist who, three decades after saying it, would nearly be killed for his words:“ Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” The room then presents visitors with a dilemma that has confronted many of the nation’ s presidents: We don’ t have a state religion, but it says“ In God We Trust” on our money.
The same floor contains a timeline of Obama’ s two terms in the White House – told from his point of view. Critics wondered whether the center would prove too self-congratulatory, and some may still find it so. But the timeline reveals what a mere victory lap would leave out: tributes to servicemen and women lost on his watch, and candid acknowledgments of what he wishes had gone better
— the gun violence epidemic, the warming planet, a digital era whose disruptions outran the tools to govern them.
Watching a memorial video, visitors sat in an emotional silence. Someone had thought to leave a box of tissues.
The fourth floor, called“ The People’ s House,” is the crowd-pleaser. Guests line up eagerly for a chance to be photographed sitting behind a replica of the Resolute Desk in a space that is a copy of the White House Oval Office. The original desk, which was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, was built from the timbers of a British ship as a gesture of goodwill between nations. Seated in that room, even at a replica of the desk the nation’ s first Black president sat at for eight years, you can feel the weight and responsibility of the American presidency.
Just outside of this space are Michelle Obama’ s dresses and displays of more presidential memorabilia, including a Chicago Blackhawks hockey jersey and a Chicago Bears football jersey with Obama’ s name on them. Looking at the dresses, one visitor said,“ I love Michelle Obama’ s style. It’ s understated, sophisticated, and elegant.” Her wardrobe favored diverse and emerging designers, not just J. Crew, the mass market designer that was one of her favorites.
On the fifth floor, the“ We the People” exhibit forces visitors to look at themselves— at the role each of us play in shaping and protecting our democracy. At a display on the global fight for girls’ education, beneath Michelle Obama’ s words— that when she travels the world and meets
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