AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago is now open to the public.
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BARACK OBAMA: The exhibits in the center are not meant to evoke nostalgia for some gauzy, bygone era, some unattainable past.
RASCOE: It's more than just a presidential museum, but it is that too. NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea first covered Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008. Don joins us now. Hey.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Hey. Glad to be here.
RASCOE: So, Don, what stuck out to you about the center's dedication?
GONYEA: It is very hard to not feel like it's kind of a full circle moment, right? It's hard not to flash back to Obama's unexpected victory the night of the Iowa caucuses where he finished ahead of the front-runner Hillary Clinton. Then there was obviously the moment in Grant Park when he was the president-elect and onstage there with his two then still very young daughters and Michelle Obama, of course. So you can't sit there and watch the events of this weekend at the Presidential Center's opening and not think back to all of that stuff that you witnessed before.
RASCOE: Well, take us back to the 2008 campaign. Like, did you envision this moment then?
GONYEA: Oh, I don't think you could possibly envision...
RASCOE: Yeah.
GONYEA: ...This moment back when you're covering kind of the rough and tumble of a contested campaign. But I will tell you, by the time we got to the final months of the campaign, into the fall of 2008, absolutely you could feel where this seemed to be going. And it's not that you played it out and thought of a library or an Obama center dedication someday, but you could certainly envision him going to the White House.
And I want to describe one moment from that campaign, from October of that campaign. So just about 2 1/2 weeks before the election, Obama clearly had momentum. The crowds were growing and growing. And all of the sudden, it was in St. Louis, one Saturday morning underneath the St. Louis Arch, and 100,000 people came out to hear this political candidate, Barack Obama, the first Black person to be a major party nominee.
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OBAMA: I think it's time to give a tax cut to the teachers...
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OBAMA: ... And the janitors who work in our schools, to the cops and the firefighters who keep us safe.
GONYEA: And the candidate - Obama - was really driving his message home that day.
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OBAMA: And yes, the plumbers fighting for their American dream.
GONYEA: But that morning, there was something else I couldn't help but notice. As he spoke - and again, with this massive crowd in this field in front of him - there in the background was the Dred Scott courthouse. Obviously, it's a famous case. It's where the local courts and eventually the federal judiciary went on to rule that an enslaved person who moved to a free state was not emancipated. So with Obama on that stage that morning, with that massive crowd, it just, to me in that moment, encapsulated how far we'd come. But at the same time, you knew that tensions still existed.
RASCOE: Yeah. I mean, people just never thought that this could happen, that you could have a Black man on the verge of being president of the United States.
GONYEA: And the Obama campaign did not highlight the fact that that was the Dred Scott courthouse there, but I think there were plenty of people in the audience who noticed that and felt that.
RASCOE: Obama was elected in 2008 and kind of ushered in this hope and change he had campaigned on, but it wasn't long before the tone in parts of the country changed.
GONYEA: By 2010, I was out talking to voters all around the country, something I'm still doing. And that's when I witnessed the rise of the Tea Party movement and the rise of a movement that, ultimately, two elections later coalesced around the candidacy of Donald Trump and propelled him to office. So even that early on in Obama's tenure, it did feel like you could see another shift underway.
RASCOE: How does Obama think back or remember his presidency? Did he address any of the drawbacks to his time in office during his dedication speech this past week?
GONYEA: He did. He said he learned in office quickly that huge crowds of the campaign trail don't always translate to huge success in office.
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OBAMA: Of course, we did not accomplish everything we set out to do. No administration does. Some of the exhibits reflect unfinished business, in some cases, my own shortcomings and mistakes, in some cases because - as a sign I kept on the Resolute desk read - hard things are hard. And that's especially true in a big, raucous, diverse, argumentative democracy like the United States of America.
RASCOE: As Obama dedicates his presidential center, he does stand in contrast to his successor, who notably was not invited to attend the grand opening ceremony, and who knows if he would've attended if invited? But how does Obama of today, nearly 20 years after his first election to the White House, address the world that we're in now?
GONYEA: He basically says that it's not without hope - to pull out that word from his 2008 campaign, right? - that there have been times of tragedy and despair in the past. If that's what you're feeling now, well, the nation needs to rise above it, that it's time to do the work again.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Don Gonyea. Thank you so much.
GONYEA: It's a pleasure.
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