Michelle: Many Around the World Feel Barack is ‘Their President’

Speaking at the Obama Foundation Summit at the Illinois Institute of Technology on Tuesday, former first lady Michelle Obama said her husband, former President Barack Obama, could have built his presidential library anywhere because so many people around the world feel he is “their president.”

Michelle O. explained that Chicago’s Jackson Park was selected as the site for the Obama Presidential Center because it was close to the couple’s former home and situated near her South Side childhood home. “There’s power in the selection of Jackson Park,” the former first lady said. “Barack and I don’t do things incidentally. There’s a strategy.”

But she pointed out that “Barack’s presidential library could have been anywhere in the world, because there are so many people who feel like he is their president.” Not so many people inside the U.S. feel that way, however.

“New York wanted it. Hawaii wants it,” she added. No word on whether Kenya wanted it.

Michelle Obama

On February 1, 2008, Mrs. Obama said, “I don’t think there is a person of color in this country that doesn’t struggle with what it means to be a part of your race versus what the majority thinks is right.”

While campaigning for her husband on February 18, 2008, Mrs. Obama told an audience in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “[F]or the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Later that same day, in Madison, she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

In March 2008 a New Yorker profile quoted Mrs. Obama saying, in a stump speech she had made in South Carolina, that the United States is “just downright mean” as a nation. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she told churchgoers in that same state. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime.”

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