OF ROOSTERS, ELEPHANTS, AND THE LONG STRANGE TRIP THROUGH THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY

A Personal Political Memoir Disguised as an Essay

The Barack Obama Presidential Center has officially thrown open its doors on Chicago's South Side, and like any good American who has been paying attention since roughly the Truman administration, I find myself doing what we political animals do best: making a list. A deeply personal, occasionally contradictory, and thoroughly opinionated list of the men who shaped — and sometimes nearly destroyed — this republic I love.

My family didn't just follow politics. We breathed it. Going back to the turn of the century, ours was a household where the dinner table was a debating floor and the ballot box was a sacred altar. We weren't just Democrats — we were , the old Oklahoma State Party faithful, where the crowed on the ticket and the eagle soared on the national stage. The jackass and the elephant were Washington's problem. The rooster was ours. We voted a straight rooster ticket, and we were proud of it.

So let's take a walk through the American presidency — the good, the bad, and the occasionally jaw-dropping — through the eyes of one kid from Muskogee, Oklahoma, who grew up to care deeply, vote faithfully, and occasionally want to throw the television out the window.

Harry S. Truman — The Man Who Swore, Integrated, and Dropped the Big One

I wasn't old enough to vote for Harry, but I was old enough to notice him. And what I noticed was this: the man dropped the atomic bomb. Twice. He integrated the military at a time when that took genuine political courage. And he swore like a sailor who had just stubbed his toe on the anchor.

History has been generous to Truman, and not without reason. The Marshall Plan rebuilt a shattered Europe. The desegregation of the Armed Forces was a moral act of historic proportion. But those two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki — killing over 100,000 civilians in an instant — remain the most consequential and haunting decisions any American president has ever made. Harry was plain-spoken, tough, and real. He kept a sign on his desk that said "The Buck Stops Here." He meant it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower — He Won the War, Built the Highways, and Warned Us Nicely

Ike won the war. Then he played golf. A lot of golf. But before he left office, he did something remarkable — he looked America in the eye and warned us about the military-industrial complex, a phrase so prescient it sounds like it was written last Tuesday.

He built the Interstate Highway System, the greatest public works project in American history. He also quietly let McCarthyism run roughshod over civil liberties for years before gently tapping the brakes. His CIA was busy overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, planting seeds of resentment that are still blooming today. But the man had gravitas, decency, and the good sense to warn us about the very machine he'd helped build. We didn't listen, of course. We rarely do.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy — The One Who Broke My Heart

Here is where it gets personal.

JFK won my heart completely. He was cool. He was smart. He was funny in a way no president had ever been funny before — sharp, self-deprecating, and genuinely alive. He defused the Cuban Missile Crisis through diplomacy when the generals were screaming for bombs. He launched the Apollo program and dared us to dream at a national scale.

But what touched me most directly — a kid in Muskogee, Oklahoma — was the Presidential Physical Fitness Program. My hometown was a pilot city. Kennedy believed in the bodies of American children the same way he believed in their minds, and I felt that personally. I felt seen by a president, which is a remarkable thing for a kid from eastern Oklahoma to feel.

And then November 22, 1963 happened. Nothing — before or since — has hurt quite like that. The world cracked open, and something innocent fell through the floor.

Lyndon Baines Johnson — The Texan Who Made Me a Progressive for Life

Johnson was a big, loud, profane, arm-twisting force of political nature, and his Great Society was the most transformative domestic agenda since FDR — the president whose stories had already shaped my Democratic family's political DNA.

Medicare. Medicaid. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Head Start. This was the progressive gospel made legislative flesh, and it made me what I am to this day: a lifetime progressive, unapologetically so.

The tragedy, of course, is Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin was a fabrication. The draft was a hammer that fell hardest on the poor. The deception tore the country apart and drove LBJ from the race he would have won. A giant brought low by a war he couldn't win and couldn't stop. The American story, in miniature.

Richard Nixon — The Devil Had Good Ideas and Terrible Judgment

I'll give the devil his due: Nixon opened China. That was genuinely brilliant. He also created the EPA, which means every clean breath of air you've taken since 1970 has a Nixon co-signature on it.

But the war. The secret bombing of Cambodia. The enemies list. The paranoia. The plumbers. The cover-up. Watergate was not just a scandal — it was a confession that the most powerful man in the world believed himself to be above the law. He resigned in disgrace, the only president ever to do so. My grandmother didn't have a word strong enough for him. I'll borrow one of Truman's.

Gerald Ford — Great on Saturday Night Live, Catastrophic on Pardons

Chevy Chase made Gerald Ford the most famous stumbler in television history, and Ford — to his enormous credit — laughed along. He was decent. He was steady. He brought a kind of calm normalcy back to a White House that had become a crime scene.

And then he pardoned Nixon.

One month into the job. Full and unconditional. The message it sent — that the powerful play by different rules — was a wound that never fully healed. Ford paid for it politically and never stopped paying. History has been somewhat kinder to him. But I read the pardon, Jerry. I read the whole thing.

Jimmy Carter — Great American, Great Human, Complicated President

I voted for Jimmy Carter. I am not ashamed of that. I am proud of it.

Carter was — and remains — one of the most genuinely decent human beings to ever occupy the Oval Office. The Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt stand as a foreign policy masterwork. His post-presidency, building houses with Habitat for Humanity and monitoring elections around the world, was arguably the greatest second act in American political history.

But Iran was wrong. The hostage crisis consumed him. The botched rescue mission left eight servicemen dead in the desert. And Ronald Reagan — in what many historians now believe involved a back-channel deal to keep the hostages in Tehran until after the election — rode that crisis straight into the White House. Carter got screwed. History knows it.

Ronald Reagan — Loved the Monkey, Hated the Politics

Look, I grew up watching Bedtime for Bonzo. The man had charm to burn, a smile that could light a stadium, and a twenty-mule team pulling borax across the desert of American nostalgia.

But his politics? Trickle-down economics was a theory that mostly trickled up. The national debt exploded. Wealth inequality widened into a canyon. The HIV/AIDS epidemic raged while his administration looked away, and people died while the White House stayed silent.

And then there was Iran-Contra — illegally selling weapons to Iran to secretly fund Nicaraguan rebels, in direct defiance of Congress. The deal with Iran over the hostages before the 1980 election. These were not policy disagreements. These were actions that, in a more accountable era, might have ended a presidency.

The fall of the Soviet Union happened on his watch, and he deserves partial credit. But the Soviet Union was also collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. History, as always, is complicated.

George H.W. Bush — The Most Prepared Man Who Ever Read My Lips

George Herbert Walker Bush may have been the single most qualified person ever to assume the presidency: CIA Director, Ambassador to the UN, Vice President, war hero. He managed the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union with extraordinary skill. He assembled a genuine global coalition and liberated Kuwait.

And then he said, very clearly, into every microphone in America: "Read my lips: no new taxes."

I read them, George. We all did. And then you raised taxes — which was, honestly, the fiscally responsible thing to do. But in politics, responsible and popular are not always the same zip code. His attachment to Reagan's shadow and that one broken promise cost him a second term to a saxophone-playing governor from Arkansas.

Bill Clinton — Slick Willy and the Most Expensive Indiscretion in History

Bill Clinton was a political genius and a human contradiction wrapped in a Southern accent. I understood Bill Clinton in the way you understand a brilliant friend who keeps making the same mistake.

The economic expansion of the 1990s was real and historic. Balanced budgets. Surpluses. The Family and Medical Leave Act. But his capitulation to Newt Gingrich's Contract with America — signing the 1994 Crime Bill, gutting welfare, repealing Glass-Steagall — were progressive betrayals of the first order.

And then came the affair with a 22-year-old intern, the perjury, the impeachment, the finger-wagging "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" — and the subsequent legal admission that he did. The resulting impeachment proceedings and legal fees made that particular indiscretion, without question, the most expensive in the history of human intimacy. Is is is, Bill. We know what is is.

George W. Bush — A Decent Man Steered by a Very Dangerous Co-Pilot

George W. Bush tried. He was not, at his core, a terrible person. His PEPFAR program saved millions of lives from HIV/AIDS across Africa — a genuine, underappreciated act of humanitarian leadership. He united a grieving nation after September 11th with real grace.

But Dick Cheney was his Rasputin — whispering of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, steering the ship toward Iraq with a certainty that history has since demolished entirely. The war destabilized the Middle East in ways we are still living with. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. The torture memos.

And then came No Child Left Behind — the education law that turned American schools into testing factories and launched my own career as an education advocate. Sometimes the things that outrage us most become the things that define us. Thanks for that, at least, George.

Barack Obama — The Man Who Made Policy Disagreement Feel Like a Personal Failing

And now we arrive at the man whose presidential center opened this week on Chicago's South Side — a stunning $850 million campus in Jackson Park featuring a 225-foot Museum Tower, a civic forum, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a Chicago Public Library branch, and enough green space to make Frederick Law Olmsted weep with complicated feelings.

Barack Obama is, personally, a man to be emulated. Ethically rigorous. Intellectually serious. Funny in the Kennedy tradition — sharp and self-aware. A devoted husband and father. A human being of evident decency who carried the weight of history on his shoulders with extraordinary composure.

Which made my policy disagreements with him genuinely painful in a way they never were with Nixon or Bush.

Race to the Top. The embrace of charter schools and education privatization. These were not small disagreements for someone who had been fighting for public education since George W. Bush handed me a cause. Obama's education policy felt like a betrayal dressed in the language of reform, and it stung precisely because I respected the man delivering it.

The drone strikes — expanded across multiple sovereign nations with minimal congressional oversight, raining death on targets and, too often, on civilians who happened to be nearby — were a moral wound on an otherwise ethical presidency. The aggressive use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers set a precedent for press freedom that should have alarmed every journalist in America.

But here is the thing about Barack Obama: it was genuinely hard to sustain ill feeling toward him, because his personal qualities as a human being kept getting in the way. Policy differences are the lifeblood of democracy. They are how we argue our way toward something better. I had several with him. I voted for him twice. And I would do it again.

The Presidential Center itself mirrors this complexity beautifully. The location — deliberately planted in a historically underserved South Side community — is an act of intentional investment in the people who needed it most. The fact that the actual archival documents are housed separately at a NARA facility has drawn criticism from historians who argue it prioritizes branding over scholarship. And the years of legal battles over Jackson Park's historic Olmsted-designed landscape, combined with community anxiety about gentrification displacing the very Black residents the center claims to serve, are the kind of messy, unresolved contradictions that follow every large and ambitious thing.

In other words: it's very American.

Joe Biden — The Scranton Kid Who Carried Too Much, Too Late

Joe Biden was, in many ways, the most human president of my lifetime — a man built from genuine loss, genuine empathy, and genuine blue-collar grit who had been waiting his entire political life for a moment that arrived perhaps a decade too late. I liked Joe Biden. I voted for Joe Biden. And watching his final chapter unfold was one of the most painful things I have witnessed in fifty-plus years of paying close attention to American politics.

The legislative achievements were real and underappreciated — the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to American soil, record job creation, historic low unemployment, and finally making Medicare negotiate drug prices like every other civilized nation on earth had been doing for decades. For a progressive from Muskogee who had been waiting since LBJ for someone to actually build something again, that mattered enormously.

But the Afghanistan withdrawal — chaotic, heartbreaking, and catastrophically mismanaged — with 13 American service members killed at Kabul airport and thousands of Afghan allies left behind as the Taliban walked back in like they'd never left, was a wound that never closed. And the inflation spike — peaking at 9.1% in 2022, the worst in 40 years — hit the working families he claimed as his own people the hardest, whatever the global causes. His unflinching support of Israel through the Gaza war fractured his own coalition in ways that may take a generation to repair.

And then came the debate. One terrible June night in 2024 that confirmed what too many people had been whispering and too few had been willing to say out loud. The subsequent pressure campaign that pushed him from the race made him only the second eligible incumbent since Lyndon Johnson to stand down — and the parallel to LBJ, the president who made me a progressive for life, was not lost on me. Both men passed transformational legislation. Both men were consumed by a war they couldn't control. Both men left the stage before they were ready, carrying the weight of what might have been.

Joe Biden deserved better from history's timing. But then again — so did a lot of us.

And Then There Is Trump…

My grandmother told me: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

She was a wise woman.

The Long View From Muskogee

Here is what a lifetime of watching presidents teaches you, if you're paying attention:

Every president is a ledger — credits and debits, courage and cowardice, vision and blindness, all bound together in one complicated human being handed the most impossible job on earth. The ones I loved most — Kennedy, Johnson, Obama — were not without their failures. The ones I found most troubling — Nixon, Reagan — were not without their genuine contributions.

What my rooster-ticket family taught me, and what a lifetime of progressive politics has confirmed, is this: democracy is not a destination. It is a practice. It requires showing up, arguing loudly, voting faithfully, and holding the powerful accountable — even the ones you love, especially the ones you love.

The Obama Presidential Center opens its doors on Juneteenth — June 19th — which is either a beautiful piece of intentional symbolism or the most perfectly American coincidence imaginable.

Either way, the rooster crows. And some of us still answer.

Written by a kid from Muskogee who ran the Presidential Physical Fitness course, voted for Jimmy Carter, and never once stopped caring.

Sources: — The Obama Foundation — Visit the Center — The Obama Foundation — Grand Opening Weekend — Presidential historical record (Truman through Trump policy ledger, as provided) — ABC7 Chicago — Obama Presidential Center Opening Coverage

Complete Source List & Links