The Obama Center opening had celebrities, speeches, and a confused former president wandering an empty stage. What it didn’t have: American flags — or checks for the minority contractors who built the place.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide
The left spent this past week comparing celebrity attendance lists.
On one side: the UFC event at the White House, where Trump celebrated his birthday with Mark Zuckerberg, a handful of family members, and comedian Nate Bargatze working a room that, according to critics, didn’t want to be there.
On the other: the grand opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, where Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Bono, John Legend, Eddie Vedder, and a constellation of Hollywood names showed up without arm-twisting.
The scoreboard read: Obama wins the room. Case closed.
Except it wasn’t.
The Contractors
While the celebrity roll call was being used as a proxy for moral authority, a different story was unfolding on the South Side of Chicago — one that the star-studded press coverage largely ignored.
The Obama Presidential Center was explicitly marketed as a model project for minority-owned and local businesses. The Obama Foundation pledged to award 50 percent of subcontracting packages to diverse vendors — nearly double Chicago’s standard requirements — and committed that 35 percent of workforce hours would come from historically underserved communities. It was, by design, supposed to be a legacy that went beyond the building itself.
What it left behind, according to multiple subcontractors, was unpaid invoices and broken businesses.
A Fox News Digital investigation and reporting from Crain’s Chicago Business identified multiple construction firms claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions. One contractor says his company is owed nearly $4 million for completed work. At least two minority-owned subcontractors — Glass Management Services and Vision Painting & Decorating Services — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection during construction, with the center contracts listed in their filings. A separate federal lawsuit alleged racial discrimination against a minority-owned subcontractor by one of the project’s engineering firms.
The Obama Foundation’s position is that it paid its general contractor, Lakeside Alliance, and that contractual closeout processes are ongoing — a standard defense in large construction disputes. But Omar Shareef, president of the African American Contractors Association, had a more pointed take.
“The promise was that this project was going to uplift minority contractors and uplift the community. What sense is celebrating Juneteenth if our Black contractors are not getting their money?”Omar Shareef, President, African American Contractors Association
It’s a fair question. It didn’t get asked from the stage.
The Stage
What did happen on that stage was something the livestream captured, but the celebrity narrative didn’t account for. As the ceremony wrapped, former President Barack Obama danced off to the music — playing air guitar on his way to the exit. Jill Biden followed, smiling and waving at the crowd. Left behind at the podium, looking out at the audience with his sunglasses in his hand, was 83-year-old Joe Biden — the same man the Democratic Party insisted just two years ago was sharp as a tack.
“Where’s my granddaughter?” he asked into an open microphone.
Nobody answered. The camera panned away. Reports indicate it wasn’t an isolated moment — Biden had to be directed off stage at another point during the same ceremony.
It was, in miniature, a portrait of an entire political class: polished on the outside, chaotic at the exits, and leaving the people who did the actual work to figure it out for themselves.
The Flags
One more detail from the event went unremarked upon in the breathless coverage. Reviewing footage of the ceremony and photographs of the campus, there was hardly an American flag in sight — there was one barely seen on the stage, and none visible on the grounds outside. No attendees were wearing anything patriotic. For a celebration of a former American president’s legacy, it was a telling omission. Not incidental. Consistent. It looked more like a funeral.
A $850 million campus. Four former presidents. Bruce Springsteen. And not a flag to be found.
The presidency ends eventually. So does the ability to stage-manage the optics.
The contractors are still waiting.
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