Michele Norris
speaker
715 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 20 Jun
Michele Norris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
For modern-day presidents, building a library is yet another civic duty once they leave office.
Every president since Herbert Hoover has built a presidential library.
They are monuments to the men who serve their country and a kind of glorified warehouse to store all the papers and documents from their time in office.
As Obama advisor Marty Nesbitt discovered, they can end up being rather lonely places.
Every presidential center I went to, the archives were empty.
There was nobody there.
It was idle space.
When we looked at the history of presidential libraries, we found that sort of they opened with a lot of fanfare and interest.
And then over time, as sort of history progresses, time progresses, they become less and less relevant.
President Obama decided to break with tradition to preserve his papers inside a fully digital library in lieu of keeping all those files inside a physical building.
Instead, he tried to create a place where people, everyday people, not just scholars, would gladly visit over generations.
That was the driving mission and the catalyzing challenge for what ultimately became not the Obama Presidential Library,
but the Obama Presidential Center.
That distinction is important.
The Obama Presidential Center is so much more than just a library.
I think because they chose Chicago, the south side of Chicago, where it's really home for them, they wanted it to be a gift.
And if it had just been a museum, it wouldn't be the gift that it is today.
The goal was to create a campus that would remain relevant over decades, to make this place feel alive.
I've had a chance to watch the project evolve over 10 years from dream to reality.
The Obama Foundation assembled a storytelling committee of historians, scholars, and storytellers to serve as a resource.
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