By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

Presidents didn’t always build libraries after they finished their terms. When they did, the results tended to underwhelm. You could sit in an ersatz oval office. You could admire baubles received from foreign governments. If you were lucky, you could get some sense of place: Hyde Park, where Franklin Roosevelt fed hot dogs to the queen of England, Yorba Linda, where Dick Nixon was born to fight, Austin, Texas, not big enough for Lyndon Johnson. The Kennedy clan built its library in Boston, even though Jack was more of a New Yorker.

In that same spirit of make-believe, Barack Obama ended up in Chicago. Obama skipped around when he was young, from Hawaii to the mainland to overseas, then back to Hawaii. He attended college in California, then finished in New York. He worked for a while in Chicago, studied law in Massachusetts, then returned to Chicago to work again. He became a politician there. Like the Pope, he claims to like the White Sox. Unlike the Pope, his allegiance seems to be more strategic than real.  He could have put his library anywhere.

This new building is a cement fortress filled with art and invocations of politics, culture, sports. He designed major aspects of it himself. Its top floor is an open space with a soaring ceiling that recedes into the air. The highest point bathes everything in light. The walls are decorated with words from his speeches, streaming down. But there’s no actual skylight there. The light is artificial. Sunshine was considered corrosive to the papers plastered everywhere. In celebrating the work of such a thoughtful man, the irony is rich.

It’s too early to take the measure of this museum. It’s been criticized as cold and forbidding; it’s been lauded as original and interesting. As vanity projects go, there are surely worse examples (that ballroom being built in Washington, for starters). It’s also probably still too early to take the measure of Obama’s presidency, except for one fact: he is the man who first handed off our nation’s leadership to Donald Trump.

They make an odd couple, these partners in history. Obama was intelligent, snobby, and cautious. He excelled in paying lip service to things like baseball and patriotism; he himself was too cool for that stuff. Trump is famously boorish, emotional, and rash. He epitomizes being uncool – and I’m using that term with care.

Marshall McLuhan was an academic from Toronto who studied media and its effects on society. He famously defined television as a cool medium, meaning that its emphasis on close-up camera work rewarded the underplay of emotion. Vaudeville, theater in general, and even the movies either allowed for or encouraged vivid display, but not television. So the antics of old-time clowns like Milton Berle mellowed into the calm demeanor of guys like Johnny Carson.

The same was true in politics. Politicians used to be visible from afar. They used to have loud personalities. Think Huey Long, the Kingfish; think LaGuardia with his paunch. Starting in the nineteen-sixties, though, our leaders toned it down for the screen. Obama had no flash at all, or he had it in muted fashion and was duly awarded with fawning attention. He was so cool his acolytes used to count the number of almonds he snacked on.

Nobody counts how many french fries Trump devours. Trump does not even pretend to be cool. So far, so good; so McLuhan, so there. Just as Kennedy was the first, Obama was our last television candidate. Trump came of political age with the internet, so like an old-fashioned pol, he needed to get noticed. He therefore entertained us. He was blatant, he was vulgar, and the crowd paid attention.That answers the question of style (others have learned this lesson too; Mamdani and his so-called progressives are Trump’s true political heirs). But it doesn’t explain what Trump yelled, nor how intimately he is connected to his predecessor. And at the start of things, before it all went bad, when Obama was busy polishing his awards and Hillary was already planning what causes she would pretend to care about, he was yelling that his opponents had failed to listen to their country; they were too busy skipping from place to place. He was yelling that his opponents cared more about their looks than their actions, cared more about architecture in the abstract than they did about building things, cared more about bright lights than they did about warmth.

Then he won, but not because he yelled. He won because he was yelling pieces of the truth. Obama’s style and politics were both endemic to his time. He played it cool, but he still lost the game. Go to Chicago and see.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project,  The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.