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INTRODUCTION TO THE ROTUNDA
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      When you walk into the Presidential Museum and Leadership Library, the first thing you should see is the rotunda and what is exhibited there.
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Odessa Texas’s Presidential Museum threatens to close July 1, despite being on track to attract some 3,650 visitors this year. They have somehow managed to survive for 45 years, given a boost when the semi-local Bushs stumbled to the top.
The museum is an exciting confection of early Bush 
 home replication, the vaguely presidentialy related, and misinformation.
      “We have some very rare, interesting items for our visitors to see. An example is the registration desk used by President Eisenhower when he was commander of the European forces during WWII. The museum acquired this piece in the 1960’s and it serves to illustrate the unique collection we have, it is not all about buttons and posters.“
The museum’s web page is a melange of odd choices and factual errors. Their timeline for the 1860s and 1870s finds no space to mention either Lincoln’s election or assassination, but the Chicago Fire gets a mention.
Prize oddity comes when they sound the alarm in the 20th Century:
AREA 7:
DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II
AMERICAN SOCIALISM: WHAT HAPPENED?
 “Not satisfied with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its initial work/relief programs, left-wing politicians Louisiana’s Huey Long and California’s Father Coughlin advocated radical changes to the American system-tax the rich to provide welfare for the poor.”
What ever are they saying here?
 Long is usually viewed as a populist and/or fascist, rarely as a man of the left.
 Father Coughlin was a Detroit based fascist, although the Townsend Movement for old people’s pensions started in California.
Cause For Alarm 
A group of academics have petitioned President Obama to end a beloved presidential tradition dating back to Liberal Idol Woodrow Wilson: sending a wreath each year to a Confederate war memorial in Arlington.
 
The legacy of the man who segregated Washington DC lives on in this sacred annual remembrance, only shifted from Jefferson Davis’s birthday to Memorial Day by the first President Bush.
And not just any cracker monument.
“The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers.“
The monument is a relic of lost cause-ism, reading in part:
“The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth.”
Straw for Last Gaspers to grab hold of:Â the distinguished professors whose names are enrolled on the petition to the President include old pal Bill Ayers!
Super-performance! Â
Matthew Yglesias tries to make sense out of Gallop’s opinion polling on presidents by age, and comes up puzzled, especially by Kennedy’s over-performance across the ideological spectrum.
“I can’t imagine a coherent ideological viewpoint that would justify the high ratings Americans over-35 give to Kennedy… if you could take the Kennedy-Johnson years as a whole, then divide them up into one presidency that was dominated by Vietnam and another one that’s responsible for Civil Rights and the Great Society, then you’d have one shitty president and one great president. A lot of people seem to have basically decided to divide things up this way and call the shitty president “Johnson†while the good president is called “Kennedy.†That, however, doesn’t have a great deal to do with reality.“
Book Him 
The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning arts critic Mark Feeney has solved the Presidential Library/Pharaoh-ization problem: Make Obama go first!
It’s a position our first African-American President has been in many times before, and why not round out Black History Month by renouncing the building of his all but inevitable Presidential Library?
I agree with almost everything Feeney says about these places – the terrible history, bad architecture, and overall waste of these monuments to would-be greatness.
But why start with the new guy? George W. Bush has yet to announce a design, much less break ground – that one could be strangled in its birth. The Carter Library will be is closed most of this year in order to sink another $10 million into the place. And despite Feeney’s claim that the Nixon Library finally got his papers in 2007, they are still building,  
      and the papers are not expected on site until Fall 2009.
The established Presidential Libraries are rotting from within, and could be left to wither. But why does Barack Obama have to be first?
