Obama changed his mind after getting an earful from Chicago museums

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Hopes are running high in the arts because all eyes and ears are on Barack Obama, and Obama’s eyes and ears seem to be attuned to the arts.

But go back a little more than 10 years and you discover that Obama, an Illinois state senator at the time, was even then getting an earful from arts and cultural institutions -- and apparently receiving their message loud and clear.

The dust-up became public Jan. 11, 1999, when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Obama believed a consortium of nine (now 10) major museums in his hometown, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (now the National Museum of Mexican Art), should stop giving free passes to elected officials under a new law he’d championed prohibiting Illinois pols from accepting gifts.

‘It’s probably not a good idea for legislators to be getting gifts from institutions they have an impact on,’ Obama told the newspaper, adding that he had never used his pass.

By the next day, however, Obama was changing his view. He told the Chicago Tribune that ‘of all the things we have to worry about in terms of influence peddling in Springfield, museums fall pretty low down on my list.’ The gift ban, he said, was aimed at stopping ‘obvious and serious ethical infractions.... For the most part, that does not involve museums.’

Looking back at the brief controversy this week, Illinois state Sen. Kirk Dillard, a Republican who co-sponsored the gift-ban bill with Obama but never thought it should prohibit the museum passes, said the incident showed that the future president had an open mind and door for the arts and culture. Obama’s quick reversal of a publicly taken position was hastened, Dillard recalled, by ‘a flurry of calls over a few days between the heads of some of the major museums, Sen. Obama, myself’ and a lobbyist for Museums in the Park, the coalition that issued the free passes to elected officials -- and still does.

Dillard has another memory of Obama and the arts: The two senators sang a duet of ‘We’re in the Money’ at a political talent show -- as a spoof of their 1998 gift-ban bill. The president’s former colleague notes, ‘Sen. Obama clearly had some musical talent.’

-- Mike Boehm