Obama will have to decide whether to build the library in Hawaii or in Chicago. | REUTERS Obama's next campaign: His library

President Barack Obama’s next campaign is about to begin.

Even though his second inauguration is still weeks away, the work of his presidential library starts soon: Libraries take years of planning and decisions by the president and his inner circle, from choosing a location, to picking achievements to highlight. It’s a chance for Obama to begin shaping his legacy, and has in the past been an increasingly large priority during presidents’ second terms.


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But it requires the kind of personal fundraising that Obama clearly dislikes, full of potential pitfalls that led his predecessors into trouble.

Add more complications for Obama: He’ll have to decide whether to build the library in his birthplace of Hawaii or his adopted hometown of Chicago and possibly raise funds for a presence in both. Even for one, he could need to raise close to $500 million. Though much of the work will be done by a circle of close friends who will begin mobilizing in the coming months — including one longtime friend of the first lady already starting to make way for the library to be associated with the University of Chicago — much of the fundraising is going to come down to Obama himself.

“It’s like a third-term contribution,” said Skip Rutherford, a longtime friend of Bill Clinton who was involved in the planning for the library in Little Rock. “These are the friends and associates and supporters of a particular president, and they all want attention from him.”

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Clinton’s library cost $165 million and George W. Bush has brought in more than $300 million for his library, due to open next year. But Obama will need to raise even more since Congress has hiked endowment requirements for future libraries to at least 60 percent of the cost of construction.

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Presidential libraries are constructed and endowed with private funds, before being handed over to the National Archives. Federal employees staff the facilities, which include archives, museums and presidents’ final resting places. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to oversee a library being built, and putting one together has become an assumed part of serving in the White House.

Now it’s Obama’s turn — and that starts with fundraising, lots of it, even after a year’s worth of promises that he was done. His pledge that this was his last time asking for money became such a familiar part of his speeches that at one July event in New York, a Wall Street veteran interrupted with a joke.

“So you’re not going to call us for the library?” the donor said.

“Somebody else will make that call,” Obama shot back.

But with big donors being pressed for large checks, based on past library efforts, Obama will have to make calls, host visits and otherwise accommodate the people giving him hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Donors will inevitably demand it.

Obama can’t be disconnected from the process.

“Raising money for a library is an unexpected cost of being president, but it’s one they all face,” said Richard Norton Smith, a historian who’s headed several presidential libraries.

Fundraising isn’t the only thing that needs to start soon. The foundation responsible for Clinton’s library launched right his second term began in early 1997. George H.W. Bush selected Texas A&M University to host his library in 1991, before he’d even begun campaigning — unsuccessfully — for a second term.

“The pressure is mounting. They’ve got to get going,” said Don W. Wilson, who was executive director of Bush’s library throughout most of the 1990s.

A $20 million donor might be glad to have dinner with the first lady, but a conversation with the president would be key before signing a check.

The potential donor pool of friends, associates and supporters will be especially large while Obama is still in office, and potential donors hope to have some influence over administration policy.

That’s led to trouble in the past.

A presidential library donation was at the heart of the investigation of Clinton’s last-minute pardon of billionaire commodities trader Marc Rich. Since Clinton didn’t have to disclose his donors and chose not to, only as controversy escalated was it revealed that Rich’s ex-wife had given $450,000 to the Clinton library before the pardon was granted.

In 2008, Houston lobbyist Stephen Payne, a longtime friend of George W. Bush, was recorded urging an exiled Kazakh politician to give a $250,000 contribution to the Bush library to get access to senior administration officials. Payne denied any wrongdoing and the appropriate congressional committee chose not to take action against him after he answered its questions. But it was still an unwanted bump in the road during Bush’s final months in office.

Donors from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have given millions of dollars to the Clinton library and to both Bush libraries, and stirred up controversy. But disclosure of those contributions — some of which were made while the presidents were still in office — only came after the fact.

The Clinton library provided a list of its top 150 donors to congressional investigators during the Rich scandal in early 2001. The identities of other donors — including the governments of Dubai, Kuwait and Qatar, as well as the Saudi royal family — emerged in media reports after Clinton left office.

But it wasn’t until late 2008 that the former president released full donor records for the library and his foundation, which by then had expanded into humanitarian work. The disclosures came as part of an agreement aimed at creating transparency and preventing conflicts of interest after Obama chose Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state.

Kenneth Gross, a former associate general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, said he expects Obama to be more forthcoming. “It would be consistent with the positions that President Obama has taken on political and related activity beyond the requirements of current laws.”

George W. Bush didn’t accept foreign contributions for the fund to build his library, but did accept them for its endowment. Obama will have to make that choice.

“When you start slicing and dicing, it seems like no good deed goes unpunished,” Gross said, arguing that it’s hard to actually differentiate between money that goes to one purpose for the library versus another. Instead, Gross said he could see Obama barring foreign money altogether.

Not all the contributions Obama will get will be huge and, given the success his presidential campaigns had in attracting small donors, the stream of emails for more trademark win-a-dinner contests.

“They’re going to get a record number of small donors,” said Rutherford, noting that his efforts on behalf of the Clinton library involved more than 90,000 contributions of $100 or less.

With a legendary small donor operation and an email list reaching tens of millions of people, Obama will surely be able to raise more money from more small contributions than Clinton did.

He’ll also have to decide where he wants the library to be built.

The clear favorite is Chicago, the city Obama chose to make his home, and where he built his political base of rich friends including Hyatt Hotels heiress Penny Pritzker, investor John Rogers and media mogul Fred Eychaner. He represented the South Side of Chicago in the Illinois State Senate, and has deep ties to the neighborhood.

The University of Hawaii, and the whole state, were vocal early on in Obama’s term about wanting to host the library on Oahu. Obama’s parents met at the university’s main campus in Manoa, a Honolulu neighborhood, and the president’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is an assistant professor of education at the university.

Still, the heavy favorite to host the library is the University of Chicago: the president was a law professor there, Michelle Obama worked at its hospital, and the faculty and administration are full of friends and former colleagues. Obama campaign senior strategist David Axelrod is set to launch a political institute at the university in January, and Susan Sher, the first lady’s friend and former chief of staff, is on a committee tasked with anticipating problems the library might generate.

Faculty members involved in the proposal process won’t talk about it, and a university spokesman said it’s “premature to discuss a presidential library.” People familiar with the internal deliberations say that the university’s president, Robert Zimmer, and other top administrators support bringing the library there.

Charles Lipson, a professor of political science, has been the most vocal critic of bringing the library and a related think tank to the university, arguing that they would be “inherently partisan political institutions” that violate the university’s rules about staying neutral on political issues.

Nonetheless, Lipson expects the library will end up in Chicago and affiliated with his university. “It’s never been a question of what are the pluses and minuses of bringing it here,” he said.

Obama’s reelection has only enforced that sense because it will link the university with a “winner” who secured two terms and can pay for it easily “because you’ll be raising funds for the library while you’re an incumbent president, however unseemly that is.”