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Today’s opening ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center is a media spectacle fit for a former president, with A-list performers like Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder, and all the other former presidents on hand. The dedication ceremony in Chicago begins at 11 a.m. CT. CNN, C-SPAN and other channels are planning special coverage.

This is “more than a decade in the making,” CNN’s Sara Sidner said from her anchor position at the center. Jeff Zeleny told Sidner that the Obamas want the center “to be about more than just his candidacy and his presidency, but sort of a lesson of history” and a reminder for future generations “about what leadership can do.”

Obama expressed some of that in a sit-down interview with Michele Norris for MS NOW. The center is meant to embrace “complexity,” he said: “I think when you understand the complexities of America and the contradictions of America, I don’t think it makes you love it less, I think it makes you love it more.”

“And I think it also makes you more resilient,” he said. “Because then, during periods like we’re in right now — where for a lot of folks it’s crazy and you feel despair and anger — that perspective allows you to then say, ‘Okay, we’ve gone through crazy periods like this before. We’ve gone through mean periods before.’ It fortifies you to say, ‘Yes, this has been part of the journey that we’re on,’ and there’s no reason to suggest that we can’t get through this one.”

The former president has only taped a couple of TV interviews about the center, but he has appeared on several podcasts and YouTube shows in recent months, modeling the behavior that he wants to see from other Democrats. More than 100 creators and influencers were given tours of the center in the lead-up to today’s ceremony.

“We have intentionally broadened the president’s reach beyond traditional media — including working with creators, appearing on podcasts, and engaging on new platforms — to connect with audiences in unexpected places,” Obama senior advisor Eric Schultz told me. “This has been President Obama’s media strategy since the beginning, knowing that effective communications in today’s environment means engaging audiences in venues they already use and trust.”

>> CNN’s Jacqui Palumbo has a first look inside the presidential center here…

CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reports that Obama told his alums last night that “he didn’t believe in nostalgia and didn’t intend to wallow in it.”

But it’s impossible to read about the center’s opening without thinking back to the Obama era — which was also the beginning of the social media era. Instagram didn’t even exist until 2010, Obama photographer Pete Souza pointed out to Zeleny on CNN earlier this morning.

To conjure up some memories of those years, I searched my inbox for 2016 editions of the Reliable Sources newsletter, and the first one that popped up with Obama’s name was… about then-candidate Donald Trump telling me in a phone interview that he would “love to” keep pushing his lies about Obama’s birthplace.

But “I don’t talk about it” anymore, Trump said in 2016, “because once I talk about it, that’s all they want to write about.” Yes, the future president — whose lies about Obama helped him win over GOP voters — bragged to me about his message discipline.

It’s no wonder that Trump was not invited to today’s event.

“In an era where DEI has been completely, not just DEI, when Black American history has been carved out of the halls of the federal government with, like, a butcher knife, them doing this library on Juneteenth week is on purpose and is significant,” CNN’s Audie Cornish observed… “It feels like the Obamas are doing something very purposeful. They’re creating an alternative historical celebration for people who feel like part of their history is forgotten.”

New York’s ticker-tape parade for the Knicks is underway at the tip of lower Manhattan, with wall-to-wall coverage on all the city’s local TV stations and extensive coverage nationally on channels like CNN and ESPN2 as well. Almost every reporter at the parade is wearing Knicks gear. My better half, a morning anchor at NY1, just drank a second coffee, expecting to be on the air with coverage of Zohran Mamdani’s keys to the city ceremony through the afternoon.