'Inconceivable' Obama library won't be in Chicago?

CHICAGO — Will Barack Obama put his presidential library on the South Side of Chicago, where his political career was launched?

He better, his former strategist and adviser David Axelrod says.

"I can tell you that from the standpoint of Chicagoans, it's inconceivable" that Obama's official library would be anywhere else, Axelrod said in an interview with USA TODAY's Capital Download about his memoir, Believer. "There may be some debates about sitings, but if you ask people here, 'What about New York City?' the color will drain from their face."

New York's Columbia University, where Obama received his undergraduate degree, is making a bid for the library. The University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Hawaii also are interested.

But Obama taught in the University of Chicago Law School, and he represented the area in the Illinois state Senate, fueling assumptions the university had the inside track. However, it submitted plans for a site on parkland it doesn't own, raising objections from some local residents and preservationists.

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"The president spent so much of his life trying to revive the South Side of Chicago; he represented this area," Axelrod says. "It would be so meaningful to this community to have that library and that center here, and I think he knows what it would mean."

The Second City has powerful allies. Axelrod just happens to head the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics now, and Rahm Emanuel, Obama's first White House chief of staff, is the city's mayor.