Chicago: Former President Barack Obama cast Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night as the inheritor of the political movement he created, saying her candidacy had rekindled the hope that propelled him to the Oval Office 16 years ago.
In back-to-back speeches at Democratic National Convention in Chicago, former first lady Michelle Obama and her husband, the 44th president, brought thousands of Democrats to their feet time and time again, using the chants of “Yes, we can” to revive the spirit of the 2008 election.
“Now the torch has been passed,” Barack Obama said, evoking the words of John F. Kennedy at his 1961 inaugural, months before Obama was born. “Now it’s up to all of us to fight for the America we believe in. And make no mistake: It will be a fight.”
It was the first of many warnings that the wave of enthusiasm and rising poll numbers for Harris might not be enough to avoid a tight outcome in 11 weeks, and that former President Donald Trump would try to manipulate the numbers and steal the election unless Harris won an overwhelming victory.
“We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos,” Obama said. He later needled Trump for what he called “the childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories and weird obsession with crowd size. It just goes on and on.”
Michelle Obama recalled how Trump “did everything in his power to try to make people fear us.” And then she asked: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”
The line brought one of the biggest roars of the evening, and Michelle Obama followed up by accusing Trump of “doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions.”
But if it was Michelle Obama who most electrified the audience, it was her husband, one of the party’s most revered and popular figures, who made the case that Harris’ candidacy was an extension of his own. And in the vast hall of the United Center, the enthusiasm for that era contrasted in tone and power with the farewell given the previous night to President Joe Biden.
Yet it was lost on no one that Barack Obama has played a role in pushing Biden, his former vice president, to abandon his candidacy and turn the race over to Harris, who is 22 years younger than the sitting president.
For all the enthusiasm among Democrats for the Obamas, history suggests that their ability to transfer their own popularity to another candidate is limited. Obama came to national prominence in 2004, giving a keynote address to the Democratic convention in Boston as it nominated Sen. John F. Kerry to take on President George W. Bush. Yet Kerry lost, narrowly.
In 2016, leaving office, Obama made an impassioned case for Hillary Clinton, his onetime political rival and then his secretary of state. Clinton won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College to Trump.
Now Obama saw a new opportunity to revive the aura of his own run, in the first major-party presidential nomination of a Black woman in American history.
The Obamas took the stage after an appearance by Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, who had the familiar convention task of sharing the more personal side of his spouse with the party faithful — and the prime-time television audience.
He described the details of his first, awkward, overlong phone message to her seeking a date, and followed with a touching scene of Harris, inside the vice president’s residence, setting aside the business of the day to take a long call from his daughter (and her stepdaughter), Ella.
As with much of the Democratic convention this year, the evening was relatively devoid of any discussion of policy — a sharp contrast to Clinton’s campaign eight years ago, and even Biden’s in 2020.
There were two notable exceptions. The convention organizers highlighted stories from women — including Michelle Obama — who said that in vitro fertilization treatments allowed them to have children, and from others who told horror stories of medical emergencies in states that would not allow abortions.
The other exception was Barack Obama. He made the case that Harris “helped take on the drug companies to cap the cost of insulin, lower the cost of health care and give families with kids a tax cut.” He said she had “real plans” to cut costs more.
And then he turned to what he called a “broader idea of freedom” that included “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and send your kids to school without worrying if they’ll come home.” He portrayed the Democrats as the party of nonintervention — one that allows Americans to decide “how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry.”
In short, Obama cast Trump’s Republican Party as more authoritarian than libertarian. He cast the Democrats, once known as the party of regulation, as the guarantors of personal freedom. It is unclear whether voters are willing to entertain that vision of the Democratic Party’s role. And Obama’s mission Tuesday evening was far larger than what he sought to accomplish during a packed political convention in 2016.
Back then, he was extolling the talents of Clinton and warning of the dangers of Trump, who was widely assumed by Democrats in the room to be easily beaten. In a sense, he was handing off a baton, with the strength of the presidency behind him.
This time, he made clear that despite his “passing the torch” line, it would take far more to defeat Trump for the second time in four years.
“For all the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate over the last few weeks, this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country,” Obama said. “A country where too many Americans are still struggling and don’t believe government can help.”