By Saqib Saleem Qureshi
Obama steps back into the spotlight — and absolutely skewers Trump CHICAGO —
Former President Barack Obama delivered his most animated address in nearly a decade as he worked to pass his political legacy to Kamala Harris while skewering Donald Trump.
Obama, who largely stayed behind the scenes as other Democrats worked to remove President Joe Biden from the ticket, was suddenly front and center Tuesday night, closing out the second night of the Democratic convention here, along with his wife, Michelle.
Declaring that “the torch has been passed,” Obama lauded Biden while sharpening the contrast voters face between Harris and “a guy whose act has — let’s face it — gotten pretty stale,” the former president.
“America is ready for a new chapter. America’s ready for a better story,” Obama told the crowd. “We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.”
His argument in 2004 was that the American people are fundamentally decent. Despite the anger on the surface, there is more that unites us than divides us. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” he said back then. “We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
Does that mean we can all just hold hands and skip off into the future together? No, because there have always been demagogues who seek to divide us so they can exploit the division.
In 2004, the Bush campaign was using patriotism and gay marriage to impugn the Americanness of its opponents. In 2024, Trump is using racism, as Michelle Obama noted candidly in her speech preceding her husband’s.
Those tactics can succeed because they prey upon baser and lower human instincts. “The other side knows it’s easier to play on people’s fears and cynicism. It always has been,” Obama argued on Tuesday.
Obama’s answer to this is a positive-sum vision. Lifting up the most vulnerable Americans, he believes, creates more freedom and prosperity for all of us. He also emphasized this theme 20 years ago. (“If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.”)
And he returned to it Tuesday night. “Kamala and Tim understand that when everybody gets a fair shot, we are all better off,” he said. “Just like we can keep our streets safe while also building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve and eliminating bias that will make it better for everybody.”
He presented this as a contrast to Trump’s zero-sum vision, which implies we can only help ourselves at the expense of others: “Donald Trump and his well-heeled donors, they don’t see the world that way. For them, one group’s gains is necessarily another group’s loss.”
Obama declared Harris is ready for the job. He said she spent her career as a prosecutor fighting for victims of sexual abuse and, fighting big banks and for-profit colleges, and as vice president, helping to cap the price of insulin and lower health care costs.
“She’s not the neighbor running the leaf blower,” he said. “She’s the neighbor rushing over to help when you need a hand.”
And in Walz – “I love this guy,” Obama said – Harris has found the perfect running mate, he added.
“A Harris-Walz administration can help us move past some of the tired old debates that keep stifling progress, because at their core, Kamala and Tim understand that when everybody gets a fair shot, we’re all better off,” he said.
The former president also paid homage to his vice president, President Biden, who he said “history will remember … as a president who defended democracy at a moment of great danger.”
In closing, the former president quoted former President Abraham Lincoln, who on the eve of the Civil War, called for a restoration of “‘our bonds of affection.”
“An American that taps into what (Lincoln) called ‘the better angels of our nature,’” Obama said. “That’s what this election is about.”
