CHICAGO—In what may be rhetorical high points of the Democratic National Convention, former First Lady Michelle Obama and her spouse, former President Barack Obama, energized an already enthusiastic crowd in Chicago by looks ahead to a hopeful future under Democratic nominee Kamala Harris contrasted with the dark, backward, racist picture painted by the convicted criminal, Republican Donald Trump.
Both Obamas warned the crowd that they must bring their case and that contrast to the people 24/7, realizing that in a divided country, many millions will still disagree with them. That case must be earnest, Barack Obama said, including a willingness to listen to all.
Barack Obama spent much of his speech praising his vice president, current President Joe Biden, who stepped aside for his own VP, Harris, to enter and win the party nomination for the White House.
He not only praised Biden’s past achievements, but also indulged in some forecasting of what Harris would do if she wins the Oval Office. That includes enacting the Protect The Right To Organize Act, labor’s top legislative priority, which Senate Republican opposition doomed during Biden’s term.
In Obama’s term, he gave Biden the initial task of lobbying for the PRO Act’s predecessor, the Employee Free Choice Act, before pulling him away to lobby lawmakers—successfully—for the narrowly passed Affordable Care Act. That’s the giant and now very accepted revision of the U.S. health care system, despite the system’s own scrambled details and insurer profiteering.
“We need a president who will wake up every day” thinking of “the people who clean our floors, sweep our streets and deliver our packages. She’ll stand up for their right to bargain for better wages and working conditions…Everybody gets a fair shake,” Barack Obama said.
That prompted a crowd chant of ‘Yes, we can!” – a prior Obama and labor chant.
“For Donald Trump, freedom means they”—the rich—“can do what they want while firing you for wanting a union.”
Michelle Obama skewered Trump even more than her spouse did. “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” she declared, a slam at Trump’s harangues against everyone except his white nationalist legions.
“No one has the grace of falling forward,’ referring to Trump’s six corporate bankruptcies. “No one has the luxury of lying or cheating or changing the rules…after they come down a golden escalator.
“My husband and I know a little about this,” Michelle Obama deadpanned. Trump entered the political limelight by, among other things, charging that since Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein, he’s a Muslim born abroad—appealing to prejudice–and ineligible for the presidency.
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii of a Kenyan Black father and a Kansan white mother. Ultimately, the nettled Obama had to drag out his birth certificate to prove his constitutional qualification.
“In the limited view” of Donald Trump’s “world, he just happened to be threatened by two highly successful people who happen to be Black,” Michelle Obama drolly commented. Both Obamas graduated with Harvard law degrees, with honors, and he edited the Harvard Law Review.
Barack Obama went on to be a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, a state and U.S. senator from Illinois, and two-term president. Michelle Obama became a successful top university administrator. Trump, she noted, kept going broke, then entered the presidential race and won, with a romanticized view of the past where racists and white males dominated everyone else.
“Why would we support anyone practicing those backward politics?” Michelle Obama asked. “America deserves better than that and we will do better than that.” Democrats must deliver that message and she gave them permission “to be confrontational” where necessary.
Barack Obama took a different tack, opening his address with long and generous praise for Democratic President Joe Biden, his VP. Biden retired from the race after party mavens and big givers concluded he couldn’t beat Trump this fall. He opened the door for and endorsed Harris, his VP, who quickly won all of Biden’s Democratic convention delegates.
Reclaiming the chant
Reclaiming the successful chant from his first presidential campaign of 16 years ago of “Fired up!” and crowd’s roaring reply, “Ready to go!”, Barack Obama declared “I’m feeling hopeful” about the outcome of the presidential race with fewer than three months to go.
He then launched into a celebration of Harris’s record as a prosecutor in San Francisco, as California Attorney General and as vice president, adding a few details to the record Harris outlines in her standard stump speech.
She cites her San Francisco record prosecuting sexual predators, her AG record pursuing big banks who foreclosed on homeowners who were behind on their payments during the coronavirus-caused Great Recession even when those owners were willing to repay, and her prosecution of for-profit colleges who took students’ and federal student loan cash and then suddenly closed.
He didn’t say so, but Harris does: Trump ran one of those for-profit failures, the Trump University. And when it closed, it left students, many of them of color, with mountains of debt and no diplomas or even transferable credits. They sued, they won, and Trump cussed out the federal judge who ruled for them—because the judge, the son of migrants, has an Hispanic last name.
“And as vice president, she helped families with kids,” by lobbying for extension of the pandemic-era child care tax credit, Barack Obama noted. Left unsaid: The GOP-run House killed the extension.
“And as president, she will push a law to give every woman the right to make her own health care decisions” on when or whether to have children.
The three Trump-named Supreme Court justices formed the core of the court majority that yanked that federal right from every U.S. woman two years ago. Democrats used the outrage of millions of women—outrage that continues and intensifies—to their advantage in the off-year elections two years ago, regardless of whether the state is Democratic blue, deep Republican red, or marginal.
“And she won’t help only those who kiss the ring or bend the knee,” Barack Obama declared, a nod to the absolute fealty that has turned the Republican Party into the Cult of Trump.
Thus voters will elect Harris, Michelle Obama added, because “She sees you, she hears you and she will get up every day to fight for you.”
That’s even though Harris admits that because of the late start, the campaign still faces “an uphill battle.” And though public opinion polls show Kamala Harris has moved ahead of Trump both nationally and in key swing states, past political history—including in her home state of California—shows there is a latent anti-Black vote, racist in origin, not reflected in replies to pollsters.
Prejudice beat Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley when he ran as a Democrat, and former police chief, against right-wing Republican George Deukmejian. It turned what was assumed to be a walkaway for Lieut. Gov. Doug Wilder (D) in Virginia into a close win to become the South’s first Black governor.
“It won’t be easy,” Barack Obama warned. “The other side will tell you the easy path: ‘The government is corrupt…Take what you want.’” But Harris, Obama claimed, “knows the election has to be earned.
“Let us not forget there are so many people who are ready for a different outcome, who will go for these lies” by Trump, as they did four years ago, and continue to do, he reminded listeners.
Will be a close race
“This will be a close race in a closely divided country,” Barack Obama predicted. “Many people are struggling. Many people are asking ‘Who will fight for me? Who will fight for our future? Who will fight for our children’s future?’”
Kamala Harris will, he proclaimed. Donald Trump won’t. “One thing is certain: Donald Trump hasn’t thought about that last problem. He’s benefitting more since he rode that golden escalator” in Trump Tower in Manhattan to declare his candidacy nine years ago, then ready to face Hillary Clinton.
“The truth is Donald Trump sees power as a means to his ends. He wants the middle class to pay for a tax cut for his rich friends. He killed a bipartisan bill written by one of the most conservative Republicans to solve problems at the [U.S.-Mexico] border” because it would give Democratic President Joe Biden a political win.
“He wants to divide us and he wants you to think you’ll be safer if he puts ‘the others’ in jail,” without defining who the others are. Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, D-Ohio, have made clear that every type of progressive and leftist is “the enemy” to be arrested and jailed.
“After a while, folks just tune out…It’s gotten stale. America is ready for a new story and a new voice,” Barack Obama said, optimistically.
And to those who still believe the U.S. is too prejudiced to elect an African-American female president, he warned “We cannot indulge our anxieties about electing someone like Kamala, instead of doing anything we can to get Kamala elected.”
That may also be a warning to protesters who marched in the streets of Chicago, chanting “Free Palestine!” and demanding U.S. cut off military and political support of murderous right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his increasingly ferocious war on Gaza and disdain for Israeli hostages held by Hamas for nine months. High rings of fences, tight security and platoons of police—the entire Chicago force was mobilized—kept the protesters far away from the convention.
“They will make mistakes,” Michelle Obama admitted about Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. “But it is up to all of us to be part of the solution.
“This is the time to stand up for what we know in our hearts is right, for our basic freedoms, for our basic dignity and for the values that are the foundation of our democracy.”
“You gotta pick up and do something!” she exhorted. “We cannot afford for anyone to sit there and wait to be told. There is no time for that kind of foolishness. In some states, a handful of votes in each precinct will decide the winner.” “Do something! Do something! Do something!” the crowd chanted in reply.
“I know these ideas can seem pretty naïve,” Barack Obama admitted. “Especially in a culture where we build all manner of walls and fences…that teach us to control each other and fear each other.
“But away from the noise, we share the same values. The vast majority of the country does not want to live in a country that is bitter and divisive,” and neither does Harris, he said.
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