CHICAGO — “Fair to say, this is not your typical election,” Barack Obama told a packed political convention about to make history by nominating a woman for president.
That was July 2016, as Obama was leaving the presidency, extolling the talents of Hillary Clinton, and warning of the dangers of Donald Trump, who was widely assumed by Democrats in the room to be easily beaten.
Anyone reading that speech today would realize instantly that Obama could give much of it, word for word, on Tuesday night in Chicago. The phrases will change, a reflection of the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris’ life story, and her experience in government, is dramatically different from Clinton’s. But his core message about Harris’ tenacity may well be drawn from what he said about Clinton.
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There will doubtless be echoes of eight years ago, when Obama described the dangers posed by Trump, whom he called a peddler of “a deeply pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other, and turn away from the rest of the world.”
But Obama’s mission Tuesday evening will be far larger than what he sought to accomplish in 2016. Then, he was handing off a baton, with the strength of the presidency behind him. This time, it will be his job to resurrect, and then reassemble, the kind of movement that propelled him to the White House.
And after President Joe Biden’s farewell speech to the party Monday, it is Obama’s job to separate Harris from the Biden years, while making the case that she was central enough to the Biden administration to slip seamlessly into the job — essentially the argument he made about Clinton’s role in his own administration. And then he must seek to transfer to Harris the sense of endless horizons that surrounded his own first run for the presidency.
It will be a tricky combination, people close to Obama said, a transition moment that convention planners deliberately placed in the hands of the party’s greatest living orator.
“President Obama spoke as an incumbent in 2016 in favor of one of the most familiar brands in American politics,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist for his political campaigns and a senior adviser who sat just down the hall from the Oval Office, where Obama would sometimes come in, in his stocking feet, to mull the political quandaries of the moment.
“He will speak Tuesday as someone who also once was a turn-the-page candidate, just as the party is showing signs of renewed energy behind Kamala Harris,” Axelrod said. “It’s a very different scenario.”
The Democrats are betting that if anyone can pull it off, it will be the man who burst into the consciousness of many Americans at the 2004 convention in Boston. It was then, as a state senator in Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate, that he was selected to be the keynote speaker. He labored over the speech, he wrote later, drafting it longhand. The resulting speech left a bigger impression on his audience than the subsequent acceptance speech of the party’s nominee, Sen. John Kerry, who, like Clinton, later served as Obama’s secretary of state.
Obama’s line that evening, that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America,” promised a vision of national unity at a time that the seams were just being stretched. “There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America,” he added. “There’s the United States of America.”
Former aides to Obama say he is bound to return to that theme Tuesday night, as he makes the case for not fueling the societal divisions Trump has at once benefited from and fed. And his former aides expect him to draw heavily on his old critique of Trump — “does anyone really believe that a guy who’s spent his 70 years on this Earth showing no regard for working people is suddenly going to be your champion?” — updated with a few indictments and a conviction.
“Donald Trump calls our military a disaster,” Obama said in 2016, pressing his case. “Apparently, he doesn’t know the men and women who make up the strongest fighting force the world has ever known. He suggests America is weak. He must not hear the billions of men and women and children, from the Baltics to Burma, who still look to America to be the light of freedom and dignity and human rights.”
And, Obama said, Trump “cozies up” to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and “tells our NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection.”
Axelrod noted that “so much has happened since 2016.”
“And what was then just speculation about Trump’s potential for excesses and trespasses,” he said, “are now a part of his history as president an aggrieved former president.”
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