Barack and Michelle Obama anoint Kamala Harris as their political heir: ‘Hope is making a comeback’

“America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris,” he said. “Hope is making a comeback!” she proclaimed. In their closing speeches on the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago Tuesday, Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, and his wife, Michelle, invested the presidential candidate as the heir to their political legacy, in the hope she will become the first U.S. president of mixed Black and South Asian American heritage, and the country’s first female leader, in November’s election.

With the lofty oratory that is his trademark, the former president and spiritual leader of the Democrats launched an appeal for unity, between generations and ideologies. An appeal directed not only to the 4,500 Democratic delegates who moments before had ratified in a ceremonial vote the nomination of Harris as candidate, and who greeted Obama with cheers of “Yes, we can,” his old campaign slogan. As he did in the 2008 campaign that brought him to the White House, Obama appealed above all to the spectators beyond the United Center, to those who are not willing to listen to his message at first, to those who are not convinced by Harris. To “Democrats, Republicans, and those somewhere in between.”

“The vast majority of us don’t want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided. We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and excitement we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we are not alone,” the former president told a convention attempting to conjure up the same spirit of optimism and hope for the future that turned the Obama campaign a political phenomenon.

The conciliatory words of the former president did not extend to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, against whom he launched a multitude of rhetorical darts. “We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse, he said, adding in a serious tone: “Donald Trump sees power as nothing more than a means to his ends.”

By contrast, Obama said of the Democratic ticket: “Kamala and Tim [Walz] have kept faith with America’s central story, a story that says we are all created equal, all of us endowed with certain inalienable rights, that everyone deserves a chance that even when we don’t agree with each other, we can find a way to live with each other.”

“Black jobs”

Like her husband, Michelle Obama drew a stark contrast between the Democratic nominee and Trump. In very personal terms, the real estate magnate was the main promoter of the hoax in 2011 that claimed Barack Obama had not been born in the United States, and could not therefore serve as the country’s legitimate president. “For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. His limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard working and highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black,” she said.

The former first lady mocked Trump by alluding to the message the Republican candidate delivered during his debate with Biden, when he said migrants crossing into the U.S. are taking “Black jobs” away from Black Americans. Obama sparked laughter and applause from the audience when she asked: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”

Barack Obama’s speech in the city where he lived for years and the state from which he launched his political career carried a special symbolism. Twenty years ago, the former president made his first appearance at another Democratic convention, in Boston in 2004 to nominate John Kerry as presidential candidate. “There is no Republican America. There is no Democratic America. There is a United States of America,” Obama said at the time, moving the entire country and launching the young Illinois state legislator, who until then was almost an unknown, to political stardom.

Without Obama, Harris’s candidacy would not have been possible: not only did he pave the way as America’s first non-white president, he also selected Joe Biden as vice president, making it possible for the former senator reach the White House and, in turn, appoint Harris as his own number two. And Obama was one of the Democratic heavyweights who pushed to convince Biden to cede the nomination to his running mate in July.

Harris’s campaign bears more than one similarity to the one that brought Obama to the White House in 2008. The former chief strategist in that battle for the presidency, David Plouffe, has joined the current candidate’s team. If Obama’s campaign masterfully used the nascent social networks and databases to reach the maximum number of voters, before an audience much more fragmented than that of that time the vice president has made it a priority to turn to influencers and content creators, to use TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Her slogans, like Obama’s, are short, memorable and optimistic. The artist Shepard Fairey, who turned Obama into a cultural icon with his portrait Hope, has created a similar image for Harris entitled Forward.

The relationship between the former president and the candidate dates back almost two decades, to when Obama decided to throw his hat into the presidential election ring with only two years of experience on Capitol Hill, his oratory and a slogan of hope: “Yes, we can,” to compete against someone who at the time had the almost complete support of the party hierarchy and was considered the inevitable candidate: former first lady Hillary Clinton.

Harris, then California’s attorney general, was one of the few senior officials to declare her support from the start for what seemed a doomed campaign, and even to help by trying to convince voters door-to-door in Iowa. Obama never forgot this. The two became good friends.

Many things in common

They have many things in common: both are lawyers, of similar ages (Obama is 63, Harris 59) and have a life experience marked by their diverse cultural heritage. In 2015, the then president considered appointing Harris to replace attorney general, Eric Holder. According to Harris’ memoir, The Truths We Hold, Holder, a good friend of both, offered her the job, but she turned it down. She was already considering a run for the Senate that same year, which would take her to Washington in 2017. Once she was selected by Biden to be his number two and took up the vice-presidency, Obama maintained his role as mentor on the peculiarities of White House life and protocol.

Obama’s legacy is not immaculate. Progressives believe that throughout his term he was too conservative in areas such as immigration reform, and at the same time, too aggressive with a foreign policy that attacked Libya and sent American soldiers to Syria. Others accuse him of having neglected relations with the Democratic National Committee, towards which he always felt distrust, to the point that he seriously weakened the party’s structures, something that could have contributed to Hillary Clinton’s defeat against Trump in the 2016 election.

But on Tuesday, none of that mattered. The old spirit of optimism, hope and desire for change prevailed. During his speech, Obama switched his “yes, we can” into a “yes, she can,” which the audience chanted. “We did it then and we can certainly do it again now... Let’s keep moving our country forward and go higher than we’ve ever been before,” concluded Michelle Obama, to thunderous applause.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition