Barack Obama Still Seducing Us, And Still So Good At It
Barack Obama Still Seducing Us, And Still So Good At It
This man knows how to give a speech.
Barack Obama renewed our crush on him in his speech to the DNC Tuesday night, that charming, witty devil. (You know who else gave good speeches? Very few like Barack Obama, that’s who.) He started off with slogans from his own campaigns, saying he still feels “fired up!” and “ready to go!”
Obama made the case for good old American democracy and decency, emphasizing that the difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump isn’t simply a matter of politics, but of fundamental understanding of what governing is about. Joe Biden’s presidency, Obama said, reflected his “unshakeable belief that everyone in this country deserves a fair shot,” and that philosophy drove Biden’s policies:
At a time when millions of our fellow citizens were sick and dying, we needed a leader with the character to put politics aside and do what was right. At a time when our economy was reeling, we needed a leader with the determination to drive what would become the world’s strongest recovery: 15 million jobs, higher wages, lower healthcare costs.
And notice this deft rhetorical turn when “at a time when …” suddenly snaps forward to the last month and where we are now:
At a time when the other party had turned into a cult of personality, we needed a leader who was steady and brought people together, and was selfless enough to do the rarest thing there is in politics: putting his own ambition aside for the sake of the country.
That’s how you give a speech, kids. Here, enjoy it again or for the first time:
And here we are again, facing the question that every election is about:
Who will fight for me? Who’s thinking about my future, about my children’s future, about our future together?
One thing is for certain: Donald Trump is not losing sleep over that question. Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. […] There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.
At the mention of crowd sizes, Obama made what NBC News very delicately describes as “a pointed accompanying gesture that drew cheers from the crowd.”
That had to leave Trump sputtering with rage, just as Obama’s speech at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner did, except this time Obama didn’t need to go home and oversee the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and Trump’s rage jizz will be channeled into an angry whine to the idiots who read his fake Twitter instead of becoming a stupidly lucky, just barely successful presidential campaign that lost by three million votes, but not in the right combination of states.
Obama himself diagnosed why that’s not going to work this time, though he was directly addressing the dishonest claim that if only Trump can punish the right people, his supporters will all see their own lives improve: “It is one of the oldest tricks in politics, from a guy whose act has — let’s face it — gotten pretty stale.”
There’s a reason why novelty songs almost never make a comeback, no matter how high they charted the first time around. Donald Trump is the “Roly Poly Fish Heads” of politics, but smellier and with little nostalgia value.
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.
America’s ready for a new chapter. America’s ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.
Obama reviewed Harris’s political history, noting that when she was in the Senate, she pushed him “to make sure homeowners got a fair settlement,” even though she had campaigned for him — party loyalty is no bar to making sure you fight for your constituents.
Again, Obama is just so good at modulating his tone, from the very serious — Harris’s work as a prosecutor against those who committed sex crimes, her constant fight as vice president to expand the child tax credit — and the lighthearted, as when he noted Tim Walz’s service in the military and as a small-town teacher and coach who rose to govern Minnesota:
He knows who he is, and he knows what’s important. You can tell those flannel shirts he wears don’t come from some political consultant; they come from his closet, and they have been through some stuff. [Pause, audience reacts to closeup of Gwen Walz reaction] They have been through some stuff!
Here’s Gwen Walz, apparently having traumatic laundry day flashbacks:
Then it was time for the real meat of the speech: Why Kamala Harris and Tim Walz should be in charge of the country — and not only because Trump would be a disaster.
Together, Kamala and Tim 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. That’s Kamala’s vision. That’s Tim’s vision. That’s the Democratic Party’s vision. And our job over the next 11 weeks is to convince as many people as possible to vote for that vision.
The fight won’t be easy, he said, because there’ll always be an enthusiastic audience for cynicism and fear: “They will tell you that government is inherently corrupt, that sacrifice and generosity are for suckers, and since the game is rigged it’s okay to take what you want and just look after your own.”
On policy, Obama said, it’s not just enough to stand on the Biden-Harris administration’s considerable accomplishments, but to look toward how the Harris-Walz administration (a phrase I hope to type a lot next year, grinning) will follow up, on housing and health care and genuinely family friendly policies like giving families a tax break, to cite just a few items from Harris’s first tranche of policy proposals.
And yet again, Obama invoked liberal values, not only because they’ll be good for the Democrats who vote for Democrats, but because they lift up the entire country, even people in states that would elect a pile of bricks to Congress if it had an R after its name.
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 are all better off. They understand that when every child gets a good education, the whole economy gets stronger. When women are paid the same as men for doing the same job, all families benefit. They understand that we can secure our borders without tearing kids away from their parents.
It’s a fundamentally different way of governing from the Trumpian view that everything’s for sale and power is for rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies (who may include friends you no longer have any use for).
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. For them, freedom means that the powerful can do pretty much what they please, whether it’s fire workers trying to organize a union or put poison in our rivers or avoid paying taxes like everybody else has to do.
As a side note, we’d add that the Trump worldview rejects even the old Republican rhetoric that the role of the government is to get out of the way of the donors and the corporations so they can increase their own prosperity, some of which may trickle down to others. Trumpism is about having the government shove everything to the Great Man and his friends, “competition” be damned.
The law can’t just be a list of arbitrary rules that get in the way of exercising power, and democracy, he underlined, “isn’t just a bunch of abstract principles and dusty laws in some book somewhere. It’s the values we live by. It’s the way we treat each other, including those who don’t look like us or pray like us or see the world exactly like we do.”
Ultimately, Obama says, the way forward is through the basic respect and decency — and stubborn determination to make sure the system works for all — that Harris and Walz stand for, even if it does sound a little corny. Invoking his own maternal grandmother and Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson, he said that even though they came from very different backgrounds,
They knew what mattered: things like honesty and integrity, kindness, and hard work. They weren’t impressed with braggarts or bullies. They didn’t think putting other people down lifted you up or made you strong. They didn’t spend a lot of time obsessing about what they didn’t have. Instead, they appreciated what they did. They found pleasure in simple things: a card game with friends, a good meal and laughter around the kitchen table, helping others, and, most of all, seeing their children do things and go places that they would’ve never imagined for themselves.
Well hell, if that’s corny, we’ll take it. It’s way better — for all of us — than cruelty, and a far better way to run a country. Obama closed by calling on us all to work in the next 77 days — 76 now, the pressure is on — to go and fight like hell and have fun doin’ it, beloveds:
We will elect leaders up and down the ballot who will fight for the hopeful, forward-looking America we all believe in. And together, we too will build a country that is more secure and more just, more equal, and more free. So let’s get to work.
We’re fired up and ready to go, that’s for sure.
[Time (Obama speech transcript) / Vox]
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Ta, Dok. We're all working for the next 10+ weeks.
Fine article, Dok!