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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.”
Obama’s speech offered something of a transition between Biden’s valedictory Monday night address, which focused heavily on his and Harris’ four years of accomplishments, and the final two nights of programming centered around the revamped Democratic ticket.
It also reaffirmed his role as perhaps the party’s most effective and beloved messenger — along with Michelle, who delivered a rousing speech of her own connecting the enthusiasm Harris’ weeks-old campaign has generated with the same hope her husband inspired during his first, historic run.
The former president, who spoke at the scaled down Democratic convention four years ago and hit the trail in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, has remained largely out of the spotlight over the last two years. Aides hope that limiting his public appearances will make his occasional returns to the stage more meaningful and give his words greater weight.
Before a packed arena where a number of delegates remained on their feet throughout his 35-minute speech, Obama eviscerated the Republican nominee as “a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala,” he said.
“The childish nicknames and crazy conspiracy theories and weird obsession with crowd size,” he said while holding his hands a few inches apart, a joke about anatomy over crowds. “It just goes on and on. The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.”
Harris, he asserted, is “not the neighbor running the leaf blower — she’s the neighbor rushing over to help when you need a hand.”
Obama, whose relationship with Harris dates back 20 years, ran through her biography and work as a prosecutor, senator and vice president, casting her and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as politicians who “have kept faith with America’s central story.” Obama seemed charmed with Walz’s biography, riffing about the Democratic vice presidential nominee’s time as a football coach and flannel shirts that “don’t come from some consultant — they come from his closet, and they’ve been through some stuff.”
This is the second time the nation’s first Black president has urged the nation to elect a woman — and in both instances, however different, that has meant bypassing Biden. After urging his vice president not to challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Obama offered only a perfunctory public defense of Biden after his difficult debate performance in June and privately encouraged others in the party who pressured him to step aside.
Obama opened his remarks by praising Biden’s character, presidency and decision to step aside after a long career of public service. “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.”
Harris herself, after watching Biden’s speech from a luxury box inside the United Center here on Monday night, was not on hand for Obama’s speech. Instead, she and her running mate rallied supporters in Milwaukee, filling the same arena where Republicans held their convention a month earlier.
With Harris returning to Chicago just moments before he took the stage, Obama picked up on the central theme of Harris’ campaign, drawing a contrast between Democrats and the Republican ticket on the issue of freedom.
“For them, one group’s gain is another group’s loss. For them, freedom means that the powerful can do what they please, whether its fire workers trying to organize a union or poison our rivers or avoid paying taxes like everybody else has to do,” Obama said, declaring that Democrats subscribe to “a broader idea of freedom.”
As he closed his speech, Obama referenced the recent loss of Michelle Obama’s mother, as she did in her own speech, and reminisced about his own mom, presenting them both as “strong, smart, resourceful women” who worked hard and “knew what was true and what mattered.”
He presented Harris and her candidacy as cut from that same mold, a strong woman who offers stability and safe haven to a shaken, still polarized country.
“As much as any policy or program, I believe that’s what we yearn for — a return to an America where we work together and look out for each other. A restoration of what Lincoln called, on the eve of civil war, ‘our bonds of affection.’ An America that taps what he called ‘the better angels of our nature.’
“That’s what this election is about.”
