For a moment on Tuesday, it was 2008 all over again at the Democratic National Convention.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling fired up. I am feeling ready to go,” former president Barack Obama said to open his headlining speech, harking back to his 2008 campaign chant. “I am feeling hopeful, because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible.”
There were the chants of “Yes, we can” and “Yes, she can.” There was the talk of “hope making a comeback,” a blatant effort by the Democrats to try to inject some of Obama’s 2008 magic into Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
In a roughly 40-minute speech, the former president urged Democrats to put their differences aside and to vote for Harris and to “fight for the America we believe in.”
Obama’s speech, capping off the second night of the Democratic National Convention, came 20 years after he first introduced himself to the American public as a “skinny kid with a funny name” during a headlining speech at the 2004 DNC in Boston. And it came 16 years after he accepted the Democratic nomination in 2008 in Denver.
“I know that is hard to believe, because I have not aged a bit,” he joked, his hair mostly grey by now. “But it’s true.”
He quoted Abraham Lincoln. And he called for Americans to vote for Democrats “up and down the ballot who will fight for the hopeful, forward-looking America we all believe in.”
And, like many of the speakers who preceded him, Obama embraced what has become a central talking point of the Harris campaign, arguing that Democrats are the party of “freedom” because they’re willing to use government to shield Americans from various burdens.
“We have a broader idea of freedom. We believe in the freedom to provide for your family if you are willing to work hard. The freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and send your kids to school without worrying if they will come home,” he said.
In addition to pumping up Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz — “I love this guy. Tim is the kind of person who should be in politics,” he said — Obama tried to make nice with President Joe Biden, his one-time vice president. Obama is believed to have been one of the chief string-pullers in the ultimately successful effort to get the 81-year-old Biden to pull the plug on his re-election bid last month.
He buttered up Biden, saying that picking him to be his VP in 2008 was one of his best decisions.
“History will remember Joe Biden as an outstanding president who defended democracy at a moment of great danger,” Obama said. “And I am proud to call him my president. But I am even prouder to call him my friend.”
Without referencing the behind-the-scenes efforts to end Biden’s reelection bid, Obama praised Biden for being “selfless enough to do the rarest thing there is in politics, putting his own ambition aside for the sake of the country.”
During his own fiery speech on Monday, Biden denied that he was angry with the Democratic leaders who pushed for him to step aside, saying “I love the job. But I love my country more.”
Biden said Democrats “saved democracy in 2020, and now we must save it again in 2024.”
Obama also spent time attacking Trump as a blustering, self-absorbed whiner whose act is stale. He compared him to a neighbor who runs a leaf blower outside early in the morning.
“There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” Obama said, holding his hands narrowly in front of him in what seems to have been a weird attempt at a off-color joke.
When the crowd booed Trump, Obama responded: “Do not boo. Vote.”
Comparing Trump to a movie, Obama said “We all know the sequel is usually worse.”
“America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story,” he said. “We are ready for a president Kamala Harris. And Kamala Harris is ready for the job.”
Unlike Trump, he said, “Kamala Harris won’t be focused on her problems. She’ll be focused on yours. As president she won’t just cater to her own supporters, and punish those who refuse to kiss the ring or bend the knee. She’ll work on behalf of every American.”
In a prepared statement, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley noted the Democratic efforts to “evoke memories of 2008,” but added that “this isn’t Barack Obama’s Democrat Party.”
“Kamala Harris is even more dangerously liberal,” he said. “Harris’ handlers can try and moderate her image, but Americans are already saying ‘no we can’t’ to four more years of Kamala Harris’ disastrous policies.”
Obama was proceeded to the stage by his maybe even more popular wife, Michelle.
Speaking as if Democrats haven’t held the presidency for most of the past four years, she said the nation “on the cusp of a brighter day” and that “hope is making a comeback.” She started with what seemed to be a slight against Biden’s electoral prospect, telling the crowd that “I am realizing that until recently I have mourned the dimming of that hope.”
Harris — “my girl” as Michelle Obama called her — is “more than ready for this moment,” she said.
“She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward, we will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth,” she said in a dig at Republican Donald Trump. “If we bankrupt a business, or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. We don’t get to change the rules so we always win.”
She said that Trump would attempt to distort Harris’s “truth,” just as she said Trump tried to make people fear her and her husband when they were in office.
“His limited, narrow view of world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard working, highly-educated, successful people, who happened to be black,” Michelle Obama said of Trump. “Who’s going to tell him the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs.”
Other speakers on Tuesday included Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and Harris’s husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
During a speech highly focused on their family, he called his wife a “joyful warrior” whose “empathy is her strength.” Harris has always been there for his kids, he said, “and I know she’ll always be there for yours, too.”
Harris and Walz were in Milwaukee on Tuesday for a campaign rally. They briefly appeared on a video screen at the DNC in Chicago.