Barack Obama Teaches Democrats How to Go on Offense Against Donald Trump

Former President Barack Obama taught his fellow Democrats a new way to go on the offensive against former President Donald Trump in a powerful speech on the second night of his party’s convention.

In remarks that served as a throwback to Obama’s famous oratory skills that was also threaded with humor and specific jabs at Trump — framing him less as a democracy-threatening bogeyman and more as a whiney narcissist — the former president held the rapt attention of the crowd at Chicago’s United Center while also reminding the country why he was the last two-term president.

After asking who will fight for Americans’ future, Obama declared with a smirk: “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,” Obama said of Trump. “It has been a consistent scream of gripes and grievances that’s actually been getting worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala.”

“There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” he said, delivering the punchline as he gestured with his hands in a way that mirrored how Trump gesticulates. The crowd went wild with laughter and applause as Obama went on, comparing Trump to a neighbor’s leaf blower that wouldn’t shut off.

Obama told the convention: “We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” warning that, “We have seen that movie before and we all know the sequel is usually worse.”

The former president closed out the second night of the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, delivering a key endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as she seeks to build on the coalition that helped deliver Obama to the White House 16 years ago.

Harris’ late entry into the race presented the party and its convention with a myriad of challenges and Obama had his own unique task: to find a way to separate Harris from President Joe Biden, while still positioning her as critical to the achievements of his administration.

Luckily for Obama, Harris’ campaign, which has embraced the “politics of joy,” laid the groundwork for him to do what Democrats would say he does better than anyone: deliver “optimism and passion about the future,” political scientist Steven Schier told Newsweek.

Returning to the stage where his political career began two decades ago, Obama told the crowd Tuesday, “I am feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe that anything is possible.”

His remarks echoed the famous “Red State, Blue State” speech he delivered at the DNC in 2004, when he was a young state senator from Illinois with virtually no name recognition, ostensibly there to rally the crowd for John Kerry.

Kerry would go on to lose that election, while Obama’s speech served as the spark that propelled him to the top of the Democratic ticket a mere four years later.

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” Obama said in 2004. “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

Political experts told Newsweek that Obama’s signature move—using broad and uplifting themes—would help him shift the spotlight from Biden, who was reminiscent of the last three years during his speech on Monday, to Harris, whose month-old campaign has been keenly focused on the future.

“Biden’s remarks were a valedictory and an endorsement,” veteran Democratic strategist Matt Bennett told Newsweek. “They were necessarily backward-looking, reflecting on what they had accomplished together and why that makes Harris the right choice to succeed him.”

“Harris is running a future-oriented, ‘not going back’ campaign, with joy being the central emotional tone,” Bennett said. “That’s pretty similar to hope as the emotional valence of 2008, with change being the vague but appealing promise.”

In a moving and somewhat unheard of line from any major Democrat, Obama appeared to speak to the party’s leftward turn and the perils of cancel culture and intraparty division: “The ties that bind us together are still there,” he said. He urged the country to have empathy for those who have caught up to a society that’s “moving fast” and called on the nation to “work together” and “look out for each other.”

“The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that is bitter and divided,” Obama told the audience at the United Center on Tuesday night. “We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone.”

Obama’s public support for Harris’ White House bid comes after a decades-long friendship between the two — but also a noticeable delay in backing her campaign after Biden’s dramatic exit last month.

As marquee figures in Democratic politics rushed to endorse Harris after Biden’s announcement, Obama held back, choosing to not even mention Harris’ name in his tribute to his former running mate that was shared shortly after Biden bowed out of the race.

Obama’s response to the campaign shakeup largely reflected the status of impartial party elder that he’s cultivated since leaving office (he did not endorse a candidate, not even Biden, in the 2020 primaries). But his delay to vocalize his support for Harris—who took the political risk by endorsing Obama early on during the 2008 primaries more than 17 years ago—was also interpreted by Republicans as a snub.

But all of that fell to the wayside Tuesday night as the former president praised Harris as the future of the party, and the future of the coalition that lifted Obama from relative obscurity to the White House 16 years ago.

“America’s ready for a new chapter. America’s ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris,” Obama said. “And Kamala Harris is ready for the job.”