DNC 2024 speech: Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have a superpower no other Democrat has.
Every four years, Democrats meet for a convention and relearn that Michelle and Barack Obama are their two best communicators. The lesson came on Tuesday night of the 2024 convention, which the Obamas headlined in back-to-back speeches. Monday’s programming was set aside for the sitting president, and Wednesday and Thursday will always go to the candidates running on the presidential ticket. The Obamas can have convention Tuesdays for as long as they want.
What’s the key, beyond natural communicative talent? (It’s mostly natural communicative talent.) The Obamas have the best speechwriting team working for them, because their speechwriting team includes the Obamas. Their relative scarcity works to their advantage, too. We see most of the goofballs giving convention speeches every day, doing cable news hits or lambasting a witness or outside a committee hearing room. The Obamas, while not absent from politics, lead a fairly private life on compounds in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. Hard politics isn’t often on their schedule. Many viewers Tuesday night would have been equally shocked to see how gray Barack Obama had gone and how Michelle Obama hadn’t aged at all since they saw them last.
They key advantage the Obamas have, though, is their ability to speak from a position of authority. It enables them to get away with things that, for most speakers, might lose a crowd. He’s the first Black president, and she the first Black first lady. Aside from a disaster of a 2000 congressional campaign, the Obamas have a perfect record in politics—one that could be extended were Michelle to ever get the itch. (She won’t.) They speak from proven experience, and they do so rarely.
AdvertisementAll speakers at the Democratic convention are making fun of Donald Trump. For the Obamas, though, this is new on such a grand stage. They’ve been criticalof Trump in past speeches, including their video messages for the 2020 DNC. But on Tuesday, the Obamas fully detached from their traditional belief that presidents don’t mock their successors, a tradition that had meant a lot to Barack Obama after George W. Bush had extended the tradition to him. They were ruthless to Trump on Tuesday.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementAn important thread in Michelle Obama’s speech was to push back against the Republican narrative that Kamala Harris would be, in their words, a “DEI president” who hadn’t earned her sudden ascent to the top of the ticket. Michelle didn’t just say that Harris is qualified enoughto be there. She said that Harris is “one of the most qualified people ever to seek the office of the presidency.” Harris, she said, approaches the task from a mindset that Trump’s own background and nature ensure he never can. Harris “understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward” and “will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.” Most Americans won’t get a “second, third, or fourth chance” if they “bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis.”
Advertisement“If we see a mountain in front of us,” Michelle said, “we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top.”
Each successive bit of needling served to prime the crowd for the line of the convention: “Who’s going to tell him,” she said of Trump, “that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs?’ ”
AdvertisementBarack Obama—who conceded that he’s “the only person stupid enough to speak right after Michelle Obama”—described Trump as a “78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago.” Trump’s output has “been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala.” (This was an interesting acknowledgement from Obama, who remains on President Joe Biden’s grudge list, of how little Trump feared losing to Biden.) He compared Trump to “the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.”
Advertisement AdvertisementMost notably, the former president, who restrained himself for years from actively criticizing his successor, may have made a penis joke about Donald Trump. He noted Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes,” knowingly gesturing his hands a few inches apart.
These were certainly the most reshared elements of their speeches. What caught my attention more, though, was the ability Michelle and Barack Obama have to tell Democrats to cut their own crap, and be heard.
Much of Michelle Obama’s speech was managing expectations about how, even if Democrats feel euphoric now, the next couple of months will be no picnic. Harris will either have stumbles or be forced to make difficult decisions that test the unity of the Democratic coalition, sects of which are known to complain when they’re on the losing end.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementAdvising Democrats not to “be our own worst enemies,” Michelle Obama warned against “wringing our hands” the “minute something goes wrong” or “the minute a lie takes hold.”
“We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right,” she said. “We cannot indulge our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala—instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected.” Don’t complain, she said, “if no one has specifically reached out to ask for your support. There is simply no time for that kind of foolishness.”
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Read More“So consider this to be your official ask: Michelle Obama is asking you to do something.” It may go without saying, but if any other DNC speaker drawn out of a hat told Democrats to stop succumbing to their worst tendencies, it would only encourage those tendencies further.
AdvertisementAny other bad tendencies you see within the culture of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama?
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“To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices, and that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns—and maybe learn something in the process,” he said. “After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize the world is moving fast, and that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.”
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementPerhaps, he suggested, being a little less like this is “how we can build a true Democratic majority.” I’m trying to imagine if your run-of-the-mill striver at the convention, like the somehow always-on-camera New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, would be received if she told a convention hall of Democrats that they needed be better to their fellow citizens. She’d probably not want to be within flinging distance of stray tomatoes.
Obama conceded that these ideas can feel “pretty naive right now.” But his very presence as someone who was comfortably elected president twice on these ideas gave him the authority to, well, lecture a little bit. Both he and Michelle Obama might be the best two Democratic speakers because they’re the ones who’ve earned the right to speak most frankly to their party. And, sure, it doesn’t hurt to butter up the crowds with some Trump burns first.
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