Barack and Michelle Obama
Barack Obama greets Michelle Obama on the second day of the DNC. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) (Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)
Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama bring the vintage hopey-changey vibe as various Democratic senators and governors flesh out Vice President Kamala Harris’s “Bold Vision for America’s Future.” This is Yahoo News’ succinct wrap up of day two of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Here’s what you need to know:
🖼 Big picture
Despite delays that pushed President Biden’s farewell remarks out of primetime — and saw singer-songwriter James Taylor slashed from the schedule entirely — Monday night’s DNC ratings beat last month’s opening night RNC ratings by 21%, according to one preliminary estimate.
Donald Trump is reportedly sweating.
Tuesday’s festivities aimed to up the ante in two ways. First, by tapping the two most popular Democratic speakers on the planet— Michelle and Barack Obama, in that order — to headline the evening. And second, by moving past day one’s respectful but retrospective focus on Biden’s record and pivoting to what comes next.
Hence the theme: “A Bold Vision for America’s Future.”
“Something wonderfully magical is in the air,” Michelle Obama said. “A familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for far too long. … America, hope is making a comeback.”
📌 Key takeaways
‘Yes she can.’ Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are longtime friends. As San Francisco district attorney, Harris was one of the first elected Democrats to endorse his 2008 presidential candidacy, and they’ve been close ever since.
But more than that, the two mixed-race trailblazers see each other as kindred spirits. Born in 1961 and 1964, respectively, Obama and Harris come from a younger generation than the white men who served before and, if Harris wins in November, between them. They’re both children of the civil rights movement.
So it’s no surprise Obama was asked to speak Tuesday night. His mission was simple, his message clear: Remember how you felt in 2008? Now you can feel that way again. Harris might be Biden’s vice president. But she’s my political heir — another “fired up, ready to go, yes we can” kind of candidate, as former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu put it.
To do that, Obama drew the same contrast between Trump and Harris that others echoed throughout the night. Trump is “a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago,” the former president said. “There’s the childish nicknames. The crazy conspiracy theories. This weird obsession with crowd sizes” — at which point Obama moved his hands back and forth as if measuring something in between them.
But Harris, according to Obama, “won’t be focused on her problems — she’ll be focused on yours.”
Obama went on to list some of Harris’s policy proposals: plans to make housing more affordable, to lower health care costs, and so on. But the heart of his appeal was broader and bigger than that.
“The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” Obama said. “We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us that we’re not alone.”
With her polling numbers continuing to inch upward, Harris has gotten off to a strong start. The DNC could give her an additional bump. But it remains to be seen whether Harris can live up to Obama’s promise and win as decisively as he did on Election Day.
Michelle takes Trump to task. The former president started his speech by joking that he’s “the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama.”
He had a point.
During the 2020 Democratic convention, Michelle generated far more engagement online than any other speaker, according to NewsWhip data. Stories about her speech received five times as many social media interactions, for instance, as stories about her husband’s.
And earlier this year, before Biden dropped out, pollsters asked voters about hypothetical matchups between various “replacement” Democrats and Trump. Only Michelle bested the former president, 50% to 39%. Harris trailed 42% to 43%.
On Tuesday, Obama put her popularity to work for Harris, whom she described as “one of the most qualified people ever to seek the office of the presidency” — in marked contrast to Trump.
“[Harris] understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” Obama said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. 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.”
As a Black woman herself, Obama cast her opposition to Trump — and support for Harris — in frankly personal terms.
Trump “did everything in his power to try to make people fear [me and Barack]” she said. “See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working and highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black.”
Then came the zinger: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?”
The Obamas’ one-two punch was a reminder that right now, the Democratic Party is a very different kind of institution than the Republican Party, which has remade itself from what used to be its “establishment” — and which didn’t even invite Trump’s own vice president and the previous GOP president to its convention in July.
The ‘first first gentleman?’ Despite the Obamas’ star power, the sleeper hit Tuesday night might have been Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff — the man who could become, in the words of his son Cole, “America’s first first gentleman.”
A successful Los Angeles lawyer who paused his career when Harris was elected vice president, Emhoff embodies a subtly radical proposition: a husband who is not just serving in a supporting role to his wife, but who seems to find contentment and purpose in doing so.
He could soon be serving in that role on the world’s biggest political stage.
Tuesday’s speech was his national debut. Emhoff did the usual political spouse thing of “humanizing” the candidate, of course. Earnest and a little goofy, he recounted how they met — on a blind date — and how he called to ask her out at 8:30 in the morning. He praised the chile relleno recipe, handed down from her mom, that she cooks every Christmas.
But more interesting and important, Emhoff took everything Republicans try to call “abnormal” about Harris and made it all seem absolutely mainstream: her laugh (“I love that laugh”); her “childlessness” (“Blended families can be a little complicated, but as soon as our kids started calling her ‘Momala,’ I knew we’d be OK”); even her prosecutorial attitude (“She stands up to bullies.”)
Maybe he’ll normalize first gentlemen next.
Targeting Kamala converts. In 2020, Biden earned a considerable number of Republican votes — especially among white, suburban, college-educated voters turned off by Trump.
Now undecided voters unsure about Biden’s fitness for a second term are breaking for Harris. In an effort to solidify these shifts, the campaign gave several day-two speaking slots to former Trump supporters, all of whom testified that Trump isn’t who he says he is.
Their goal? To give other Trump supporters permission to break up with him too.
“I work in construction. I work with my hands. He told us he’d look out for blue-collar workers,” Kyle Sweetser told the delegates. “But then I started to see Trump’s tariff policy in action. Costs for construction workers like me were starting to soar. I realized Trump wasn’t for me. He was for lining his own pockets.”
Citing former Arizona Sen. John McCain as “his hero,” John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Ariz., confessed that he feels “more at home here than in today’s Republican Party” — a party that has been “kidnapped by extremists and has evolved into a cult.”
“John McCain’s Republican Party is gone and we don’t owe a damn thing to what’s been left behind,” Giles said. “Let’s turn the page.”
But Tuesday’s splashiest convert was probably former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, a self-described “true believer” who became disillusioned when she saw how Trump behaved “when the cameras were off.”
“He mocks his supporters,” Grisham said. “He calls them ‘basement dwellers.’ He has no empathy, no morals, no fidelity to the truth.”
Grisham said her breaking point came on Jan. 6, when she texted Melania Trump asking if she could tweet on the first lady’s behalf that there was “no place” in America “for lawlessness and violence” — and received a curt “no” in response.
Few Republicans will change their minds about Trump at this point. But Harris & Co. are hoping at least a portion of fence sitters can be persuaded.
Keeping progressives in the tent. During her 2020 presidential primary run, Harris struggled to navigate intraparty tensions between progressives and moderates, and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses.
Four years later, she has vaulted to the nomination without having to endure any primary battles, and she’s found it much easier to unify Democrats as a result.
Still, the Harris campaign is using the convention to maximize its support, and progressives (some of whom had soured on Biden) are a big part of the equation. On Tuesday, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — the left wing’s presidential pick in both 2016 and 2020 — made the case that Harris would expand access to health care and lower costs for middle-class Americans if elected.
“I look forward to working with Kamala and Tim to pass this agenda,” Sanders said. “And let us be clear: This is not a radical agenda. Let me tell you what a radical agenda is: Trump’s Project 2025.”
Eight years ago, hundreds of Sanders supporters stormed out of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia to protest Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Despite the fact that Harris has abandoned her more progressive positions on Medicare for All, fracking and a federal jobs guarantee, there were no such displays this time around.
