As Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and John Kasich – three people with major ideological and personal differences between them – all made clear in their earlier speeches, the case against Trump is not about policy. The urgency that socialists, liberals and conservatives have to unite this week is about something much more fundamental, something that is honestly difficult for political reporters accustomed to legal action over policy and political disputes between the two parties to discuss. bring in a way that seems unlimited.
Obama accused Trump of not “discovering any respect for the democracy that was placed in his care.” He accused him of essentially corruption and abuse of power, saying that Trump “had no interest in using the extraordinary power of his office to help everyone but himself and his friends.” And he accused his successor of a dangerous form of narcissism when he said that Trump “had no interest in treating the presidency as anything other than one reality show he can use to get the attention he desires.”
Obama then turned to a positive case for Biden. But after some personal reflections on his capacity for empathy and how Biden made him a better president, Obama’s case for Biden (and Kamala Harris) became a case against Trump. Biden and Harris “actually care about every American” and they “care deeply about this democracy”, and that “the right to vote is sacred”, and “that no one including the president is above the law and that no public official, including the president, must use her office to enrich herself as her supporters. ”
There was more. Biden would “never use the men and women of our army who are willing to risk anything to protect our nation as political prophecies to use against peaceful Protestants on their own soil.” He and Harris believe “political opponents are not un-American simply because they do not agree with you” and that “a free press is not the enemy.” They would not attack the pandemic by “just making things up.”
But, again, the main point – the reason a former president who wanted to enjoy a cushier post-presidency of intellectual pursuits (starting with his memoir), international do-goodism, and hobnobbing on yachts with the likes of David Geffen broke the tradition of not piling on his successor – is the certainty that Trump is doing nothing less than undermining the American system. “That’s what’s going on at the moment,” he said. “Our democracy.” If the point was not clear, Obama gave his speech in Philadelphia before it was an inflated image of the constitution.
“None of this should be controversial,” Obama said, with the characteristic fear he exposes when he can not believe that others do not see something that shines so blindly at his hand. “These should not be Republican principles or Democratic principles. These are American principles. But for now, these presidents and those who turn him in have shown that they do not believe in these things. ”
Of course, that’s the big obstacle the Biden Convention faces this week: the blinding manifestation of the Trump threat as Democrats see it is not shared by about half of the country and 90 percent of Republican officials. Not only is it not shared by them, but it is passionately denied. The president himself has come up with a very counter-argument that Obama is a criminal – guilty of ‘betrayal’ – who mastered a fraudulent Russia investigation to cut off his administration from the first days.
In an earlier era, Obama would have spent some time trying to talk to those on the other side who believed such things. But it is no longer 2004, when Obama became famous by arguing that the blue / red separation was a fiction invented by pundits. “I know that in times as polarized as this, most of you have made up your mind,” he added.
His pitch was for those who were on the fence, Americans “still not sure which candidate you will vote for or whether you will vote in any case.” He sought to empathize with these Americans and threw them as essential people who had given themselves up for democracy: a white factory worker with stagnant pay, a Black mother who believes the government “never looked out for them,” a new immigrant who wonders “Whether there is still a place here,” and a cynical young person shoots out of politics because of “the circus of everything, the commonality and the lies and conspiracy theories.” His point was that democracy cannot be taken away, but it can be given if enough voters are encouraged to take off from the system.
Prior to becoming a U.S. senator from Illinois, Obama was a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. His view of American history is that the Constitution was an incomplete document that excluded most Americans from citizenship and yet gave future generations the best system to repair the shortcomings of the original document, and that progress is the story of our country. .
He concludes by saying that history – the struggles for abolition, and labor rights, and religious equality – and by reminding voters that no matter how bad things seem now, there is always the chance for renewal.
“If anyone had the right to believe that this democracy did not work and could not work, it was those Americans, our ancestors,” Obama said. ‘They were receiving a democracy that was short of their entire lives. They knew how far the daily reality of America then fared from them. And yet, instead of giving up, they came together and they said somehow, somehow we will make this work. We will bring those words to life in our founding documents. ”
In most Obama speeches that tell the story of American progress and how we have always worked to fulfill the promise of our founding documents, he seems optimistic and confident that this history will continue. In Wednesday’s speech, the question of whether America will get this right this time – at least in his opinion – was uncertain.
This is the same uncertainty that Obama has been grappling with since Trump was elected. According to one of his adviser’s memoirs, in late 2016, Obama’s confidence in his understanding of the American vote was shocked by Trump’s victory.
Since then, Democrats have regained a lot of political turf, mostly in 2018. But after Trump’s victory, Obama turned to his aides and posed a question that still hangs over the 2020 campaign.
‘What,’ he asked himself, ‘if we were wrong?’
