The news
The Democratic Convention marked the triumphant return of former US President Barack Obama’s political style, with some notable updates for the Donald Trump era.
Benjy’s view
Put aside the questions about Obama’s role as party leader and the ongoing debates about his record. The most striking feature of this gathering, fittingly in his hometown of Chicago, was very much in Obama’s style. Night after night, the DNC marked the return of a patriotic pluralism that speaks of America as a united country trying to do the right thing, even as its citizens struggle to see themselves that way.
Obama positioned herself as a post-partisan opportunity to “shed the worn-out ideas and politics of the past” and move beyond the psychodramas of the Bush and Clinton eras. Kamala Harris presented her potential election as a chance to end a draining decade defined by Trump, both in and out of office. She stuck to the promise of being a president “for all Americans.”
“Our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move beyond the bitterness, the cynicism and the divisive battles of the past — an opportunity to find a new way forward,” Harris said. “Not as members of a party or a faction, but as Americans.”
The Obamas themselves used their speeches to position Harris as the heir to their hopeful brand of politics, but she was already leaning heavily on that era of Democratic messaging, eliciting “USA!” slogans along the way even as she added a harder edge to her attacks.
The choice of Tim Walz helps crystallize the message, which celebrates the country’s diversity with a deliberately naïve, “Ain’t that America for ya!” kind of wonder. Onstage with her new running mate earlier this month, Harris marveled at how “only in America” could two “middle-class kids,” one “a daughter of Oakland” and another “a son of the Nebraska plains,” come together and “make it all the way to the White House.” In her convention speech, she said she was “no stranger to improbable journeys” as she recounted her upbringing as the child of immigrants.
This kind of rah-rah liberalism via biography echoes Obama’s own signature speech from the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The former president himself saw the connection, using his final speech to link Harris to his success as “kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible,” a direct reference to his speech two decades earlier. And, to paraphrase another Obama line from 2004, Walz’s speech was about how Americans coach high school football in blue states and don’t like it when politicians poke around in their libraries in red states.
This old dogma was clearly popular with Chicago Democrats, and raised the question of why it has been less prominent in recent years. The answer lies in two trends that have fed off each other over the past decade.
One was Trump’s racist birther campaign and incendiary run in 2016, a demanding form of anti-Obamaism that ridiculed the hope for an enlightened future in which old prejudices are melted away in the melting pot. Obama’s view of the electoral process as a good-faith disagreement between people with shared values — still at the heart of his speech Tuesday — also became a much harder sell amid Trump’s in-your-face politics. Democrats struggled to see that friend, family member or neighbor in the red hat as a fellow American with different views rather than, at best, complicit in a toxic conspiracy to dismantle their country’s most cherished institutions.
Second, there was the rise of new social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, which accelerated during Trump’s presidency and peaked in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd. Disillusioned with the pace of social and economic gains following Obama’s election and the backlash from Trump’s presidency, Democrats of all stripes sought answers to what had gone wrong. New voices, often steeped in scientific knowledge, offered a credible explanation: America was plagued by overlapping systems of oppression that needed to be identified and dismantled.
Obama’s celebration of incremental progress and his Hamiltonian reworking of the history surrounding it sounded naïve in that context, and his universalist rhetoric sounded evasive. Democrats shifted to more direct appeals to marginalized groups, often borrowing terms from academia, and made more ambitious and targeted promises to help them.
These trends have permanently changed the party — as Harris said in another context, “We’re not going back” — but they have also run up against limits that have made Obamaism more attractive today than it was four years ago.
Trump no longer looks like an “aberration,” as current U.S. President Joe Biden hoped he would be, but an enduring force who has reshaped his entire party in ways that will likely outlast his lifetime. That makes the quest to defeat him all the more urgent for Democrats, but it also means they’ll have to make peace with the idea that your Fox News uncle isn’t going anywhere.
As Obama put it, “If a parent or a grandparent occasionally says something that we find appalling, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people.” Recognizing this, he said, was the way to “build a real Democratic majority.” He made a nearly identical point in his famous speech about the 2008 race in Philadelphia, even citing the prejudices of his own beloved grandmother.
Politically, Democrats looked to the polls and decided that the more academic vocabulary and policy thinking around race and gender was sometimes alien to the groups it was intended to appeal to. Black voters overwhelmingly chose Biden as the party’s standard-bearer over more liberal rivals in 2020; Trump’s recent gains have largely been made with voters of color, and Gen Z no longer looks like a left-wing majority in waiting. The tough-on-crime, tough-on-borders politics that Harris ran away from in 2019 are increasingly common in deep-blue cities.
Obamaism has since become more popular as a way to appeal to the broadest possible group of voters in language that is easy to understand, without reservations or excuses, even though the party is still much further to the left on policy than it was in 2008.
Perhaps the most striking example of the shift came from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who delivered one of the week’s best-received speeches with a populist, vote-winner that positioned Democrats as the party of the working class and Trump as the champion of billionaires. Like Obama, she relied on her biography (a New York bartender) to charismatically appeal to the broadest possible audience (anyone with a job) to reject “a cynical politics that seemed blind to the realities of working people” (an idea Obama coined in 2008).
Compare that, as The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg did, to her brief remarks at the 2020 DNC, in which she asked America to “acknowledge and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to imagine and build new systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past,” and you see the quantum leap of the past four years.
Not everything about the new Obamaism is the same. The biggest adjustment for the ugly 2020s is a party-wide departure from the former president’s above-board civility — Obama himself used his hands to illustrate Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” (hint hint), the kind of once-shocking line that few commentators can possibly bristle at after Trump. And Harris was absolutely unrelenting in condemning the “unserious man” she encountered with the zeal of a true prosecutor.
Of course, there are still targeted messages for different groups of voters. Michelle Obama bluntly noted in her speech that Trump and his “ugly, misogynistic, racist lies” have not gone away. But the language of the platform is largely wrapped in Obama-esque appeals to American traditions. The convention’s biggest theme was “freedom,” a simple umbrella term that can be adapted to everyone from social justice warriors to mind-your-own-business libertarians.
At the grassroots level, where the excitement (and fundraising) is really only comparable to the Obama campaign, there’s been a notable shift, too. The rise of groups like “White Dudes for Harris” alongside Walz’s camouflage-hat liberalism represents a kind of synthesis of the politics of 2008 and 2024: progressives who acknowledge discrimination but can also laugh at cultural differences rather than constantly trying to deconstruct them.
When I look at this new Obamaism, I think of a video the Harris campaign released in which Harris and Walz casually get to know each other. Walz went viral by joking about his spicy “white guy tacos”; Harris outdid him by asking if they had “mayonnaise and tuna” in them. The two traded musical tastes: Walz went through the all-time White Dad Classics like Bob Seger; Harris mentioned jazz, soul and hip-hop artists and contrasted himself with Doug Emhoff’s interest in Depeche Mode, a stereotypical favorite of the white, college-educated hipsters of his day. Their “Venn diagram,” of course, was Prince, who encompassed all of those genres while also being Walz’s Minnesota hero.
To quote an old pop song: We’re a little bit country, we’re a little bit rock and roll. Sound like a pretty banal observation? Congratulations, you’re doing great.
Remarkable
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Writing for New York MagazineJonathan Chait sees the party’s return to Obamaism as a policy story rather than just a shift in message. Hillary Clinton’s failure in 2016 was wrongly seen as “an indictment of the entire Obama era,” he argues, prompting the party to shift to the left on both social issues and economic policy, breaking with Obama’s more cautious pragmatism.
