Barack Obama was just days away from his 43rd birthday and just months away from being elected senator when he took the stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.
As a state legislator from Illinois, he had an unusual profile to be a keynote speaker at a presidential convention. But the self-described “skinny kid with a funny name” captivated Democrats that night, going beyond a requisite pitch to nominee John Kerry to introduce the nation to his “politics of hope” and vision of “one United States of America” that is neither defined nor defeated by its differences.
Kerry lost that November to Republican President George W. Bush. But Obama etched himself into the national consciousness and began a remarkable rise that landed him in the Oval Office just four years later. And now, eight years removed from the presidency, Obama returns to the DNC Tuesday night as the elder statesman with a different mission.
Speaking in his political hometown of Chicago, the nation’s first Black president will honor the legacy of President Joe Biden after he left the campaign trail while standing up for another historic figure, Vice President Kamala Harris. It will be a significant moment as she goes up against former President Donald Trump in a contest rift with the same cultural and ideological fissures that Obama warned about two decades ago.
“President Obama continues to be a north star in the party,” said Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who credited the 44th president for helping her become the first Black female lieutenant governor of her state.
Stratton said Thursday that no voice, aside from Harris himself, is more important this week to galvanize Democrats, reach out to independents and appease moderate Republicans than Obama.
“He knows how to finish,” she said.
Laying the foundation
Obama’s two decades in public life have been defined by influential speeches. His body of work has run the gamut of tone and purpose — a gamut of choices as he tries to find the right balance for Harris as she attempts to become the first woman, second Black person and first person of South Asian descent to hold the presidency.
In 2004, Obama used his invitation from Kerry and then-Democratic Chairman Terry McAuliffe to combine lofty themes with storytelling, humor and his biography as the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.
“Let’s face it, my being on this stage is pretty unlikely,” Obama told delegates and a national television audience.
McAuliffe, however, remembered Obama as a clear rising star. “I knew him … did events for him” when he was running for U.S. Senate, McAuliffe said in an interview. Still, no one could have predicted Obama’s performance and the reaction — because he had never been on a stage like that before.
“It was an exciting moment,” McAuliffe recalled. “It clearly laid the foundation for his success as a nominee and candidate in 2008.”
In 16 minutes — shorter than a typical nomination acceptance, inauguration address or State of the Union address — Obama told his origin story, contextualized the 2004 election and addressed Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. Obama had little policy, but his sweeping indictment of divisive politics struck a chord.
“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 Latin America and Asian America; there is the United States of America,” he said in perhaps the most remembered passage. “Are we engaging in the politics of cynicism or are we engaging in the politics of hope?”
Two and a half years later, Obama echoed that theme as he launched his presidential campaign before thousands of supporters gathered outside Illinois’ capital, Springfield. His campaign motto: Hope and Change.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, the first black person to hold office in the commonwealth, recalled seeing that winter scene as a high school student. “That was the moment that clicked for me,” Davis said, and later “it helped me believe that I could accomplish the things that I’ve accomplished.”
A different tone
When Obama brought idealistic and even vague themes to the White House, it was hard-nosed politics and ice-cold realism that saw him through.
In March 2008, then-candidate Obama was pilloried for his friendship with his black pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had a reputation for being critical of the country’s history of white supremacy. This included a video clip of Wright shouting “God, Damn America” from the pulpit of Obama’s home church.
This time, high-flown rhetoric wouldn’t suffice. Obama wrote a nearly 38-minute speech explaining his relationship with Wright, in the context of American history and race relations in the early 21st century.
“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said, rejecting Wright’s “view that sees white racism as endemic and puts what’s wrong with America above everything we know is right with America.”
The speech, titled “A More Perfect Union,” was full of nuance — a risk in presidential politics. But it worked.
Obama’s August convention speech certainly contained his trademark promises of hope and change. The venue and the audience — 84,000 people in the Denver Broncos’ football stadium — cemented his celebrity status. Another lesson, however, was Obama’s attack on Republican candidate John McCain. After weeks of resisting calls from Democrats to rally behind the Vietnam War hero, Obama hammered the Arizona senator as a rubber stamp for the outgoing Bush administration, which was out of step with most Americans and weak on the world stage.
“You know, John McCain likes to say he’ll follow (9/11 mastermind Osama) bin Laden to the gates of hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives,” Obama said at one point.
It would be a preview of Obama’s most brutal speech, his 2020 appearance at the Democratic National Convention’s virtual convention. Speaking on behalf of Biden, his former vice president, Obama called Trump fundamentally unfit for office. It was the most damning indictment of a sitting president by any of his predecessors in modern American history.
“This administration has shown that it will tear down our democracy if that’s what it takes to win,” Obama said, nearly five months before Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent Biden from being certified as the winner of the 2020 election.
Weight of history
McAuliffe said Obama’s role Tuesday is partly to amplify the messages of several presidents: Biden spoke Monday and President Bill Clinton speaks Wednesday.
“They’re going to talk about what happens when you get a Democratic president,” McAuliffe said, particularly the economy. It’s Obama’s turn, McAuliffe said, to join Clinton as “explainer in chief” — a nod to Clinton’s 2012 convention speech when Obama was up for re-election. The idea, McAuliffe said, is to position Harris as the natural Democratic successor.
For her part, Stratton said she expects the man she saw to connect with voters, individually and en masse. As a volunteer on Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, she recalls the then-president visiting his campaign office in Chicago’s Hyde Park on Election Day.
“He was funny and down-to-earth” as he shook hands with volunteers and then began calling voters himself, she recalled.
Four years earlier, Stratton and her four daughters were among the crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park for Obama’s first presidential victory speech. “Strangers were hugging each other and crying,” she said. “We saw this black family walk out, knowing they were going to the White House. It was a remarkable moment.”
On Tuesday, she said, there is room for Obama to pressure Trump, speak directly to American voters and honor the significance of Harris’ moment.
“He was a historic candidate and president. He knows what this is like,” Stratton said. “There will be a great moment when the first black president passes the baton.”
