This summer marks 20 years since a promising Senate candidate from Illinois delivered one of the most stirring speeches in the history of a political convention.
When Barack Obama finished speaking — after being interrupted 33 times for applause — the delegates jumped from their seats, many in tears. Those who sat on the floor in Boston in 2004 speak of the moment with almost mystical reverence.
“We just saw the first black president,” television commentator Chris Matthews predicted as the young politician concluded.
It was a speech so good that Obama reran it four years later. But after eight years of his leadership, and another eight years of Donald Trump, followed by Joe Biden, it also seems like a curious antiquity. Parts of the speech read like an almost hopelessly naïve relic. And as Obama prepares to take the convention stage tonight to deliver an affirmative address for Vice President Kamala Harris, his message will undoubtedly be shaped by two decades of exceptionally bitter and polarizing politics — the opposite of the ambitious message he laid out at the convention in Boston.
Obama began his speech then with a personal biography that sounded like the essence of the American dream, and his soaring orations culminated in the idea that drove his presidential campaign — “the audacity of hope.” It was more than the simple idea that a better America is possible, but that a better America is here, if we seek it. That noble children will still serve their country, that inner-city mothers and rural farmers are asking for fundamentally the same thing, that — more than anything else — there are enduring values that are uniquely American and that cut across the political spectrum.
“We worship a great God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States,” he said from the podium to loud cheers.
Twenty years later, Little League may be growing, but religious participation has plummeted. States and school boards across the country are eagerly banning books (and Obama himself expanded the Patriot Act, giving federal agents access to library records), and gay marriage became the law of the land, but legal experts now believe it could be in jeopardy.
Beyond the specific hopes for America that Obama articulated, the inspiring concept that brought his ideas together in 2004 – the stirring belief that Americans can escape the gravity of political polarization – feels anachronistic.
The ease with which Trump’s caustic and proudly divisive rhetoric took root, triumphing over Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” speech at the 2016 Democratic convention, seemed to mark a tipping point. But you could also argue that her husband, the 44th president, had largely abandoned his idea of a presidency governed by universally shared political values by the time he ran for re-election in 2012.
Even moderate Republicans blocked his efforts to pass the landmark health care legislation that eventually became Obamacare. He learned a political lesson: Success is measured not by a magic number of bipartisan operatives, but by your ability to wield the power you have.
“I realize that times have changed since I first spoke at this convention. Times have changed, and so have I,” he said at his party’s 2012 convention. “America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I don’t promise it would be easy now. Yes, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together.”
It was certainly not a complete rejection of his original vision, but his 2012 speech also reflected his view of America as a nation with less goodwill than he had ever imagined and with much sharper divisions between Red and Blue states.
In 2020, during the convention that nominated Biden to run against a president who spread wild conspiracy theories and lies about his own hometown, Obama abandoned any pretense of shared bipartisanship and proclaimed that “[the Trump] “The United States government has shown that it will tear down our democracy if that’s what it takes to win,” just months before a riot at the Capitol that shook the foundation of American political institutions.
Tonight we can expect an even greater departure from his original 2004 vision.
“At his core, I think President Obama still believes that most Americans share the same hopes and dreams and that there is more that unites us than divides us,” said Jim Margolis, an adviser to Obama who helped produce his 2008 and 2012 conventions. “I think he would also recognize that the divisions between red states and blue states are real and more pronounced than they were in 2004 — despite those shared values.”
Building a lasting legacy is proving difficult. In 2004, Obama was the darling of the political world.
In one important way, the legacy of his 2004 speech lives on. Obama’s speech in Boston inspired a newly elected San Francisco district attorney in attendance, Kamala Harris, who co-hosted a fundraiser for his Senate campaign later that summer.
Now Harris is counting on Obama to deliver a similarly encouraging message, albeit one that may be tempered by what he has learned since 2004.
“There is an exponentially greater need to bring people together today than there was 20 years ago,” says Steve Hildebrand, who joined what would become Obama’s first presidential campaign in the early stages in 2006 and served as his deputy national campaign manager in 2008. “I think [Obama’s speech tonight] must be sharper, more focused and more pointed than ever before.”
Tonight, Obama will reportedly “lay out the values at stake in this election that are at the heart of our politics.” It’s hard to imagine that his understanding of shared American values will be as impossibly optimistic as it was in 2004.
But even after years of enduring Trump’s efforts to tear down his political legacy, and witnessing the country being torn apart, there will always be a sense of hope attached to his mission as the author of one of America’s most memorable and moving speeches.
This article originally appeared in POLITICO Nightly.
