Harris caps Democratic convention’s return to Obamaism

Put aside the questions of Obama’s role as party leader and the running debates about his record. The most striking feature of this gathering, fittingly in his hometown Chicago, was all Obama style. Night after night, the DNC marked the return of a patriotic pluralism that speaks to America as a united country trying to do the right thing, even when its residents struggle to see themselves that way.

Obama portrayed himself in 2008 as a post-partisan opportunity to “cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past” and move past the psychodramas of the Bush and Clinton era. Kamala Harris framed her potential election as a chance to end an exhausting decade defined by Trump, both in and out of office. She lingered on the promise to be a president “for all Americans.”

“Our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past — a chance to chart a new way forward,” said Harris. “Not as members of any one party or 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 cribbing heavily from that era of Democratic messaging, eliciting “USA!” chants along the way, even as she brought a harder edge to her attacks.

The selection of Tim Walz helps to crystallize the message, which celebrates the country’s diversity with a deliberately naive “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 unlikely journeys” as she recounted her upbringing as the child of immigrants.

This kind of rah-rah liberalism via biography is an echo of Obama’s own signature speech from the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The former president himself caught the connection, using his latest address 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 the blue states and don’t like politicians poking around their libraries in the red states.

The old time religion clearly delighted Democrats in Chicago and raised the question of why it had been less prominent in recent years. The answer lies in two trends that fed each other over the past decade.

One was Trump’s racist birther campaign and inflammatory 2016 run, an exacting kind of anti-Obamaism that made hopes of an enlightened future in which old prejudices disappear into the melting pot look ridiculous. Obama’s take on the electoral process as a good faith disagreement between people with shared values — still the core of his Tuesday speech — also became a much harder sell amid Trump’s in-your-face politics. Democrats struggled to see that red-hatted friend, relative, or neighbor 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 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 murder of George Floyd. Disillusioned with the pace of social and economic gains after Obama’s election and the backlash of the Trump presidency, Democrats of all races looked for answers as to what went wrong. New voices, often steeped in scholarship, offered a credible explanation: America was plagued by overlapping systems of oppression that needed to be identified and dismantled.

Obama’s celebration of gradual progress, and his Hamilton-style reworking of history around it, sounded naive in that context and his universal rhetoric sounded evasive. Democrats moved toward more direct appeals to marginalized groups, often borrowing terms from academia, and made more ambitious and targeted promises to help them.

These trends have changed the party permanently — as Harris said in a different context, “We’re not going back” — but they also ran into limits that have made Obamaism look more attractive now than it was four years earlier.

Trump no longer looks like an “aberration,” as President Joe Biden hoped he would be, but a lasting force who remade his entire party in ways that will likely extend past his lifetime. That makes the quest to defeat him even more urgent for Democrats, but it also means making peace with the idea that your Fox News uncle isn’t going anywhere.

As Obama put it, “if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people.” Acknowledging this, he said, was the way to “build a true Democratic majority.” He made a near-identical point in his famous Philadelphia race speech in 2008, even citing his own beloved grandmother’s prejudices.

Politically, Democrats looked at the polls and decided that the more academic vocabulary and policy thinking around race and gender was sometimes alienating to the groups it was meant to appeal to. Black voters decisively chose Biden as the party’s standard bearer in 2020 over more bleeding-edge progressive rivals; Trump’s recent gains have largely come with nonwhite voters and Gen Z no longer looks like a left-wing majority in waiting. The tough-on-crime, tough-on-border politics Harris ran away from in 2019 are increasingly common in deep blue cities.

Obamaism has subsequently become more popular as a way to speak to the broadest group of voters possible in plainer language without qualification or apology, even as the party is still comfortably further left on policy than it was in 2008.

Perhaps the most striking example of the shift came from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had one of the best-received speeches of the week with a populist stemwinder positioning 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 make a charismatic appeal to the largest possible group (anyone with a job) in order to reject “a cynical politics that seemed blind to the realities of working people” (a very Obama 2008 idea).

Compare that, as The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg did, to her brief 2020 DNC remarks, in which she asked America to “recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past” and you can see the quantum leap of the last four years.

Not everything about the new Obamaism is the same. The biggest tweak for the ugly 2020s is a partywide departure from the former president’s above-it-all 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 even pretend to be offended by post-Trump. And Harris was absolutely relentless in condemning the “unserious man” she faced with the zeal of an actual prosecutor.

There are still targeted messages to different groups of voters, of course. Michelle Obama bluntly noted in her speech Trump and his “ugly, misogynistic, racist lies” have not gone away. But the language around the platform has largely been wrapped in Obamaesque appeals to American traditions. The biggest theme of the convention has been “freedom,” a simple umbrella term that can be adjusted toward everyone from social justice warriors to mind-your-business libertarians.

At the grassroots level, where the excitement (and fundraising) is truly only comparable to the Obama campaign, there’s also been a noticeable shift. The overnight rise of groups like “White Dudes for Harris” alongside Walz’s camo hat liberalism represent a kind of synthesis of 2008 and 2024 politics: Progressives who acknowledge discrimination, but can also laugh about cultural differences rather than constantly look 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 joking about his spiceless “white guy tacos”; Harris topped him by asking if they included “mayonnaise and tuna.” The two traded music tastes: Walz went through the all-time White Dad Classics like Bob Seger; Harris named jazz, soul, and hip hop artists and contrasted herself with Doug Emhoff’s interest in Depeche Mode, a stereotypical favorite of the white college-educated hipsters of his day. Their “Venn diagram” was Prince, of course, who encompassed all these genres while also being the hometown hero of Walz’s Minnesota.

To quote an ancient pop song, we’re a little bit country, we’re a little bit rock and roll. Does that sound like a pretty banal observation? Congratulations, you’re doing it right.