The speech that Barack Obama delivered to close the second night of the Democratic National Convention was, in many ways, a nostalgic performance of the former president’s greatest hits. With soaring rhetoric about the common bonds shared by Americans across races, creeds, and backgrounds, a spirited defense of liberalism, and a couple of well-placed zingers, it amounted to a rousing call to action: Casting a ballot for Kamala Harris in November wasn’t just a vote, it was a larger act in the work of protecting and improving American democracy.
Obama hasn’t lost his knack for synthesis in his eight years of quasi-retirement, despite having spent them with one foot in Hollywood and the other on Richard Branson’s yacht. On stage at the United Center, he succinctly delivered the message that Democrats have been hitting again and again during their convention’s first two days. After spending a few paragraphs laying out the many, many examples of Donald Trump’s selfishness, Obama nodded to the woman he’d come to endorse: “Kamala Harris won’t be focused on her problems, she’ll be focused on yours,” he said.
This is the simple message that Democrats are pushing above the rest of the rhetoric: Donald Trump is a vain, narcissistic, self-obsessed toady who wants to accrue power so he can use it to benefit himself, his family, and a cabal of fellow rich people. Harris, meanwhile, is a devoted public servant who sees government as a tool to lift up working people and, in particular, families. Naturally, there is a lot of Trump-bashing in this narrative. Trump is castigated as illiberal and selfish, with the instincts and demeanor of a mob boss. But mostly it’s a timeless message and one that is not, in substance, that different from the one that Obama deployed effectively and occasionally ruthlessly against Mitt Romney: Democrats want to help people like you; Republicans want to help themselves.
There is nothing particularly surprising about the message itself. It’s certainly not the first time these sentiments have slipped from Obama’s lips. What is surprising, however, is how quickly and thoroughly it has supplanted what had been the core message of Joe Biden’s reelection campaign: that the upcoming election was about preserving American democracy itself from the authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump.
Effectively launching his campaign on the third anniversary of Trump’s failed insurrection, Biden made the case that the purpose of his reelection effort was to defend the “sacred cause” of democracy. “This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical,” he said on January 6, 2024. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”
“There is one existential threat, it’s Donald Trump,” Biden told donors a month later. “It’s not about me,” he continued, “it’s about Trump.” But that was then; this is now.
The party has endeavored, over the first two nights of the convention, to pass this rhetorical torch. Biden’s valedictory speech on Monday largely fit the theme he’d intended to take into November. He once again recounted how seeing emboldened neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching through Charlottesville in 2017 inspired him to reenter politics. “Hate was on the march in America,” Biden said. “Old ghosts in new garments, stirring up the oldest divisions, stoking the oldest fears, giving oxygen to the oldest forces that they long sought to tear apart America.”
He recounted taking the oath of office less than four years later in a city teeming with National Guard soldiers following Trump’s failed insurrection. He ended his speech with a warning that likely would have been the centerpiece of his campaign, had he not bowed out last month: “This will be the first presidential election since January 6th. On that day, we almost lost everything about who we are as a country. And that threat—this is not hyperbole—that threat is still very much alive.”
Democrats are talking about January 6 at the convention. They are tarring Trump as a tin-pot dictator in waiting and laying out the extraordinary threat that he poses as president. But that is hardly the centerpiece of their campaign message. There is little that is somber here in Chicago; there’s little talk of existential threats. These Democrats are joyous and occasionally raucous. They’ve brought a broader message as well. Yes, Trump is a threat. But there is a much clearer counterargument being presented, not rooted in the abstract shadows of insurrections past. American democracy will once again be under threat if he is reelected; but it is also true that the federal government will once again become a tool for plutocrats and for Trump’s own corrupt ends. It will be run by people who don’t care about most Americans and who actively despise many of them—vindictive goons in charge of their own spoils system.
Biden’s pro-democracy message, though clearly deeply felt, also felt like the end product of a campaign and a candidate that was struggling badly to articulate a countermessage. Voters were skeptical of the clear progress that had been made under Biden and they blamed him for inflation, even though the United States had clearly done a much better job of managing the post-pandemic economy than any other advanced nation. Voters were, meanwhile, deeply suspicious of Biden’s ability to serve a second term as the oldest president in American history. To overcome these liabilities, his campaign hammered a message that made Biden a secondary figure in his own reelection: You might not like him, but with the fate of American democracy on the line, you’d better vote for him anyways.
What Harris has brought to Chicago is a candidate with the flexibility and popularity to run a much broader and more sweeping campaign. The vice president has been widely praised for the seamlessness with which she took on the mantle as her party’s presumptive—and now official—nominee. But her ability to shift messages (while retaining much of the same staff and infrastructure put in place by Biden) has arguably been more impressive. She is running a much more varied and appealing campaign, rooted not just in the threat posed by Trump but also in the core differences between the parties. It isn’t just that Donald Trump doesn’t care about democracy—he doesn’t care about people. Harris does.
Democrats have had far more success over the last eight years reminding voters that Trump is not only a vain egotist but a Republican—someone uninterested in using the government to help normal people and very interested in utilizing it to help his super rich friends—than they have by labeling him an aberration or a threat. Calling out the numerous ways in which Trump doesn’t care about people also cuts at the core of his appeal. These are the slings and arrows that might penetrate more deeply. Trump has found success over the last decade because he has milked the idea that he is an aberration. People who are sick of politicians are attracted to him precisely because he is a persistent norm violator—it suggests that he is a break from a political system that they feel, often with some sense of justification, does not exist to help them.
But Harris—and many others—are defining Trump in a different way these days. They’re arguing that Trump is actually just like the Republicans that voters hate—he’s not some populist instigator bent on retooling the status quo at all, he’s the same old Republican chump tarted up in reality-television tat and working for the same wealthy interests. And, of course, they’re also arguing that he’s, well, weird—someone whose basic approach to life and politics falls well outside the mainstream. That is a much different argument than the one Biden was making a few months ago. Time will tell, but it seems like it’s a vastly more effective one.
