The Democrats Aren’t on the High Road Anymore

During Donald Trump’s crude and shambolic first run for president in 2016, Michelle Obama offered a mission statement for the Democratic Party that doubled as a pithy summary of her family’s political project: “When they go low, we go high.” A decade and a half before that, Barack Obama announced himself as a major figure by declaring at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”

Neither of those statements seems true today. The country is more divided than it has been in generations, and when Republicans go low, Democrats are willing to be snarky and insult the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance right back. The party has changed during, or been changed by, the Trump years.

At the Democratic National Convention in their hometown of Chicago last night, the Obamas showed that they, too, are ready to get their hands dirty, but also that they haven’t given up on a rosier vision of what things can be.

Barack Obama scoffed at Trump early in his 35-minute speech closing the evening. “The childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes,” he said, making a not-so-subtle hand gesture.) “The other day I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.”

[Mark Leibovich: The DNC is a big smiling mess]

But Obama also sought to construct a case for Kamala Harris (and against Trump) through the lens of freedom, a concept more associated with conservative politicians but one that Democrats have tried to reclaim this year.

“We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life—how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry,” Obama said. “And we believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have the freedom to make choices that are different than ours. That’s okay!”

He argued for a sense of tolerance, not only as a rebuke to Trump’s authoritarian impulses, but also to censorious voices on his own side of the aisle. “If a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize the world is moving fast,” he said. “Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.”

He allowed that this sort of language “can feel pretty naive” given the sense among both Democrats and Republicans that each election is existential, but he said most Americans are living these values already, no matter their politics.

Obama’s role in the Democratic Party is in flux. President Joe Biden may be the head of the party and Harris the heir apparent, but Obama showed his continued muscle this summer by helping nudge Biden out of the race in favor of Harris. “He’s the leader of the party, in my opinion,” Kimberly Bassett, the secretary of state for the District of Columbia, told me on the convention floor as we awaited the speech. Obama also gave a more eloquent tribute to Biden’s presidency than any other speaker on Monday, in a program designed to burnish the Biden legacy.  

Obama served the role that former President Bill Clinton played for him in 2012, when Clinton delivered a stem-winder at the convention that articulated the case for a second Obama term better than Obama had managed to do. Now Obama was paying that forward—“a popular and well-regarded former president who has the credibility to say, Trust me, this person can do this job, and can, to use Clinton’s phrase, ‘brag on them,’” David Litt, an author and a former Obama speechwriter, told me in an email.

[Helen Lewis: Abortion takes center stage at the DNC]

Even so, Obama may not have given the most memorable speech of the night. Michelle Obama has never shown any interest in running for office; by all accounts, she doesn’t enjoy politics. But her speech last night showed why Democrats can’t stop yearning for her to run for president someday. When her husband said that he was “the only person stupid enough to speak right after Michelle Obama,” it barely sounded like a joke.

She drew big laughs when she said of Trump, “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” She fired the crowd up and warned against self-defeating perfectionism. “The minute something goes wrong, the minute a lie takes hold, we cannot start wringing our hands,” she said. “We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right.” And she affirmed that her old message is still one she believes. “Let me tell you, going small is never the answer,” she said. “Going small is the opposite of what we teach our children. Going small is petty. It’s unhealthy. And quite frankly, it’s unpresidential.”

The truth is that although the Obamas may not be quite so prim as they were eight years ago, they aren’t getting quite as far down in the muck as Trump, nor is the rest of their party. No one can match Trump’s penchant for insult, and only other Republicans are trying. But Democrats have concluded that Biden’s rather high-flown rhetoric about Trump wasn’t working, while Harris’s and Tim Walz’s attempts at deflating Trump with mockery are getting results.

Ben Rhodes, a former Barack Obama adviser, told me he sees a continuity between the pre-Trump Democratic Party and Obama’s approach now. “One thing that he’s been good at throughout his career is articulating a progressive patriotism and showing how you can stay positive while still drawing a sharp, values-based contrast,” Rhodes wrote in an email. “I think he actually has that in common with Harris-Walz in some ways—he doesn’t come across as grim or angry, and has always deployed joy, humor and a sense of solidarity that has sometimes been missing in the Trump years as Democrats have often been motivated more by fear and anger.”

The overall feeling of the convention has been euphoric—Democrats seem barely able to believe how much better their prospects look now than they did a month ago. But they can’t fully escape the shadow of Trump. Over the past two days, I’ve heard elected officials and delegates speak about the current moment as the most exciting they’ve experienced in the party. For anyone who lived through Obama’s rise, that’s a bit incredible, and the electric reaction to his speech was a reminder of his immense star power. But when I asked Lorie Longhany, a New York delegate, she insisted that it was true.

“I was really excited in 2008, but I think, because of the Trump administration and the fear of another Trump administration, that the excitement is building—because we have something to fight for,” she told me.

As for the Obamas, they demonstrated last night that they’re ready to fight too.