Obama’s DNC Speech Had a Hidden Message to Democrats

Experienced in the moment, Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago felt like the rousing culmination of a pep rally, peppered with funny insults of Donald Trump and familiar soaring patriotic oratory. But if you read it more closely, an argument emerges: against Trump and also against Obama’s own skeptics, including those within the Democratic Party who have turned away from his legacy.

Obama first electrified his party 20 years ago at the Democratic convention in Boston with a hopeful speech disdaining social division. To Obama’s skeptics, Trump’s rise refuted his optimistic belief in the nature of America and called for a different kind of politics to respond to it: summoning an angry populism to counter Trump’s angry pseudo-populism. The case Obama made to his party is that his political blueprint remains morally and strategically correct.

His argument in 2004 was that the American people are fundamentally decent. Despite the anger on the surface, there is more that unites us than divides us. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” he said back then. “We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Does that mean we can all just hold hands and skip off into the future together? No, because there have always been demagogues who seek to divide us so they can exploit the division.

In 2004, the Bush campaign was using patriotism and gay marriage to impugn the Americanness of its opponents. In 2024, Trump is using racism, as Michelle Obama noted candidly in her speech preceding her husband’s.

Those tactics can succeed because they prey upon baser and lower human instincts. “The other side knows it’s easier to play on people’s fears and cynicism. It always has been,” Obama argued on Tuesday.

Obama’s answer to this is a positive-sum vision. Lifting up the most vulnerable Americans, he believes, creates more freedom and prosperity for all of us. He also emphasized this theme 20 years ago. (“If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.”)

And he returned to it Tuesday night. “Kamala and Tim understand that when everybody gets a fair shot, we are all better off,” he said. “Just like we can keep our streets safe while also building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve and eliminating bias that will make it better for everybody.”

He presented this as a contrast to Trump’s zero-sum vision, which implies we can only help ourselves at the expense of others: “Donald Trump and his well-heeled donors, they don’t see the world that way. For them, one group’s gains is necessarily another group’s loss.”

Positive sum versus zero sum. It was telling, as well, to note which policies Obama chose to highlight as the backbone for this contrast. He cited Kamala Harris’s commitment to abortion rights (by far the convention’s most prominent issue), Obamacare’s insurance subsidies, and the right to organize a union. He touted her support for reforms to zoning restrictions, which have prevented more housing construction and made it more expensive, and tactfully ignored her shakier claims that “price gouging” is a cause of inflation. And he assailed Trump for handing another huge tax cut to the rich.

Toward the end of his speech, Obama aimed an argument squarely at his own party. Democrats are sometimes tempted to meet the hatred and anger on the right in kind. That is where they go wrong. “We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and outyell the other side,” Obama said. “And after a while, regular folks just tune out or they don’t bother to vote.”

Since his second term, Obama has been calling out the progressive tendency to shut down criticism by labeling it racist and sexist. In his Chicago speech, he framed this argument in practical electoral terms, explaining that Democrats cannot win over voters by treating them as bigots if they don’t agree on everything:

To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices. And that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process. 

After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize that the world is moving fast, that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us. That’s how we can build a true Democratic majority, one that can get things done.

And that is where the hope and optimism come in. Obama argues that, despite Trump’s ugliness, most Americans are still decent and good. If you appeal to them in a smart and empathetic way, they will recognize their commonalities.

This section, toward the end, is what I take to be a deliberate echo of his 2004 speech:

Because the vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided. We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone …

Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or somewhere in between, we have all had people like that in our lives. People like Kamala’s parents, who crossed oceans because they believed in the promise of America. People like Tim’s parents, who taught him about the importance of service. Good, hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful but who managed in countless ways to leave this country just a little bit better than they found it.

Making the country just a little bit better off than they found it does not mean revolutionary salvation or banishing our sins. It is a belief in optimism and steady progress. That hope has been deeply shaken in the Trump era. Obama is making the case that Kamala Harris can restore it.