Kamala Harris caps Democratic convention’s return to Obamaism

Let’s leave aside questions about Obama’s role as party leader and the ongoing debates about his record. The most striking thing about the rally, held in his hometown of Chicago, was very much Obama’s style. Night after night, the DNC marked the return of a patriotic pluralism that speaks of America as a united country striving to do what is right, even when its citizens struggle to see themselves as such.

Obama presented himself as a post-partisan opportunity to “get rid of the tired ideas and policies of the past” and move beyond the psychodramas of the Bush and Clinton eras. Kamala Harris presented her potential election as a chance to end a grueling decade defined by Trump, both during and after his term. She dwelt on the promise of being a president “for all Americans.”

“Our nation has a precious and fleeting opportunity to move beyond the bitterness, cynicism and conflict of the past — a chance to chart a new path forward,” Harris said. “Not as members of any particular party or faction, but as Americans.”

The Obamas themselves used their speeches to position Harris as the heir to their hopeful political model, but she was already drawing heavily on the Democratic message of that era, drawing chants of “USA!” throughout her speech, even as she brought a harsher tone to her attacks.

The choice of Tim Walz helps crystallize the message, which celebrates the country’s diversity with a deliberately naïve wonderment of the “Isn’t this America to you?” variety. 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 the other a “son of the plains of Nebraska,” come together and “make it to the White House.” In her convention speech, she declared herself “no stranger to unlikely journeys,” recounting her upbringing as a child of immigrants.

This kind of liberalism through biography echoes Obama’s own speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The former president himself made the connection, using his final speech to associate Harris with his success as “young people 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 explained that Americans coach high school football teams in blue states and don’t like politicians raiding libraries in red states.

This old dogma has clearly excited Chicago Democrats and raised the question of why it has lost popularity in recent years. The answer lies in two trends that have fed off each other over the past decade.

One reason was Trump’s racist campaign and his fiery 2016 election campaign, a demanding form of anti-Obamaism that made fools of hopes for an enlightened future in which old prejudices would disappear into the melting pot. Obama’s vision of the electoral process as a good-faith disagreement between like-minded people—still at the heart of his speech Tuesday—has also become much harder to sell in the context of Trump’s aggressive politics. Democrats have struggled to see that red-hatted friend, relative, or neighbor as a fellow American with a different viewpoint rather than, at best, an accomplice in a toxic conspiracy to dismantle the institutions their country holds dear.

Second, new social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo emerged, gathering momentum during Trump’s presidency and reaching their peak in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. Disillusioned by the pace of social and economic progress after Obama’s election and the fallout from Trump’s presidency, Democrats of all stripes searched for answers to the problems. 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.

In this context, Obama’s celebration of incremental progress and his Hamilton-esque reinterpretation of history seemed naïve, and his universal rhetoric seemed evasive. Democrats turned to more direct appeals to marginalized groups, often borrowing language 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 have also run into limits that have made Obamaism more attractive today than it was four years ago.

Trump no longer appears as an “aberration,” as President Joe Biden had hoped, but as an enduring force who has reshaped his entire party in ways that will likely endure beyond 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 uncle at Fox News isn’t going away anytime soon.

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

On the political front, Democrats have looked at the polls and decided that more academic language and policy thinking about race and gender are sometimes alienating to the groups they were meant to appeal to. Black voters overwhelmingly chose Biden as the party’s standard-bearer in 2020, over more forward-thinking progressive rivals; Trump’s recent gains have come largely from nonwhite voters, and Gen Z no longer looks like a left-wing majority in the making. The tough-on-crime, tough-on-the-border politics that Harris fled in 2019 are increasingly common in deep-blue cities.

Obamanism has subsequently become more popular as a way of appealing to the broadest possible group of voters in clearer, unapologetic language, even though the party is still comfortably further left in its policies than it was in 2008.

Perhaps the most striking example of this shift came from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose speech, one of the most popular of the week, was a populist one that cast Democrats as the party of the working class and Trump as the champion of billionaires. Like Obama, she drew on her biography (a New York bartender) to appeal to the broadest possible audience (anyone with a job) to reject “cynical politics that seemed blind to the realities of working people” (a speech that was a hit). very (Obama’s idea 2008).

Compare that, as The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg did, to her brief remarks at the 2020 DNC, in which she called on America to “acknowledge 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 is the same in the new Obamaism. The biggest change in the 2020s is the widespread departure from the former president’s above-all-things civility — Obama himself used his hands to illustrate “Trump’s strange obsession with crowd size” (hint hint), the kind of once-shocked phrase that, after Trump, has shocked few commentators. And Harris has consistently condemned the “unserious man” she faced with the zeal of a true prosecutor.

Of course, the messages to different groups of voters are always targeted. Michelle Obama made clear in her speech that Trump and his “ugly, misogynistic, racist lies” have not gone away. But the language used on the platform was largely wrapped in Obamaian appeals to American traditions. The convention’s main theme was “freedom,” a simple umbrella term that can be adapted to everyone from social justice warriors to mind-of-the-business libertarians.

At the grassroots level, where enthusiasm (and fundraising) is only really comparable to Obama’s campaign, there’s also a notable shift. The sudden rise of groups like “White Dudes for Harris” alongside Walz’s camo-hatted liberalism represents a kind of synthesis of the politics of 2008 and 2024: progressives who acknowledge discrimination but also laugh at cultural differences rather than constantly trying to deconstruct them.

When I look at this new Obamaism, I think of a video released by the Harris campaign in which Harris and Walz casually get to know each other. Walz went viral by joking about his “white guy tacos” without spices; Harris one-upped him by asking if they had “mayonnaise and tuna.” The two swapped musical tastes: Walz reviewed the classics of white dads like Bob Seger; Harris cited jazz, soul, and hip-hop artists and compared herself to Doug Emhoff’s interest in Depeche Mode, a favorite stereotype of college-educated white hipsters at the time. Their “Venn diagram,” of course, was Prince, who encompassed all of these genres while also being Walz’s hometown hero in Minnesota.

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