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Exactly 16 years ago, an impossibly young-looking Barack Obama was barnstorming through Ohio on a bus tour, electrifying huge crowds and emphatically closing the deal on his thumping 2008 election victory.
On another October night on Thursday, the 63-year-old ex-president was back on stage, with a vast American flag for a backdrop, trying to do for Kamala Harris what she’s so far struggled to do herself — put away the 2024 election.
The snowy haired Obama had swapped Ohio, which ceased to be a closely contested presidential state as soon as he left the White House, for this year’s potentially decisive state, Pennsylvania. That the hope and change prophet of 2008 is still his party’s most effective political orator four presidential elections later is an indictment of Democrats. But the urgency of his message in Pittsburgh told a more immediate story — his nemesis Donald Trump may be poised for an Oval Office return.
“We don’t need four more years of arrogance and bumbling and bluster and division. America is ready to turn the page,” Obama said. “We are ready for a better story, one that helped us work together instead of turning against each other. Pennsylvania, we’re ready for President Kamala Harris.”
Sometimes, it takes a former president to provide the clarity of argument that a candidate embroiled in a bitter race can’t make themselves. That happened before – in 2012 when Bill Clinton took Obama’s woolly reelection pitch and created a rationale for voters weary of economic pain to send him back to the White House.
Obama on Thursday painted a searing picture of Trump as a malicious, ridiculous and incompetent menace, while trying to weave a rhetorical case for voters who are feeling economically insecure to vote for Harris, who is part of an incumbent administration, nonetheless.
“I am the hopey changey guy so I understand people feeling frustrated, feeling we can do better,” Obama said. “What I cannot understand is why anybody would think that Donald Trump will shake things up in a way that is good for you, Pennsylvania. I don’t understand that.”
Obama’s impassioned appeal for Harris in a state that could doom her presidential hopes comes at a moment when Democrats are fretting that her early momentum after taking over the campaign from President Joe Biden has ebbed, leaving potentially the most critical general election in decades at best a toss-up with less than a month to go.
“He’s clear-eyed about how close this race is,” a source familiar with Obama’s remarks told CNN’s Kayla Tausche. The ex-president savagely mocked Trump, asking whether his successor had ever changed a tire or a diaper and condemning his single term and “mean and ugly” border policies.
Obama’s appearance, a full-circle moment since Harris knocked on doors for him in frigid Iowa before the 2008 caucuses, also had a far deeper, personal significance. The 44th and 45th presidents have waged a political feud for more than a decade, since Trump built the foundation of his populist movement on false claims that Obama was not US-born. Birtherism was the earliest indication of the potency of Trump’s political cocktail of racial aspersions and untruths, which has reached new heights in the 2024 election.
More broadly, the antagonism between Obama and Trump helps explain the politics of the last 15 years in the United States.
The 44th president heralded a new, multi-racial, young and socially diverse Democratic coalition as he built a brand as a leader seeking, at least rhetorically, to surmount some of the nation’s deepest divides. Trump fashioned backlash politics in the wake of the nation’s first Black presidency, using racial appeals and a strongman’s zeal for demonizing opponents to create a political movement as enduring as Obama’s. In many ways, the coming election represents a fresh battle between these two creeds — and Obama’s legacy, including his signature Affordable Care Act, may depend on Harris winning.
The former president on Thursday accused Trump of violating basic American values. “Those didn’t used to be Republican and Democratic values. It used to be we’d have arguments about tax policy and foreign policy, but we didn’t have arguments about whether you should tell the truth or not,” he said.
He slammed Trump over his false claims that the Biden administration denied hurricane aid to Republicans. “You are going to have leaders who try to help and then you have a guy who will just lie about it to score political points and this has consequences,” Obama said. “When did that become OK?”
But the Trump campaign is not letting go of claims that were debunked even by many Republican state and local officials. “You’ve got a lot of people who could have been helped, a lot of lives that could have been saved, that weren’t, and there’s a lot of details to figure out,” Sen. JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, said Thursday.
Obama’s remarks were directed especially at traditional Republicans who may abhor Trump’s conduct and the male voters who form his power base.
Earlier, Obama had sought to shore up another traditionally Democratic constituency — Black men, CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported. At a Harris campaign office, Obama wondered whether the reticence of some “brothers” to support the Democratic nominee came down to sexism. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down?” Obama said. “That’s not acceptable.”
Yet the former president can only do so much. He’s not on the ballot and for all his undimmed appeal to Democrats, he’s yesterday’s man. And in the past, his quintessential appeal has not always been transferable to other Democrats. He worked hard to elect Hillary Clinton, who was defeated in 2016. One big question now is whether Harris, who has been basing her campaign on generational change and her biography, can build on Obama’s critiques of Trump to make her own sharpened closing argument.
The former president’s appearance came after a week in which the Harris campaign has stepped up its efforts to find and turn out any available voters. The vice president has been far more willing to enter unscripted situations — from a “60 Minutes” interview, to an appearance on ABC’s “The View,” which is popular among women, to a trip to Howard Stern’s radio show, a favorite of many American men. On Thursday, Harris was seeking to reverse some of Trump’s success among another traditionally Democratic voting bloc, Hispanic voters, at a town hall hosted by Univision in Nevada, which she followed with a rally in Arizona.
Democrats are trying to boost their prospects in swing states by clipping Trump’s margins in rural areas where he runs strongest. The effort will get a boost next week when another former president, Bill Clinton, takes to the trail on Harris’ behalf, recreating the intimate small-scale events that predated his 1992 presidential campaign. The 42nd president will get the chance to deploy his southerner’s affinity for connecting with rural voters with relatable economic arguments.
But Democratic concerns about Harris’ campaign are palpable. There is no clear leader in CNN’s average of recent national polls, swing state polling shows dead heats, and several surveys this week have suggested that the Democratic nominee’s vital Blue Wall in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could be wobbling.
Harris has also apparently not yet settled on a way to differentiate herself from the Biden administration’s unpopularity with many voters — especially those frustrated with high grocery prices. On “The View,” for instance, Harris said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of” what she would have done differently from the president over the past four years.
But for all the anxiety among Democrats — rooted in the fear of what Trump would do in a second term he has promised to devote to “retribution” — the race remains impossible to predict as mid-October approaches. One reason why is that a flurry of massive, shocking events — including Biden’s withdrawal and two assassination attempts that Trump survived — did not seem to give either Democrats or Republicans an advantage in a deeply divided nation. So it’s questionable whether former presidents or the aftermath of hurricanes will change things at this late date.
Adding to the uncertainty are questions about the exact shape of the likely electorate. Will Trump succeed in turning out lots of voters who don’t usually engage? Or will the vice president benefit from a huge showing among female voters enraged by Trump’s role in the overturning of a federal right to an abortion? Or could Harris’ historic potential to become the first Black, female president spike turnout among Black women in swing states like Georgia?
And will Trump’s apparently casual attitude toward a traditional ground game to maximize voter participation backfire?
Obama stressed on Thursday that there was only one remedy for such intangibles.
“Whether this election is making you feel excited or scared or hopeful or frustrated or anything in between, do not just sit back and hope for the best,” he told the Pittsburgh crowd. “Get off your couch and vote. Put down your phone and vote, grab your friends and family and vote. Vote for Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States.”
