Two Obamas. Two Different Visions of America.

On night two of the Democratic convention, Barack Obama was in the house, and it was electric. How could it not be? His very presence reminded Democrats what they were put on this earth to do: push the great American experiment forward, redistribute wealth, expand the vote, and create opportunities for the ambitious while caring for the downtrodden. 

Nor was it just his presence. It was his words, which pulled you in, made you feel something incredibly powerful. It was unlike listening to anyone else at the convention. 

“We have a broader idea of freedom,” Obama told the crowd, his every utterance greeted with rapturous applause. “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.”

It was upbeat and inspiring, and it contrasted, not so subtly, with the speech Michelle Obama gave right before her husband’s. She was compelling, maybe more compelling than him, but she had a hard time smiling, and she was dressed in black. “The last time I was in Chicago was to memorialize my mother,” she said. That was two and a half months ago. She added: “I wasn’t even sure I’d be steady enough to stand before you tonight.” Her message was of a piece with the sorrow she felt.

Barack Obama, for his part, was focused on the fight ahead—the hill he believed the Democrats could, and would, climb together, and it reminded one of Obama’s first campaign for the White House.

Way back in 2008, the Illinois senator outlined a liberal-populist agenda, and he forged a multiracial coalition of 69 million supporters, and then he went on to a decisive Electoral College victory. As the first black president, he was poised to point the country toward a post-racial future, one that would finally transcend the violence and hate and division that coursed through the whole American story. 

On Tuesday night, Obama talked about his late mother-in-law and his grandmother—a black woman from the south side of Chicago, and a white woman born in the tiny town of Peru, Kansas. “And yet,” he said, “they shared a basic outlook on life—strong, smart, resourceful women, full of common sense, who, regardless of the barriers they encountered, went about their business without fuss or complaint and provided an unshakable foundation of love for their children and grandchildren.”

Was this not the real American Dream? The overcoming of differences. The transformation of this once-racialized and polarized country into a great, beautifully woven-together “blended family,” as would-be First Gentleman Doug Emhoff put it in his speech earlier in the night.

But all the hope and change that Obama ran on back then did not deliver us from our division. In 2009, the same year Obama took office, the Tea Party sprang to life, with its scorched-Earth politics. In 2012, progressives attacked GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney with “the Hitler treatment,” as Charles Cooke put it in National Review.

“No nation, no society, has ever tried to build a democracy as big and diverse as ours before,” said Obama, “one where our allegiances and our community are defined not by race or blood, but by a common creed.” 

He did not mention that his own story, as inspiring as it was, had also left many Americans bitter and wondering. Consider: When Obama entered the White House, he and his wife, then in their mid-40s, had only recently paid off more than $80,000 in college and law school loans. He still had the look of a University of Chicago law school professor, a man who had never really known money and cared more about ideas and helping people. He seemed anchored.

But by late 2017, less than a year after leaving the White House, he had become one of the top ten highest-paid speakers in the world. Two years later, the Obamas bought a nearly $12 million home on thirty acres of prime Martha’s Vineyard real estate. The former standard-bearers of the new left-wing populism were now charter members of the global elite. Onstage last night, he reminded us of the old Obama, the one who had offered to chart a new way forward that was market-oriented but inclusive, humane. The person who could re-center his party toward the working and middle classes once again. 

Except, of course, it didn’t work out that way.

Which is why, in 2016, 8.4 million voters who voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Donald Trump—because they saw, in their own lives, that the left-wing populist promise Obama offered had not been kept.

They saw that the Democratic Party was no longer the party of the working people. It had become the party of the managerial class, dominated by venture capitalists and Hollywood studio chiefs and university presidents. The old party of the community organizers (which Obama had once been) and union bosses and social workers and schoolteachers had given way to the party of the C-suite: careful, scripted, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi handpicking the Democratic nominee, Harris memeing her way to the Oval Office, dodging questions, smiling, waving. 

Obama seemed not unaware of the complicated legacy he had bequeathed to America, to the world. 

“I know these ideas can feel pretty naive right now,” he said. “We live in a time of such confusion and rancor, with a culture that puts a premium on things that don’t last—money, fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves and then wonder why we feel so alone. We don’t trust each other as much because we don’t take the time to know each other—and in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other.”

But it was Michelle Obama who acknowledged head-on what had happened in 2016, when the rise of Trump seemed like an angry refutation of Barack Obama—not just his administration but the man himself, the promise, the hope, the flickering possibility of a post-racial politics. And it was Michelle Obama who was willing to acknowledge the uncertainty of the road ahead.

“Hope is making a comeback,” she told the crowd, neatly stitching together the Obama campaign of 2008 and the Harris campaign of 2024. 

But then, she said: “To be honest, I am realizing that, until recently, I have mourned the dimming of that hope. Maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings. A deep pit in my stomach. A palpable sense of dread about the future.”

Peter Savodnik is a senior editor for The Free Press. Read his piece “A Vanishing Biden Reappears at the DNC” and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @petersavodnik.

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