Michelle Obama went high — and right for the jugular
The impact of Barack Obama’s keynote lay in its ability to convey what was — what remains — most inspiring about America. Before a cheering crowd in a cavernous convention hall, he offered his own unlikely story — “the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too” — as a tribute to the “the greatness of our nation.”
The 2004 election, with the nation mired in an unpopular war and a campaign that featured the eventual Swiftboating of Democratic nominee John Kerry, was not exactly a time of harmony. Yet it was impossible to listen to Obama’s speech and not feel good about the country that produced the speaker. If there was a certain gauziness to his assurances of red- and blue-state commonality, it was easy to ignore that in the passion of the moment. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” Obama asserted. “There’s the United States of America.”
Michelle Obama’s speech, in the quarantine-induced quiet of her home, spoke instead to the undeniably grim reality of America under Trump. The odd intimacy of the setting reinforced the power of the message. It was impossible to listen to her words and not feel worried about the nation’s future. “It’s a hard time, and everyone’s feeling it in different ways,” she began, and so ensued 18 minutes of relentless indictment of President Trump, even if she deigned to mention his name only once.
“Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country,” Obama said. “He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us.” And, in a devastating borrowing of Trump’s own language about the pandemic: “It is what it is.”
As much as her husband had embraced “the audacity of hope,” Michelle Obama emphasized the imminence — and intensity — of the threat posed by a second Trump term. “So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election,” she said. “If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”
The distance between these two speeches says so much about the journey the country has been on in the intervening years, both glorious and terrible. The 2004 keynote offered a glimpse of a better America, one that could, and did, go on to elect a Black president, twice. But we know now the ugliness that accompanied that achievement — the relentless birtherism championed by no one more than Trump himself; the racial resentments that spilled over in Charleston, S.C., and Charlottesville — and the tragic denouement of Trump’s election.
Barack Obama spoke of Little League coaches in blue states and gay friends in red ones. “There is not a Black American and a White America,” he proclaimed. Michelle Obama was more — well, more realistic. “We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention,” she said, and she meant that her very presence was a provocation to some. She called out Trump’s unrepentant racism: “Here at home, as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered, stating the simple fact that a Black life matters is still met with derision from the nation’s highest office.”
Of course, there is another Obama speech that bears mentioning: Michelle Obama’s address on behalf of Hillary Clinton four years ago, in which she memorably insisted that “when they go low, we go high.” Monday night, Obama offered an updated defense of that approach, asserting that going high need not mean going limp in the face of evil. “Going high,” she said, “means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold, hard truth.”
The cold, hard truth. That’s what Michelle Obama delivered. She went high — and right for the jugular.
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