Barack and Michelle Obama laid on a memorable double-act at the Democratic convention, savaging Donald Trump with wit and soaring rhetoric while embracing Kamala Harris with their high-wattage star power.
Vice President Harris was acclaimed on the convention’s second night in Chicago as the Democratic candidate to take on Trump in November’s White House election, thanking the crowd from her own rally in Milwaukee, while the Republican appeared at a town in Michigan notorious for its historic links to the Ku Klux Klan.
A ceremonial roll call in Chicago of all 50 states featured appearances by Democratic grandees, up-and-coming politicians, and a high-energy performance by Georgia rapper Lil Jon of his hit with DJ Snake, “Turn Down for What”. He added the line: “We’re not going back!”
While Ms Harris remains fairly unknown to many Americans, her husband Doug Emhoff sought to humanise her with personal details about their relationship and his affection for her raucous laugh, which Trump likes to ridicule along with her first name.
But equal top billing was given to the Obamas, who reminded the cheering thousands present in their home town and voters beyond of why they made such an effective team in the White House until Trump took over in 2017.
The former first lady declared: “America, hope is making a comeback.” Leading the audience in a call and response, she urged disaffected Americans not just to complain but to “do something” by voting in the election.
But eight years after she vowed to counter Trump by taking the “high” road, Mrs Obama showed she was now willing to go toe to toe with the Republican property mogul and counter his dark vision of “crime, chaos, destruction and death” if he loses in November.
Trump, she said, felt “threatened” by the success of the black Obamas and noted his deeply controversial remark that immigrants were taking away low-paid “black jobs”. The White House was just such a job after her husband’s presidency, Mrs Obama stressed.
Barack Obama then took the stage after a rapturous sendoff from the crowd to his wife, admitting: “I am the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama.”
It was 20 years on from Mr Obama’s first speech to a Democratic convention, a barnstorming performance that launched the little-known Illinois politician’s national career with an appeal to unity between Republicans and Democrats.
America’s first black president returned to the unity theme by quoting the words of his Illinois predecessor Abraham Lincoln, who appealed in 1861 on the eve of the US Civil War to “the better angels of our nature”.
Mr Obama insisted the country was ready to elect its first woman president in Ms Harris, who has Jamaican and Indian heritage. When someone in the crowd reprised his campaign slogan “Yes we can”, he ad libbed: “Yes, she can.”
He also called Trump “a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago”.
“It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually gotten worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala,” he said, noting Trump’s “weird obsession” with crowd sizes and using his hands in a comedic gesture that seemed to poke fun at Trump’s anatomy, to the crowd’s roaring delight.
It was not only Democrats on the stage last night in Chicago’s United Center. Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who is now a strong critic of him, said he was a political fraud who in private mocks his white working-class fans as “basement dwellers”.
“He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth,” she said. “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people. And she has my vote.”
