“Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” former first lady Michelle Obama said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday. “A familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for too long.”
“You know what I’m talking about? It’s the contagious power of hope!” she said, adding: “America, hope is making a comeback.”
The rhetoric harkened back to Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008 — when Democrats ran on hope and change.
But when you think about it, it’s kind of brutal toward Kamala Harris’s predecessor as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Michelle Obama was quite clearly implying that the party, and perhaps the country, had lost hope under Joe Biden, and that it took Harris to bring that hope back.
Few Democrats have gone so far as to openly admit how bad the vibes had gotten. Even before Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June, his polling had been quite poor for nearly a year. More and more people in the party began to view defeat as highly likely, if not inevitable. Since then, hope has indeed returned, but in this new era of good feelings, few Democrats have publicly dwelled on how bleak things had been.
The speech crystallized something fascinating about how the presidential contest has changed in the past month — namely, that Harris seems to have become the “change” candidate who can channel hopes for the future, even though her administration currently runs Washington and she is the incumbent vice president.
In part, that’s because Harris is younger — not being an octogenarian or even a septuagenarian — and because her election would be a demographic first.
But it’s also because her opponent Donald Trump has already served as president, and has incessantly dominated the nation’s politics and much of its mental mindshare for the past decade. Not only is Trump obsessed with relitigating controversies and grudges from his first term, but he also has too much of a political history at this point to credibly promise he could lead the country in a truly new direction.
When the public is dissatisfied, a newer, lesser-known change candidate can have a real advantage. Without having been in power, such a candidate can be all things to all people; they can represent the public’s hopes, having not yet disappointed them.
Barack Obama thought this was crucial in his rise to political prominence, “I serve as a blank screen,” he wrote in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
Harris has benefited from a similar dynamic. She has given Democrats, and voters generally, who were disappointed or disillusioned under Biden a reason to hope she will be different in a way that they like.
That was on display Tuesday, when both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former American Express CEO Ken Chenault spoke effusively about Harris not too far removed from each other. It’s also been evident in how protests of Biden’s Israel policies have been far less of a factor at the convention than many expected. And it’s front and center in the campaign’s rhetoric that Harris wants to go forward, not back.
The risk of being the change candidate is that you are less experienced, but being the incumbent veep helps Harris with that. Currently, she appears to be getting the benefits of experience from serving under Biden without the downsides of being held accountable for his record.
The Trump team now very much wants to recouple Harris and Biden — blaming her for the inflation, foreign crises, and border chaos that have occurred in the past four years. In the face of these attacks, Harris’s task is to ensure voters keep viewing her as the new and hopeful future, rather than the past.
