Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign against Donald Trump echoes Barack Obama's 2008 effort — but with a key difference, Washington Bureau chief Benjy Sarlin said in a Semafor column Friday.
According to Sarlin, the two candidates might have a lot of differences, but they're both painting themselves in a "post-partisan" era. As Obama said in 2008, it was to “cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past” and move beyond the psychodramas of the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton eras.
Harris is coming amid an era where Trump's rage-posting and rants could finally end "an exhausting decade," he wrote.
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"The selection of Tim Walz helps to crystallize the message, which celebrates the country’s diversity with a deliberately naive 'Ain’t that America for ya!' kind of wonder," quipped Sarlin.
He mentioned Harris' biographical story that “only in America” could two “middle-class kids,” one a “daughter of Oakland” and another “a son of the Nebraska plains,” have a chance to “make it all the way to the White House.”
It's the same philosophy Obama deployed in 2004 about “a skinny kid with a funny name," whose father was an immigrant and whose mother was a Kansan.
"In no other nation is my story possible," Obama said in another famous 2008 Obama speech in Philadelphia.
In the same speech, the former Senator recalled his grandmother's own prejudices and ways to help change it through compassion and education.
On Tuesday, Obama made a similar point: “If a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people.”
"Obamaism has subsequently become more popular as a way to speak to the broadest group of voters possible in plainer language without qualification or apology, even as the party is still comfortably further left on policy than it was in 2008," wrote Sarlin.
The only difference, he pointed out in a post on X, is the d--- jokes, a reference to Obama's use of his hands to show a small Trump "crowd size." It embraces the "hope and change, the patriotism, and the pluralism," he said. And drops "the civility stuff."
