Barack And Michelle Obama Are Fired Up: DNC Night 2

This episode focuses on the powerful speeches delivered by Barack and Michelle Obama during the second night of the Democratic National Convention, emphasizing their support for Kamala Harris and their views on current political issues.

1. Michelle Obama delivered a powerful critique of Donald Trump, marking a significant shift from her previous public persona.
2. The episode highlighted the Democratic Party's efforts to unite various factions, from lifelong Democrats to disillusioned Republicans.
3. Barack Obama's speech focused on the continuity of democratic values and the need for a unified approach to governance.
4. The personal stories shared, particularly by Michelle Obama, underscored the human element in political discourse.
5. The strategic positioning of the DNC aimed to broaden its appeal beyond the traditional Democratic base.

1: Opening Remarks

Hosts introduce the episode and set the stage for discussing the Obamas' speeches. Susan Davis: "It really felt like Michelle Obama was the news coming out of tonight."

2: Michelle Obama's Speech

Discussion on Michelle Obama's shift in rhetoric and her direct attacks on Donald Trump. Michelle Obama: "For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us."

3: Barack Obama's Speech

Analysis of Barack Obama's defense of democratic values and his subtle endorsement of Kamala Harris. Barack Obama: "We are ready for a President Kamala Harris."

4: DNC Strategy

Exploration of the DNC's strategy to include voices from various political backgrounds to expand its electoral appeal. Mara Liasson: "They were there to create what people call a permission structure."

5: Closing Remarks

Recap of the night's themes and a teaser for future convention coverage. Susan Davis: "And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics podcast."

• Engage in informed discussions about political events to understand their broader implications.
• Evaluate the impact of rhetoric in politics and its power to influence public opinion.
• Consider the importance of diverse representation in political events to ensure a wide range of perspectives.
• Reflect on personal values and how they align with political leaders or movements.
• Stay informed about political processes and participate in democratic practices such as voting.

President Obama and Michelle Obama delivered rousing speeches on the second night of the Democratic National Convention. Lil Jon performed during the ceremonial roll call. And Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff delivered a speech about the role Kamala Harris plays in his blended family.

This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.

The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.

People

Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump

Content Warnings:

None

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Deepa Shivaram
Hey there.

Susan Davis
It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

Deepa Shivaram
I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House.

Mara Liasson
And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

Susan Davis
And it is 11:16 p.m. central time on Tuesday, August 20, and the second night of the Democratic National Convention just wrapped with former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama headlining.

Mara, I expected to start this podcast off talking about the former president, but it really felt like Michelle Obama was the news coming out of tonight.

Mara Liasson
No doubt about it. She stole the spotlight. She hit it out of the park. I can't think of a figure that is more beloved and even worshipped in the Democratic Party. The ovation she got was like, no other speaker here. And even Barack Obama said something like, I'm the only person here stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama. But she did an amazing thing.

I sometimes think about this convention as the political equivalent of speed dating. They have to define Kamala Harris as fast as possible. They have very little time to do it before the Republicans do it for them. And she got right to it. I thought that my reaction when they both spoke was, wow, the communicators are back. And she gave a kind of masterclass in rhetoric and how to give a personal, emotional, moral speech that really told a story. She called Kamala Harris my girl Kamala. She made this bond. She talked about how Kamala Harris and I both have similar mothers. They both have the same foundational values. And the other thing that I was struck by about Michelle Obama is, of course, her watchword last time was, when they go low, we go high. Very above the fray. Very. Nope, no more.

Michelle Obama
For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us.

See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happen to be black.

I want to know who's going to tell him? Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs?

Deepa Shivaram
It was such a moment because, I mean, this is the same Michelle Obama who, you know, would have been criticized so much if she was, you know, using this kind of rhetoric, talking this way if she were in the White House, inconceivable. Inconceivable. And for her to have this moment on stage, you know, as you said, sue, like, this was not a night where we were going to come out of it thinking, oh, Michelle Obama's speech was the speech. This was the speech. And to give her energy and say, you know, Kamala Harris and I were the same. Kamala Harris. We have the same mom. We were raised with the same values. And then to take that and turn it to Donald Trump and go back and reference Trump's comments from just a couple weeks ago when he was speaking in Chicago at the National association of Black Journalist conference, using this phrase, black.

Mara Liasson
Jobs, which immigrants were coming to take.

Deepa Shivaram
Your black, your black jobs. And, you know, a lot of folks were just like, what is a black?

Mara Liasson
And he's used it before.

That wasn't the first time he said.

Susan Davis
That to me, the speech with Michelle Obama was, like, metaphorically, when you talk about someone who's, like, pulling their hair back and taking their earrings out, like, it was a much more aggressive and political Michelle Obama. And this is something she has talked about a lot. She's talked about how she felt like she would present to the world as first lady, how she was constantly aware of blackness in the White House. She was so aware of what it meant to present to the country as the first. I mean, she has spoken so extensively about this, and tonight she seemed so.

Mara Liasson
Freed of that, much more liberated and.

Susan Davis
So comfortable and frankly, like, the crowd loved it. And to your point, Deepa, like, that is not a speech potential first lady Michelle Obama could have ever dreamed of giving in 2007. And it was such a stark contrast to how she started in politics and yet how much more powerful she is in the Democratic Party.

Mara Liasson
She's talked about that a lot. She's written about it in her memoir. She even talked about what it was like to be black at Princeton, you know, the constant kind of, you know, burden of trying to live up to who you're supposed to be.

Deepa Shivaram
You talk about, you know, a Michelle Obama who gave a speech tonight that she would not have made, you know, maybe even eight years ago at the 2016 convention. This is not that Michelle Obama vibe. She said at the end, you know, the vibes are good, right? You're feeling a lot of hope and change. You're feeling a lot of good stuff here with the last couple weeks of a Kamala Harris campaign. That's not gonna be what the next 77 days are gonna look like, because Republicans and the other, the people on the other side of the aisle are going to attack Kamala Harris. They're going to distort her message. They're going to distort her story. And I felt like when I was hearing Michelle Obama say that, it was like she has such an authority to speak on that because that's exactly what happened to her and her husband, Barack Obama, when they were in the White House.

Mara Liasson
But she used that to say, okay, now I'm going to give you the ask. Do something.

Michelle Obama
This is our time to stand up for what we know in our hearts is right.

To stand up, not just for our basic freedoms, but for decency and humanity, for basic respect, dignity, and empathy, for the values at the very foundation of this democracy.

It's up to us to remember what Kamala's mother told her. Don't just sit around and complain. Do something.

Susan Davis
And of course, President Obama spoke tonight as well.

Barack Obama
We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse.

America's ready for a new chapter.

America's ready for a better story.

We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.

Susan Davis
It was also not at all subtle what the Obamas were trying to do tonight. There has been a lot of references among Democrats to feeling for the first time like they felt back in 2008. And that was a lot of the message tonight. Even at one point when Barack Obama was talking, he said, yes, she can.

Mara Liasson
Yeah, but he was a little defensive, I thought. First of all, he gave a very powerful speech. Also, he connected big themes and why democracy is important for our national security, et cetera. But he also said, at one point, he said, I know this might sound naive. He's come under a lot of criticism for being the Kumbaya president. You know, unity. No red states, no blue states, just United States. Well, look what happened after he left. The country is even more divided and polarized than ever.

He said, these ideas can sound naive, but they're still really important.

And I think that was the message that this convention wanted to hear. Not that it was sugar coated or that the divisions and polarization don't exist, but that unity and purpose are still worth fighting for.

Deepa Shivaram
Yeah, I thought, you know, one thing we've been talking about a lot is the Harris Obama relationship because it has gone back so many years. Right? Like, she endorsed him in 2007. He endorsed her when she was running for Senate in that, in that California Senate primary. So there is a relationship here between the two of them that goes back decades at this point. But one thing I really noticed was when Obama started his remarks, he kind of mentioned the fact that he and Kamala Harris have a funny name, right. And share that. And it just really reminded me of 2019 when Kamala Harris was running for president for the first time.

And she really talked about Obama a lot. Like halfway through when her poll numbers were dropping, she wasn't doing too well in Iowa. She talked about caucusing for him in 2008 and the night before the Iowa caucus, and she knocked on a black woman's door. It was an 85 year old black woman. And she said, you know, you should come out. You should caucus for Barack Obama tomorrow. And this woman looked at her and said, they're not gonna let him win.

And she, at this event in Iowa, told the story of, like, how she saw that same woman caucusing for Obama the next day and that people need to take a chance sometimes and imagine, you know, a candidate, a president that they'd never seen before. And I felt like Obama's speech really brought that back.

Susan Davis
All right, let's take a quick break. More in a moment.

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Susan Davis
And we're back. And just a reminder to hit the follow button for the show in your app, if you haven't already. We'll be here all week, as they say. And there's much more to talk about. What happened tonight, including the number of former Trump officials or never Trumpers who were given a speaking slot tonight. Mara, these are not unusual voices we've heard from a lot of Republicans who have distanced themselves from the party. What's the point of putting them at a democratic convention?

Mara Liasson
The point of putting them at a democratic convention is to appeal to other Republicans who dont like Donald Trump. They were there to create what people call a permission structure so that other independent voters, republican leading voters, say, okay, I see people up there, the republican mayor of Mesa or former republican members of Congress, and I can, you know, its okay for me to vote for Kamala Harris. That's what the Harris ticket wants. Because unlike Donald Trump and the Republican Party, this is a convention that's trying to go beyond the democratic base. The Republicans don't really have to go beyond their base because they can win with a minority of votes. They can win with fewer votes than their opponent. That sounds kind of screwy, but that's how we elect presidents in this country. Donald Trump only needed 46% of the vote to win in 2016.

Deepa Shivaram
I mean, I was at an event this morning with Jen O'Malley Dillon from the Harris campaign who said pretty much exactly that, that they need a wide coalition. This is not an election where they can just rely on the backbone of the Democratic Party to turn out their voters. And we can all go home now. Like, that is not going to work.

Mara Liasson
They never can.

Deepa Shivaram
No, they never can. And especially this November, especially in this election.

And I think that's where you really hear, especially on that issue of reproductive freedom, that they are hammering home again and again and again, a line that Kamala Harris often says, and I wouldn't be shocked if we hear it from her on Thursday night, which is that you don't have to abandon in your faith or your deeply held beliefs to know that, like, the government shouldn't have any place in, you know, just making decisions about what you can do with your own body. And it's that callback of saying, you know, you have a place here even if you believed something differently beforehand or if you voted a different way beforehand. And so that is something that I think with all the republican leaders on stage, with former Trump officials on stage, it's really sending that message to voters that, like, you might not have been here before, but the door is still open.

Mara Liasson
And that's why Democrats did better than anyone expected, including themselves, in 2022.

Susan Davis
And, of course, tonight, there was Doug Emhoff, Harris husband, also known as Dougie. Also known as Dougie. He gave the time honored convention tribute that comes from the spouse. And he spoke of Harris in very personal and very affectionate terms.

Doug Emhoff
DOug and those of you who belong to blended families know that they can be a little complicated.

But as soon as our kids started calling her momla, I knew we'd be okay.

Ella Ella calls us a three headed parenting machine.

Kamala and Kirsten, thank you both.

Thank you both for always putting your family and the kids first.

Susan Davis
Deepa, what did you make of his speech?

Deepa Shivaram
The thing that was really interesting for me to watch is, you know, I remember meeting Doug Emma for the first time in 2019. He is not a person who was looking for the spotlight. He is the person standing quietly in the back of the room taking pictures of his wife so he can post them on his instagram page later. He is not someone who is really made for a big stage like this. So this required a lot from him and a lot of rehearsal from him and a lot of work from him to deliver this message.

But I think he delivered it really authentically. And I think that is Doug Emhoff's superpower, is that he shows up exactly how he is. And I think a lot of folks who are close to the couple that is Doug Emhoff and Kamala Harris would say that he helps her show up as authentically as she is as well.

Mara Liasson
People who can make fun of themselves as he did in all those dorky stories about them dating Tim Walls does this too. People who can make fun of themselves, that's a superpower in politics.

Susan Davis
It's like they're giving lovable dad vibes. And it seems both partly authentic but partly a bit of a concerted strategy to say, look at us. Just typical american.

Deepa Shivaram
Yeah.

Mara Liasson
But it didn't felt. It didn't feel made up.

Susan Davis
That's what I mean.

Mara Liasson
Clearly. It clearly was emphasized for political purposes. But it had. It had some kind of basis in truth.

Deepa Shivaram
Basis and truth. And I will say it's not just good vibes. Right? Like, there's political nature of this too, which is like, you hear Doug Emhoff talk about his fantasy football team. You hear him going to the NFL draft and going to these events. There are a group of voters out there, namely white men, who are not looking at Kamala Harris and saying, oh, yeah, that's my candidate. I relate to that. And there is a relatability that Doug Emhoff brings to Kamala Harris is that she is going to need to bring.

Mara Liasson
Different tomorrow when we hear from coach walls.

Deepa Shivaram
Wait till coach walls bringing that same exact energy. But when he mentioned his fantasy football team on stage tonight, I was like, that was on purpose. There's a whole group of people.

Mara Liasson
There's a lot of things done here this week.

Susan Davis
That's an act.

I do think, too, there is a little bit of the Harris Emhoff family to me that is in that, like, we've come a long way, baby element of american politics in that it's a blended family. Kamala Harris has never had children. She is his second wife. She has stepchildren. A very common story in american families, but not something very common to the White House.

Mara Liasson
And what, well, except for Donald Trump, yes.

Susan Davis
But this is what I'm saying. What's become sort of normal and typical and okay is I think has changed very quickly in a short period of time. And it's almost a non issue of what the makeup is of the family, of the first family these days, which is a very different turn than when Barack Obama ran in 2007 even.

Mara Liasson
And whats really interesting to me is that Kamala Harris is not running explicitly to be the first anything. Shes not focusing on her gender or her race. Hillary Clinton talked about that more than I think Kamala Harris has ever done on the trail.

And thatsits obviously, the fact that shed be the first is obvious and inescapable, but thats not something that she is saying is the reason people should vote for her.

Susan Davis
I think Doug Emhoff might be embracing identity politics, though, because he seemed very ready to be first gentleman, first jewish gentleman.

Mara Liasson
She certainly is it first.

Susan Davis
Mensch was the first.

Deepa Shivaram
Mensch was a sign.

Mara Liasson
That's good. That's good.

Susan Davis
All right. More to come this week. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow night after night. Three of the DNC concludes in Chicago. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics.

Deepa Shivaram
I'm Deepa Shivram. I cover the White House.

Mara Liasson
And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.

Susan Davis
And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.

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