() – Several political lifetimes ago, Barack Obama followed Bruce Springsteen onstage at a huge rally under the Cleveland skyline and declared, “An uprising is coming.”
That promise, which made reference to one of the rock icon’s hits, became a reality days later, when Obama won the 2008 presidential election.
The band reunited Thursday night in Georgia. The former president, now 63 years old and still the most compelling figure in the Democratic Party, and “The Boss,” as Springsteen is known, made their bid to push Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the critical key state.
Springsteen, before strumming “Land of Hope and Dreams,” declared that Harris “is running to be the 47th president of the United States. Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant. “He doesn’t understand this country, its history, or what it means to be deeply American.”
Obama seized on recent interviews in which John Kelly, former White House chief of staff during the Republican administration, described the 45th president as a would-be dictator and said he had expressed a desire to be served by generals like those who surrounded Adolf Hitler. Trump denied the information on Thursday. “I never said that,” he said in Las Vegas.
But Obama warned: “Just because he acts ridiculous doesn’t mean his presidency isn’t dangerous.” He continued: “I want to explain that in politics a good rule of thumb is: don’t say you want to do something like Hitler… But it’s useful because it gives us a snapshot of how Donald Trump thinks.”
Harris recalled to the huge crowd in Clarkston, an Atlanta suburb, her trip to the launch of Obama’s first presidential campaign in Springfield, Illinois, in 2007.
“I went there to support this brilliant young senator who was running for president of the United States,” he said. “Millions of Americans were motivated and inspired not only by Barack Obama’s message, but by his leadership, seeking to unite us rather than separate us.”
But the sense of imminent change that danced in the frigid air that February morning is not felt this year in the grueling fight for every vote, amid Democratic fear that Obama’s nemesis, Trump, is about to regain power. .
And Obama’s return to center stage raises the question of whether, 12 years after his last election victory, he has the political strength to unseat the former president and possibly future president.
Obama is once again feeling “the fierce urgency of the present.” The 44th president is putting in more miles on the campaign trail than at any time since he left the White House nearly eight years ago. He has implored voters from Pittsburgh to Tucson to Las Vegas to back Harris, and by the end of the week, his campaign will have touched down in all seven major battleground states.
“We don’t need to see what an older, crazier Donald Trump looks like without guardrails,” Obama said this week in Detroit. “The United States is ready to turn the page. “We are ready for a better story.”
Trump is angered by Obama’s savage mockery and has begun to claim that the once-young prophet of hope is “worn out” and “looking a little older.” That’s funny coming from a 78-year-old man talking about a gym-addicted rival.
But the country’s first black president, who once praised his generation of voters as a “people of unlikely hope,” sounds much less optimistic as Americans prepare to deliver a third straight verdict on Trump.
The controlled fury of his Thursday night speech and his intense engagement this week show that the November election is more than just a race for Harris: It’s a battle that will show whether anyone is still listening.
It has often been said that Obama’s legacy is at stake in this election, and it is true that in a new term, Trump could try to repeal the Affordable Care Act and eradicate the economic and climate policy reforms that the former vice president of Obama was launched by President Joe Biden as the next step in a Democratic project spanning parts of three decades.
This election may embody the final showdown between Obamaism—a racially diverse, multigenerational movement for grassroots change—and the reactionary politics of Trumpism.
But more than that, Obama today seems desperate to convince his public that his life project—political change—is even possible and that democracy remains the vehicle to carry it out.
“Who we vote for matters, not because it will change all the problems we have. No president, no vice president, no senator, no governor is going to solve all the problems,” Obama said in Madison, Wisconsin, this week. “We are not going to eliminate poverty overnight. We’re not going to change race relations right away. We are born in history and change takes time.”
The man who once told ecstatic crowds that “we are the change we seek” offered a much more pragmatic speech, warning: “Sometimes I think we expect too much, and then we are disappointed when everything is not resolved immediately.”
Obama’s caustic criticism of Trump, his talent for framing the stakes of an election, and the way he has made a much more compelling case for Harris’s election than she herself has managed so far, show that his political skills have not diminished. He is conveying what he has done for others in the same way that former President Bill Clinton did in 2012 to help boost Obama’s re-election bid.
That has helped his supporters accept Harris — just three years younger than Obama at 60 — as the next recipient of his torch.
Kristen Roland, a high school teacher from Oakland County, Michigan, was filled with nostalgia as she waited to see Obama in Detroit and wore a black 2008 campaign T-shirt to commemorate the moment.
“He instilled in America a hope that maybe didn’t exist before,” Roland said. “I think it set the stage for someone like Kamala to come in and maybe fulfill some of the promises that she made.” Roland doesn’t know if Harris can beat Trump in Michigan, a battleground state, but he said he was more hopeful than at any other time this election season when he saw thousands of people lining up to see Obama.
“If he trusts her,” Roland said, “other people should trust her too.”
At rallies, Obama defends Harris, whom he has known for two decades, but spends most of his time defending Trump in a defiant tone.
He returns again and again to one of his classic phrases: “Don’t boo, vote,” as he tries to make sense of this moment.
“I understand why people seek to change things. “I understand that, but what I can’t understand is why anyone would think that Donald Trump will change things in a way that is good for you, because there is absolutely no evidence that this man thinks about anyone but himself.” Obama said Thursday night in Georgia, as he has at his other pro-Harris rallies.
Obama’s words have his usual preachy tone, which suits Janavus Davis, a barber from Detroit who came to see him to remember a political era that has passed.
Davis feels there is a lot of skepticism about Harris, but believes Obama’s message will dispel any fears or concerns about the election of the first female president.
“We still hear it, that’s why all these people are here,” Davis said. “When he was president, I felt like he kept people calm. Now that Kamala is here, it’s time for a black woman. I think it’s possible. “I think it should happen.”
Yet for all his political skills, Obama has sometimes failed to transfer his idiosyncratic appeal to other leaders. He failed to make Hillary Clinton president despite campaigning for her in the final days of the 2016 race. And the fact that he remains the Democratic Party’s most prominent political star, 16 years after his first election as president and eight years after handing over the White House to Trump, it says as much about his party as it does about Obama’s aura.
Harris faces a much more challenging environment than then-Senator Obama faced in 2008. He was the insurgent after an eight-year Republican presidency marred by George W. Bush’s failures in Iraq and New Orleans, which left the country desperate for a change. This year’s Democratic candidate is the head of an unpopular government. Young Obama voters, intoxicated with hope in 2008, are entering middle age with the same hardships from high food prices and mortgage rates that Trump voters are experiencing. And although Springsteen is the poet of America’s working class, many blue-collar voters have abandoned Democrats in recent elections in favor of Trump’s populist Republican Party.
Then there’s the question of whether support from heavyweights like Springsteen (and Beyoncé, who will align with Harris down the stretch) really makes a difference. Springsteen is no political novice: He headlined a massive rally for John Kerry in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2004, before the Democratic candidate lost to Bush. So while big events like Thursday’s bring back memories of the rock and political anthems of yesteryear, there’s no guarantee they’ll work politically.
Bruce Springsteen lashes out at Trump as he urges voting for Harris
David Urban, a political commentator and Republican operative who choreographed Trump’s crucial victory in Pennsylvania in 2016, recalled a star-studded rally in Philadelphia supporting Clinton on the eve of that year’s election, with Obama, Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi.
“The next day, guess what happened? We beat up Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania… If I were (in Georgia), I might go listen to Bruce Springsteen tonight, but I don’t think it matters at all going into November 5th,” Urban told ‘s Erin Burnett.
Still, the likelihood that this election will be decided by thousands of votes in just a few states means that even if Obama and Springsteen get some people to the polls, it could make a difference. And the former president is about to be overshadowed by the biggest political star in his family. Former first lady Michelle Obama, who has become a female icon, will campaign with Harris on Saturday in Michigan.
Right now, major events are more about getting a party’s voters to the polls than about changing minds. That’s a message Obama learned 16 years ago and repeated Thursday in his first moments on stage.
“Go vote, return your absentee ballots,” he shouted.
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