The Daily Populous Friday August 23rd, 2024 night edition
Authored by esquire.com and submitted by LosFelizCB

CHICAGO—Late Tuesday night, we saw a vivid demonstration of the difference between a charismatic political event and the gathering of a cult. Michelle and Barack Obama delivered back-to-back addresses to the Democratic National Convention that were rich in insight and passion, and that further moved an audience that by all rights should have been exhausted before either Obama took the stage. This may have been because these were two different Obamas—tougher, battle-hardened, and infinitely more familiar with the forces aligned against them than they were when we first met the two of them back in 2004.

Oh, and Barack made a dick joke, too.

Michelle went first. Fierce and passionate, she was not there for the “when they go low, we go high” business that proved so impotent against the challenge of reckless and abandoned wrath. They’ve already gone low, Michelle said, so now we go for the jugular.

[Harris] understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business—if we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No. We don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No. We put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something....

....It couldn’t be more obvious. Of the two major candidates in this race, only Kamala Harris truly understands the unseen labor and unwavering commitment that has always made America great. Now, unfortunately, we know what comes next. We know folks are going to do everything they can to distort her truth. My husband and I sadly know a little something about this. 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—I want to know—who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him, that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?

For years, Republicans lived in public terror that Michelle Obama would run for president. They used her name as a talisman to quell the jelly in their bellies, and then as the wick on the gaslight they used to gin up the rubes. Tuesday night’s speech showed definitively that the GOP was lowballing the risk of her getting involved in politics at this level. They don’t have anyone in her weight class, and now everybody knows it.

By contrast, and all dick jokes aside, her husband was almost...pensive. All week there had been references to his breakthrough speech to the DNC in Boston twenty years earlier. My own feelings on that speech are well-known. I thought it radically underestimated the forces of reaction that already existed to the point of near-banality, and I believe that perception has been validated over the past two decades. This is the third time in a row that the Republican party has nominated for president a vulgar talking yam. I’d say there probably are red states and blue states and that, despite all the Little League coaches and churchgoing citizens, there is an unappeasable vengeance in the land and that it finally found its voice. And that the warning of John Dos Passos had already come true—all right, we are two nations.

At the end of his speech, the former president delivered something like a plea. For all his life, the late John Lewis talked about “building the beloved community.” He never said it had been achieved. For that matter, he never guaranteed that it would be, only that the struggle to build it was how the country would move forward. “I may not get there with you,” Dr. King told an audience in Memphis the night before he was murdered. There is nothing certain but the next steps. Twenty years ago, Barack Obama said with great confidence that the country he described was out there, whole and united, just waiting for people of goodwill to scrape off all the foul encrustations of modern politics. On Tuesday night, he declared, with hard-won wisdom, that it’s going to take more than that.

That’s the America Kamala Harris and Tim Walz believe in: an America where “we, the people” includes everyone. Because that’s the only way this American experiment works. And despite what our politics might suggest, I think most Americans understand that. Democracy isn’t just a bunch of abstract principles and dusty laws in some book somewhere. It’s the values we live by. It’s the way we treat each other, including those who don’t look like us or pray like us or see the world exactly like we do.

That sense of mutual respect has to be part of our message. Our politics have become so polarized these days that all of us across the political spectrum seem so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue. We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out-yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out, or they don’t bother to vote.

For the first time since we came to know him, Barack Obama, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, no longer refuses to see things as they are and says why. He knows the why. He’s felt the why. He and his formidable partner in life see a political movement that needs to be crushed, utterly, until its powers of mass delusion are merely a dark memory. Michelle Obama brought the sword. Barack Obama brought the shield. And he still sees things that never were and says, “Why not?” Which makes him who he is and always will be.