Michelle Obama only once mentioned the white elephant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by name. But she succeeded in throwing more shade than any elephant could.
She followed a video earlier in the night from Kristin Urquiza who lost her father, Mark, to the coronavirus. His “only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump,” she explained. On his deathbed, he felt betrayed.
“Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country…. He is clearly in over his head,” Obama said. “It is what it is.”
Obama threw back at him his own words about the 170,000 dead Americans — dead on his watch from his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and from the division and chaos of the presidency that followed Barack Obama’s.
Heart. Soul. Conscience. Empathy. Michelle Obama is everything the acting president is not, and showed it Monday night. But that was not the contrast she was there to help paint.
“The average guy is important to him,” said Gregg Weaver, a former Amtrak conductor, in a video tribute to former Vice President Joe Biden. The portrait of Biden’s daily rail commute and Obama’s speech portrayed a man both empathetic and authentic. “A profoundly decent man, guided by faith,” Obama said, “who will “govern as someone who’s lived a life that the rest of us can recognize.” More shade.
But there was unsettling darkness to go with it moments before when Obama warned:
So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.
And in the face of racism and voter purges, intimidation and lies about ballot security, we have to vote in numbers that cannot be ignored, Obama said, adding:
We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.
We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.
Obama was as deadly serious as the virus killing off our neighbors. It felt like a call to battle. Really.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) earlier thanked his supporters for helping advance issues on which he campaigned. He urged their support for Joe Biden, warning, “The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake.”
Obama’s underlying message is that if Biden does not replace the autocrat in the White House in January the republic might not survive to see it.
What worries me is voting in November may already be too late. Will Bunch describes what is happening right now as a coup-by-mail. Democrats talk of holding hearings and undoing the damage to the Post Office the president’s lackeys have done to threaten an election that will be conducted largely by mail. But those mail sorting machines have not simply been removed. By some reports, they’ve already been destroyed. “This is a nine-alarm fire for American democracy,” Bunch writes.
Eric Boehlert notes what’s missing in reporting on vandalism of the USPS: “Trump threatens Postal Service funding to sabotage vote count.”
Don’t just watch the convention. Get busy. Now.
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