No matter who we are or where we come from
Two presidents back, the U.S. had a man in the Oval Office with no lineup of reactionary allies under criminal investigation. He did not cheat on his wife. Or his taxes. (No, really.) He left office after eight years without himself being under criminal investigation and without instigating a violent attack on the Capitol, undermining the Constitution, or stealing state secrets. His presidency was not everything I might have dreamed, but he did leave the country better off than he found it.
At one point, however, he did have an anger translator. In a series of campaign stops for Democratic candidates on Saturday, Barack Obama did not need one.
Obama has plenty to be angry about. And plenty of anti-American madmen and madwomen among his successor’s cult deserving of it. No longer bound by the strictures of the most powerful political office in the world, Obama cut loose.
The man has a gift, not a grift. Plus, comic timing and a sense of humor.
But this former president was hopscotching across the country not to vilify minorities, the press and political adversaries. Nor to feed a pitiable, bottomless need for adulation. Obama was campaigning to testify to what is at stake in the fall elections for ordinary Americans if Republicans more interested in ruling than governing wrest control of state houses and houses of Congress.
Democracy is at stake in this election. But it is not most people’s most immediate concern. Not for people struggling to fill their gas tanks and to pay their heating and doctor bills and to feed their families. People who work for a living ought to make a living. Obama melded together those concerns with women’s reproductive freedom and upholding representative democracy. They are not separate issues.
Republicans are more interested in misusing power to oppress their enemies. Democrats are more interested in expanding freedom so everyone’s life here gets better [timestamp 1:11:34]:
I know these are tough times, but we’ve been through time before. The important thing is to resist the temptation just to throw our hands up and turn inward, to see politics as a zero-sum game where rules are made to be broken — the only way for people like Us to win is for people like Them to lose — to sink into cynicism.
You know, even in our darkest moments … this country has seen darker moments before. Underneath it all, I believe we’ve had more in common than our politics and our politicians suggest. Even when times are tough, I believe what unites us can be stronger than what divides us.
There have always been certain values that bind us together as citizens no matter who we are or where we come from or what we look like or who we love. We think about our kids, and we think about working hard, and we think about being honest and being fair. Homespun values.
And it doesn’t matter whether you’re on the farm somewhere, or you’re in the inner city, people have a sense of that. It doesn’t matter what your last name is. That’s the promise of America. That’s who we at least want to be. And in this election, you have a chance to do that, to make America live up to what we hope it can be.
I’m guilty of being a bit of a fanboy for my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s pushed for a decade or more to get Democrats to speak American — more like what you just read — instead of with the prefab rhetoric Beltway consultants think reaches people because their messages make sense to them. Democrats are finally, finally beginning to listen.
Let’s hope Obama’s influence is enough to help Democrats hold the line a little more than a week from now. We don’t need this dark moment to get any darker.