He summoned the legacy of Lewis and the civil-rights movement, but he withheld his typical reassurance that despite everything, the best of America would win out. Nor did Obama conclude his speech with the uplifting peroration that has been his trademark. “This administration,” he said, “has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win.” If Biden is telling voters that “the soul of America” is on the ballot, Obama told them that its very system of government is at risk. Though he ticked off a rapid-fire summation of the progressive Biden-Harris agenda, Obama did not tell Americans that Trump would take away their health care, or ignore climate change, or deport immigrants, or even threaten national security. What was striking about Obama’s argument, however, was how little it was grounded in the traditional policy battles of the past decade. Read Barack Obama’s Eulogy for John Lewis Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.” Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. One hundred and seventy thousand Americans dead. And the consequences of that failure are severe. He went on: “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job, because he can’t. “For close to four years now,” Obama said, “he’s shown no interest in putting in the work no interest in finding common ground no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.” He took him on much more directly tonight, and more aggressively than any ex-president has criticized his successor in recent political memory. And last month in Atlanta, he used his eulogy for the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia to assail-without naming the president-Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service and other efforts at voter suppression. That restraint ended initially when Obama campaigned for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018.

The humor in Trump has been gone for a while now, but for his first few years out of office, Obama held back on his successor as he kept away from the near-daily controversies and scandals emanating from the White House. Donald Trump was once a joke to Obama, a “carnival barker” who he famously mocked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as Trump sat and watched with a frozen smile. “Don’t let them take away your democracy.”ĭevoid of an audience and its usual rapturous applause, Obama sounded at times like a disappointed father, his sighs audible as he delivered a speech he never thought he’d give. “Do not let them take away your power,” Obama said. In a stark, sober address from Philadelphia during the virtual Democratic National Convention, a man elected a dozen long years ago on a gauzy promise of “hope and change” found himself instead turning to fear as a rallying cry. The former president offered no thousand-watt smiles or soaring rhetoric as he exhorted voters to elect Joe Biden and warned them about the perils of giving Donald Trump another four years in the White House. Barack Obama didn’t try to inspire Americans tonight: He wanted to scare them.

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