President Obama will command center stage at the Democratic convention Wednesday night, in an attempt to rekindle the Democratic voter passion that launched his own political rise and transfer it to his one-time campaign rival Hillary Clinton.
Obama, buoyed by some of his highest popularity ratings of his presidency but still struggling to convince voters that the country is on the right track, will try to tap into Democratic nostalgia about his own path to power — the promises of hope and change that had younger and minority voters fired up and turning out in record numbers in 2008.
That task is far more difficult now after Bernie Sanders wrested the change message from Clinton early on, leaving her to cast herself as the “steady-hand” alternative.
Obama also has a hard act to follow in his own first lady. Michelle Obama on Monday night managed to bring down the house with her positive, highly personal message that the country is an incredible place that has overcome so many challenges, including slavery, and has little resemblance to Donald Trump’s dark depiction at the GOP convention last week.
The message of steady leadership is also a much harder sell after recent racial unrest and police violence, as well as new fears of Islamic State attacks at home and abroad.
The president has spent the last two weeks furiously working on his speech and plans to lay out a “stark” choice for voters between continuing on the path he set or taking the country backward, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday.
He will try to remind voters that he has presided over the “longest strength of job growth in our nation’s history” and helped change “the way the world views the United State for the better,” Schultz said.
The president, Schultz said, plans to make the case that his “record of accomplishment over the last eight years” should demonstrate why the nation should “continue on this path and not regress, but also why Secretary Clinton is uniquely qualified to make the decision a commander in chief would have to make.”
Michael Czin, who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign during the primary and Obama’s 2012 re-election as well as the Democratic National Committee in 2014, told the Washington Examiner that Obama will need to continue to build on the argument the first lady made on Monday and the personal appeal former President Clinton made Tuesday night.
“This is a unique opportunity — no serving president in recent memory has been given this type of platform to make a case for his successor,” Czin said. “… Their personal history gives him an opportunity to make Hillary ‘real’ for voters that goes beyond the Fox News sound-bites and discuss their shared vision for America.”
While Hillary Clinton’s transition from foe to loyal advisor is well-known, “details about their personal connection are not,” he said.
“I’m confident we’ll hear a lot about that this evening,” he said.
In many ways, Obama is obligated to pull out all the stops for Hillary Clinton after Bill Clinton’s rousing endorsement of his second term at the convention in Charlotte, N.C., in 2012 when he famously said nobody could have improved the economy better than Obama, not even him.
“What he can do is what Bill Clinton did for him in 2012,” said Joseph Ellis, a presidential historian and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Bill Clinton gave a speech at the convention that articulated the reason why he should be president more effectively than Obama did.”
Obama also is a far more gifted orator than Hillary Clinton and more “natural politically,” which he can leverage to convince voters to rally behind her, Ellis said.
Still, Ellis said he doesn’t believe Obama, even with his current high poll ratings, can “light some fires and take on some of the issues” that worked for Sanders, such as Wall Street reform and opposing international trade deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The president is far too invested in TPP, so he’s obviously not the best speaker to heal those wounds in the party, Ellis said.
“I don’t think Obama can do that,” he said, “but I think he can put a sheen and gloss over her career” in terms of her qualifications and ability to continue some of his signature policies, such as Obamacare and support for a federal minimum wage.
Others expected the president to focus almost solely on the contrasts his wife made to the GOP convention’s bleak picture of the country’s economy and national security and say it won’t take much effort.
“I expect him to provide a more realistic picture of the country than the dark, brooding rhetoric that we heard out of the Republican convention,” Jim Manley, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, told the Examiner.
“I don’t think he necessarily needs to make the case for Hillary Clinton explicitly … All he needs to do is paint a brighter picture of the country than we hear from Republicans,” Manley said. “He needs to look out in the hall and show the country that not everyone thinks it’s on the wrong track in terms of the economy and healthcare — that we are doing better than we have in the past.”
