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“There’s something magical in the air, isn’t there?” Former First Lady Michelle Obama explain “It’s a familiar feeling, but it’s a feeling that’s been buried too deep for too long,” she said during a speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday.
“You know what I’m saying? Hope is contagious!” she said, adding: “Hope is coming back, America.”
Such rhetoric harkens back to Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, when Democrats ran on a platform of hope and change.
But if you think about it, it’s a bit cruel to Kamala Harris’ predecessor, the presumptive Democratic nominee, when Michelle Obama apparently suggested that the party, and indeed the country, had lost hope under Joe Biden, and that Harris’ emergence had only restored that hope.
Few Democrats have publicly acknowledged how bad the atmosphere has become. Even before Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June, his poll numbers had been bad for nearly a year. A growing number of people in the party had begun to see defeat as likely, even inevitable. Since then, hope has indeed returned, but few Democrats have spoken publicly about how bleak things have become in this new era of good feelings.
The speech epitomized something interesting about the presidential campaign over the past month — namely, that Harris appears to have become the “change” candidate who can offer hope for the future, even though her administration currently runs Washington and she herself is the sitting vice president.
Part of that is because Harris is younger — neither octogenarian nor septuagenarian — and her election would be a demographic first.
But it’s also because her opponent, Donald Trump, has already been president and has dominated American politics and much of American thought for the past decade. Not only is Trump obsessed with rehashing the controversies and resentments of his first term, but his current political history is too sparse to convincingly promise that he can take the country in an entirely new direction.
When the public is dissatisfied, newer, lesser-known change candidates can have real advantages. Such candidates, though they have never governed, can meet the needs of everyone; they can represent the hopes of the public and have not yet disappointed them.
Barack Obama believes this was crucial to his rise as a political figure. “I was like a blank screen,” he wrote in his 2006 book Audacity of Hope”, “People from different political persuasions express their views here”.
Harris has benefited from a similar dynamic. She has given Democrats and voters reason to believe that they are disappointed or disillusioned with Biden’s policies and that they hope Harris can change things in a way they like.
On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former American Express CEO Ken Chenault both praised Harris, with their ratings close. It was also reflected in the fact that protests over Biden’s Israel policy had far less impact at the convention than many expected. Harris wants to move forward, not backward, which is at the heart of her campaign slogan.
The risk of being a change candidate is your lack of experience, but being the current vice president could help Harris overcome that. For now, she appears to be benefiting from her experience serving under Biden without being held accountable for the negative impact of her record.
The Trump team is now eager to reconnect Harris with Biden—blaming her for the past four years of inflation, foreign crises, and border chaos. In the face of these attacks, Harris’s task is to ensure that voters continue to see her as a new, hopeful future, not the past.
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