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      Barack Obama to campaign for Harris across battleground states next week

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      Former president Barack Obama will crisscross the battleground states for Kamala Harris, with a kickoff in all-important Pennsylvania next week, according to a senior Harris campaign official.Obama will hold his first event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania next Thursday, the beginning of a blitz across the handful of rust belt and sun belt states that will probably decide the 2024 election.Obama will be appearing in the swing state after Republican nominee Donald Trump returns on Saturday to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where he survived an assassination attempt in July.Obama remains one of the Democrats most powerful surrogates, second perhaps only to his wife, Michelle Obama. His return to the campaign trail follows a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, in which he cast Harris as a forward-looking figure and a natural heir to his diverse, youth-powered political coalition.“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told the convention in August. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter.”Harris was one of Obama’s earliest supporters when he launched a long-shot presidential bid against Hillary Clinton in 2007. She would go on to knock on doors for him ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008.Harris’s campaign already includes several former Obama campaign staff, including strategist David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter – who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 – and Mitch Stewart, Obama’s grassroots strategist for both campaigns. Stewart is Harris’s adviser for battleground states, among which Pennsylvania is a must-win for either side.Key to winning Pennsylvania could be winning the Latino vote. About 90,000 Latino voters might still be undecided, according to Penn State professor, A K Sandoval-Strausz, writing in the Conversation, who argues that an endorsement for Harris from Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny could have a greater impact on the election than Taylor Swift’s. In 2020, Biden won the state by 80,000 votes – or a single point. In 2016, Trump took the state with just 44,292 votes.According to the latest average of Pennsylvania polling from the Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Harris leads Trump by just 0.9 points in the state. More

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      Jimmy Carter becomes the first former US president to turn 100

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      Joe Biden led congratulations on Tuesday to Jimmy Carter on his 100th birthday, a milestone that makes Carter the first former US president to become a centenarian.Carter entered hospice care at his home in Plains, Georgia, 19 months ago. His grandson, Jason Carter, has said the former president is eager to cast his ballot for Kamala Harris, a fellow Democrat, in the presidential election.The White House paid tribute with a display of big lettering declaring “Happy Birthday President Carter” and the number 100 outside the north portico. Carter has asked Biden to eulogise him at his state funeral when the time comes.In a statement Biden, 81, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 election campaign, said his predecessor has always been “a moral force for our nation and the world”.He added: “Your hopeful vision of our country, your commitment to a better world, and your unwavering belief in the power of human goodness continues to be a guiding light for all of us.”View image in fullscreenBarack Obama posted a video message on the social media platform X that said: “Happy 100th birthday, President Carter! Thank you for your friendship, your fundamental decency, and your incredible acts of service through the @CarterCenter. Michelle and I are grateful for all you’ve done for this country.”Carter, who has lived longer than any US president in history, served a single term from January 1977 to January 1981 and was beleaguered by high inflation and the Iran hostage crisis. But more recently historians have argued that his record deserves reappraisal and he was ahead of his time in calling for action to tackle the climate crisis.His decades of humanitarian work after leaving office, including the promotion of human rights and alleviating poverty in countries around the world, earned him the Nobel peace prize in 2002.His birthday is being marked by the broadcast of a tribute concert by stars of country, rock and gospel music recorded at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre last month. The concert raised more than $1m towards the international programme of the Carter Center, which he founded with his wife, Rosalynn Carter. The former president plans to tune in to the concert on Georgia Public Broadcasting, according to his grandson Jason Carter.Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were married for 77 years. Rosalynn Carter died in November last year and the former president was last seen in public at his wife’s funeral, where he used a wheelchair and appeared frail. He has been diagnosed with cancer and other health issues, and decided to end medical intervention and enter hospice care in February 2023.Carter is expected to mark his birthday in the same one-storey home that he and Rosalynn built in the early 1960s – before his first election to the Georgia state senate. He taught Sunday school at his hometown Baptist church in Plains until a few years ago.Jason Carter, who is chair of the Carter Center governing board, told the Associated Press: “Not everybody gets 100 years on this earth, and when somebody does, and when they use that time to do so much good for so many people, it’s worth celebrating.“These last few months, 19 months, now that he’s been in hospice, it’s been a chance for our family to reflect and then for the rest of the country and the world to really reflect on him. That’s been a really gratifying time.”Early voting in Georgia begins on 15 October, two weeks into Carter’s 101st year. Jason Carter added: “When we started asking him about his 100th birthday, he said he was excited to vote for Kamala Harris.”The Carters have worked with the non-profit group Habitat for Humanity International since the 1980s, and the ex-president has regularly joined other volunteers to help build homes for people affected by poverty or disasters.This week, to mark Carter’s birthday, scores of Habitat volunteers, including country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, will build 30 homes in St Paul, Minnesota.Jonathan Reckford, Habitat’s chief executive officer, said: “The Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project serves not only as a way to honor the Carters’ legacy, but also as a reminder of what is possible when people from all walks come together to work toward one common goal.” More

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      This presidential race will be fought over competing understandings of ‘freedom’ | Eric Foner

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      The recently concluded Democratic national convention marked a sharp turn in US political rhetoric. “Freedom, where are you?” Beyoncé sang in the video that opened the gathering. Her song proved to be a fitting introduction to the days that followed. Joe Biden had made saving democracy from the threat of Maga authoritarianism the centerpiece of his ill-fated campaign for re-election. The keynote of Kamala Harris’s convention, invoked by nearly every speaker, was “freedom”.Nearly a century ago, in the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt linked freedom to economic security for ordinary Americans – “freedom from want” was one of the four freedoms summarizing the country’s aims in the second world war. This definition of freedom, a product of the New Deal, assumed an active role for the federal government. But since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan in effect redefined freedom as limited government, low taxes and unregulated economic enterprise, Democrats have pretty much ceded the word to their opponents. Now they want it back.Of course freedom – along with liberty, generally used as an equivalent – has been a US preoccupation ever since the American revolution gave birth to a nation that identified itself, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, as an “empire of liberty”, a unique embodiment of freedom in a world overrun by oppression. The declaration of independence includes liberty among mankind’s unalienable rights; the constitution announces at the outset its aim of securing the “blessings of liberty”. As a result, freedom has long been a powerful rhetorical weapon. As the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940: “Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow, knows that this is ‘The land of the free’ … [and] the ‘cradle of liberty’.”Yet freedom is neither a fixed idea nor an evolutionary progress toward a predetermined goal. The history of US freedom is a tale of debates and struggles. Often, battles for control of the idea illustrate the contrast between “negative” and “positive” meanings of freedom, a dichotomy elaborated by Sir Isaiah Berlin in an influential essay in 1958. Negative liberty defines freedom as the absence of outside restraints on individual action. Positive liberty is a form of empowerment – the ability to set and fulfill one’s goals. As the contrast between FDR and Reagan illustrates, the first sees government as a threat to freedom and the second as removing barriers to its enjoyment, often by government intervention.The Democratic convention built upon this history. Positive and negative freedom co-existed and reinforced one another. The frequent calls for “reproductive freedom” – the right to make intimate decisions free of governmental interference (or as vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz put it, the principle of “mind your own damn business”) – embraced and expanded the idea of negative freedom. Never before has the 60s slogan “the personal is political” found such powerful expression at a party convention.Positive freedom also made its appearance, notably in Bernie Sanders’ litany of future government action against the likes of big oil and big pharma in the name of combating economic inequality and “corporate greed”. Walz, echoing FDR, commented that people who lack access to affordable housing and healthcare are not truly free.There is another crucial element to the ongoing debate about freedom: who is entitled to enjoy it. When the constitution was ratified, the United States was home to half a million enslaved African Americans. The first laws defining how immigrants could become citizens, enacted in the 1790s, limited the process to “white” persons. It took more than half a century for slavery to be eradicated and for Black persons, for a brief period during the era of Reconstruction that followed the civil war, to be incorporated into the body politic.This history exemplifies what the historian Tyler Stovall, in a recent book, calls “White Freedom”. Fast forward to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. With its freedom rides, freedom songs and insistent cry “freedom now”, that revolution linked freedom with equality regardless of race or national origin. What is now remembered simply as “the movement” did more to redefine the meaning of freedom than any other development of the last century. Its fruits were visible every night in the Democratic convention’s remarkably diverse composition.Throughout our history, freedom has been defined, in large measure, by its limits. This is how the Confederacy was able to claim to be fighting for liberty. The historian Jefferson Cowie, whose book Freedom’s Dominion won the Pulitzer prize for history in 2023, argues that negative freedom, expressed as opposition to federal intervention in local affairs, has often boiled down to little more than the determination of local elites to exercise political and economic power over subordinate groups without outside interference. Civil rights were condemned as a threat to white people’s liberty (the freedom, for example, to choose who is allowed to live in one’s neighborhood). The vaunted independence of men depended on limiting the freedom of women.With the party conventions over, the campaign now becomes, in part, a contest to define the meaning of freedom. Historical precedents exist for such a battle. In 1936, the New York Times observed that the fight for possession of “the ideal of freedom” was the central issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Three decades later, the journalist Theodore White noted that freedom was the “dominant word” of both civil rights demonstrators and supporters of the conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, but they meant entirely different things by it. The United States, he concluded, sorely needed “a commonly-agreed-on concept of freedom”.Freedom is often used to mobilize support in wartime. No recent president employed it for this purpose more egregiously than George W Bush, who made freedom an all-purpose justification for the invasion of Iraq. In his first inaugural address, Bush used the words “freedom”, “free” or “liberty” seven times. In his second, a 10-minute speech delivered after the invasion, they appeared no fewer than 49 times.Bush’s egregious distortion of the ideal of freedom seemed to discourage his successors from using the word at all. Barack Obama preferred the language of community and personal responsibility. Nor has freedom been a major theme of Donald Trump, who prefers to speak of raw military and economic power. But Trump’s long campaign to deny that Obama is a US citizen, and his calls for the immense deportation of undocumented immigrants, resonate with those who seek to redraw freedom’s boundaries along racial and nativist lines.The Democratic convention appears to have guaranteed that the 2024 election will be a contest over the meaning of freedom. Whatever the result, it will likely define American freedom for years to come.

      Eric Foner’s many books on American history include The Story of American Freedom More

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      Tactical ad breaks and lies: rightwing coverage of DNC is exactly as expected

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      As the Democratic party enjoys the afterglow of an exuberant national convention, the rightwing media has settled on consistent counter-programming: complaining about “joy”, hyping up pro-Palestinian protests and expressing a newfound concern for the treatment of Joe Biden.The coverage, which has at times avoided the more pointed Democratic criticisms of Trump by cutting to ad breaks, has also including the criticism of women both for smiling too much and not smiling enough, and the coining of a new name for Barack Obama: “Barack-Stabber”.There has also been the bizarre revival of the racist Obama birther conspiracy theory by a Fox News host, as well as the straight-faced claim by a Republican-supporting news host that it is “all vengeance at this year’s DNC [Democratic national convention]”.In short, it’s been days of coverage that will be unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to be outside the rightwing media bubble, and depressingly recognizable to those who dip into conservative coverage.“The words that we hear on the ground over and over is [sic]: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’, and that Harris and Walz are full of joy,” Daniel Baldwin, a reporter on the hard-right OANN news channel, reported on Tuesday.Baldwin, who seemed quite upset, added: “Guess what: vibes and joy don’t put fool … food on the table. They don’t bring prices down, they don’t clean up the streets, they don’t do any of that.”Others in the rightwing media complained that the joy was insincere. Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter and one of Fox News’s most celebrated hosts, told his audience on Tuesday: “The convention has been full of a lot of hate, instead of the politics of joy, which you’ve been promised.”Laura Ingraham, another Fox News stalwart, sang from the same hymn sheet as she claimed that Kamala Harris’s “joyful branding is a cover for something far more sinister”.“I like to call it socialism with a smile. It’s a seething disdain for tens of millions of Americans who still support Donald Trump,” Ingraham said, adding that the DNC is not about “love or optimism: it’s about hatred and retribution”.“There’s not much joy in this convention hall, certainly not compared to what we say at the RNC,” Ingraham added.Ingraham’s analysis was apparently unironic, but the idea that the Republican national convention was happy and joyful will come as a surprise to anyone who was there.The Republican event saw Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, claim that Americans were being “murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released”, while Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, warned that “millions of illegal aliens” should not be allowed to “harm our country”, as attendees waved signs reading: “Mass deportation now.”When it came to joy, at times it seemed like conservative media didn’t quite know what line of attack they were supposed to be using.“Hillary Clinton, she’s the most joyless person I think who has ever walked on this earth,” Matt Schlapp, a Republican political operative, told Newsmax on Monday.But minutes later, Schlapp performed an about turn on how much happiness women should express.“Kamala Harris came out on the stage … all the laughing, it’s like she got into the sherry or something,” Schlapp complained, in comments highlighted by Desi Lydic on The Daily Show.As well as questioning joyfulness and levity, the right wing has focused on protests rather than what was going on in the convention hall. That caused problems for the likes of Fox News and Newsmax at the start of the week, when a smaller than expected group of people congregated peacefully in Chicago. Fox News still tried valiantly to make the protests seem more of a thing, but the channel was outshone by One America News Network.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn OANN, the host Kara McKinney claimed: “DNC protests are spiraling out of control” over footage of pro-Palestinian activists calmly holding a flag and a crowd standing quietly behind a fence.Away from the protests, a common feature was anguish at Democrats’ treatment of Joe Biden – a man who rightwing media has spent years accusing of ill-defined crimes and senility.On Newsmax, one guest complained that Biden was mentioned “maybe twice”, “as they shoved him out in the dark of the night on the first night”, while an OANN host claimed Biden had been “buried at the end of the night”.Fox News’s The Five took a similar angle, portraying senior Democrats as nefarious plotters. A chyron on the show dubbed Obama “Barack-Stabber Obama”, as the host Jeanine Pirro lamented that Biden spoke on the first day of the convention and then “was exiled to California”.Michelle Obama didn’t escape unscathed either. A chyron under one discussion of the former first lady: “Michelle Obama snubs Biden in her DNC speech”, while Nancy Pelosi was also criticized, just for good measure.As the week wore on, it became clear that one tactic for news channels was just to ignore certain things happening at the convention. When a video was aired at the DNC about about the January 6 insurrection, Fox News cut to an advert for a landline telephone.When three women, including one who had been raped as a child, took the stage to discuss their experiences with pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions, Fox News skipped the segment entirely, Media Matters reported. Instead, the network had its male chief political analyst, Brit Hume, pontificate on the issue, and offer more faux Biden outrage, on air.“What does it say about the modern state of the Democratic party that it could not ask these abortion speakers to stand aside to make room for the president of the United States to speak at a reasonable hour tonight?” was Hume’s take.Among the critical analysis of the term “joy”, the wailing over Biden’s speaking spot and the ongoing female smiling debate, at least Fox News offered something more familiar to its viewers: the revival of the more-than-a-decade-old Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. The idea, which Trump pushed even before he was a presidential candidate, posits that Obama was not born in the US, and therefore should not have been US president.Ignoring the fact that Obama has published his birth certificate, and that he has not been president for eight years, Jesse Watters, a primetime Fox News host, declared on the channel that he was going to send someone called Johnny to investigate.Obama is “definitely going to interfere in this election”, Watters said.“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate – this time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.” More

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      Democrats are finally done with the ‘high road’ – and hitting Trump where it hurts | Robert Reich

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      I’m glad Democrats are finally hitting back at Trump. Enough with the “high road”.They’re calling him “weird”.They’re mocking him. “Donald Trump fell asleep at his own trial,” Hillary Clinton sneered at the Democratic convention. “When he woke up, he’d made his own kind of history – the first person to run for president with 34 felony convictions.”Barack Obama noted Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”.Michelle Obama asked: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”Trump hates to be laughed at. He cannot abide ridicule. So, keep it up.But in addition to the mockery, we must not forget Trump’s treachery.The values a president enunciates and demonstrates ricochet through society, strengthening or undermining the common good.George Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, noted that by June 1775, when Congress appointed him to command the nation’s army, Washington had already “become a moral rallying post”.In the 2016 presidential campaign, 240 years later, candidate Donald Trump’s moral squalor was on full display. When accused of failing to pay his income taxes he responded: “That makes me smart.”He thereby signaled to millions of Americans that paying taxes in full is not an obligation of citizenship.Trump also boasted about giving money to politicians so they would do whatever he wanted. “When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.”In other words, it’s perfectly OK for business leaders to pay off politicians, regardless of the effect on our democracy.After Trump launched an attack on NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem, Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, explained that the players were trying to protect a core American value. “They’re protesting excessive police violence and racial inequality,” said Kerr. “Those are really good things to fight against. And they’re doing it in a nonviolent way. Which is everything that Martin Luther King preached, right?”Before Trump, the peaceful transfer of power was assumed to be a central feature of American democracy.As the Harvard political scientist Archon Fung has noted, when losing candidates congratulate winners and deliver gracious concession speeches, they demonstrate their commitment to the democratic system over the result they fought to achieve – an important means of reaffirming the common good.Think of Al Gore’s gracious concession speech to George W Bush in 2000, after five weeks of a bitterly contested election and just one day after the US supreme court ruled in favor of Bush:“I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country … Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it … And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”Consider what might have occurred had Gore bitterly accused Bush of winning fraudulently and blamed the five Republican appointees on the supreme court for siding with Bush for partisan reasons. Or if, during his campaign, Bush had promised to put Gore in jail for various alleged improprieties, and then, after he won, accused Gore of spying on him during the campaign and trying to use the FBI and CIA to bring his downfall.These statements – close to ones Trump actually made – might have imperiled the political stability of the nation.Instead, Gore made the same moral choice his predecessors made at the end of every previous American presidential election, and for the same reason: he understood that the peaceful transition of power confirmed the nation’s commitment to the constitution, which was far more important than his own loss.Trump has had no such qualms. When he lost, he embarked on a coup against the United States and instigated an assault on the US Capitol, resulting in five deaths.At this moment, Trump and his lackeys are installing loyalists in state and county election offices to deny certification to the Harris-Walz ticket and other Democrats down the ballot.The essence of Trump’s failure as president – and the fundamental reason he doesn’t merit a second term – is not that he has behaved in childish and vindictive ways or is “weird”.It is that he sacrificed – and continues to sacrifice – the processes and institutions that undergird America to achieve his own selfish aims.He abused the trust we place in a president to preserve and protect the nation’s capacity for self-government.Trump is a traitor.He and the Republican party – now a personality cult based on Trump’s “big lie” – violate everything America stands for.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      RFK Jr to reportedly drop out of race by end of week – live

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      We reported earlier that independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign announced that he will make an address to the nation on Friday about “his path forward”.ABC News is now reporting that Kennedy plans to drop out of the race by the end of the week.It comes after Kennedy’s running mate, the Silicon Valley attorney Nicole Shanahan, said the pair were considering abandoning their campaign in order to help the election of Donald Trump.Kennedy was a member of the Democratic party and attempted to run as its nominee before choosing to stand as an independent.At an event hosted by Politico, Kamala Harris’s campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon was asked about how Robert F Kennedy’s reported intention to end his presidential bid would affect the race.One of the biggest questions of this year’s election is whether Kennedy is syphoning support from voters who would otherwise back Harris, or Donald Trump, and we may get a better idea of the answer to that if he ends his campaign.Either way, O’Malley Dillon told Politico she did not think it would be a big deal:
      We are very confident that the vice president is going to win whether she’s running against one candidate or multiple candidates. I don’t think it’s really going to interfere with the race too much.
      Nancy Pelosi delighted a well-heeled crowd at the University Club of Chicago on Wednesday afternoon, sharing anecdotes about her extraordinary career arc that she described as “housewife, House member, House Speaker.”Now considered one of the most powerful House speakers in modern political history, Pelosi said she faced doubts as she climbed the ranks in Congress from male colleagues who admonished her to wait her turn.“I became interested in running [for leadership] because we kept losing the elections, 94, 96, 98 and then it was 2000 I thought, ‘I’m so tired of losing … for the children,’” she said, using a Pelosism, that everything she does is “for the children.”When she made her decision to run for Democratic leadership known, Pelosi said she was immediately met with skepticism, especially among her male colleagues. “Who said she could run?” Pelosi recalled them saying. Their incredulity only encouraged her further.“Light my fire, why don’t you, poor babies?” Pelosi said, drawing laughs. In an aside to the audience, she emphasized that she was telling a story that occured “this century.”Pelosi continued, saying she was told there was a “pecking order” and she wasn’t in it.“They said, ‘these people have been waiting a long time,” Pelosi recounted. “So I said: ‘Was it over 200 years?’”The Uncommitted movement continues to press for the Democratic convention to allow a Palestinian to address delegates.Earlier in the day, the movement said it approved of a reported decision to allow the family of an Israeli hostage to address the convention, but said a Palestinian voice should also be heard:Here’s more about their quest to get Democratic leaders to allow them to speak from the convention stage:Two of Donald Trump’s surrogates will hold a press conference tomorrow in Chicago to criticize Kamala Harris’s record on handling immigration and other issues, hours before she is to deliver the closing address at the Democratic national convention.The Trump campaign has not had much of a presence in the city as Democrats have gathered to celebrate Harris’s entry into the race. That will change tomorrow when Vivek Ramaswamy and Carlos Trujillo, a former Trump administration official, address reporters from the Trump Hotel & Tower downtown.Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, is tonight’s keynote speaker, and will deliver a speech focused on telling American voters about his life and career, the Biden-Harris campaign said.“In his remarks at the Democratic national convention, Governor Tim Walz will introduce himself to the American people. He will highlight the values that he learned growing up in a small town in Nebraska, which shaped his service in the national guard, as a teacher, football coach, member of Congress, and governor, and that he will bring to the White House. Governor Walz will lay out what Vice-President Harris will do for working families and call on the American people to work together to elect Kamala Harris president,” according to the campaign.Musicians John Legend and Sheila E will introduce Walz, who will be nominated by Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ingman, a former student of the governor.Gaza solidarity protesters interrupted an environment and climate crisis council meeting at the convention on Wednesday, chanting “free, free Palestine”.“If you want to show some political courage, go and interrupt one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” responded Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, who was speaking. “We’re organizing against Trump, we’re organizing against the reactionary autocrats, plutocrats and kleptocrats.”“Anybody who interferes with that is objectively helping Donald Trump and Tim Walz,” Raskin continued, mistakenly naming Harris’s vice-presidential pick instead of Trump’s. “So cut it out,” he added before the protestors were escorted away.Some climate groups, however, are pushing for the Harris campaign to stop supporting Israel’s deadly war in Gaza by backing an arms embargo. Among them is the Sunrise Movement, the influential youth-led environmental justice group who spearheaded the push for a Green New Deal.“Young people want a livable world for our generation and generations. We want everyone to have clean air and water and safe homes,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, a Sunrise Movement spokesperson. “Everyone must have those rights and freedoms, including Palestinians.”Those of us who have shown up early to the United Center in Chicago (such as your live blogger) are getting a sneak peek at one of the night’s musical guests: Stevie Wonder.He’s sound-checking his 1972 hit Higher Ground, and was earlier at the podium rehearsing some remarks. Wonder has with him backing dancers, as well as a bassist, guitar player and someone who looks to be playing turntables. He is, of course, playing piano.Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is reportedly planning to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and considering throwing his support behind Donald Trump, was asked by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl about Trump calling the climate crisis “a hoax”.Here’s how Kennedy responded:Kennedy spent decades working as an environmental lawyer who sued polluters and founded a large non-profit focused on protecting clean water. Trump has long questioned human-made global warming, including calling it “mythical”, “nonexistent” or “an expensive hoax”, or suggesting that the climate could “change back again”.Pink is expected to take to the stage on Thursday for a closing-night performance at the Democratic national convention, CNN is reporting.The award-winning singer-songwriter will perform on Thursday evening before Kamala Harris’s speech, according to the outlet.As we reported earlier, John Legend will be performing tonight before Tim Walz’s remarks.Donald Trump Jr said he “loved the idea” of having Robert F Kennedy Jr appointed to a role in a potential Trump administration so that he can take a government agency and “blow it up”.The Republican presidential candidate’s son, in an interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck reported by the Hill, said:
      I loved the idea, love the idea of giving him some sort of role in some sort of major three-letter entity or whatever it may be and let him blow it up.
      He added that he believes Kennedy is “a smart guy” and that “he’s actually got very good views on certain things”. Trump said:
      I think that’s what we need. And so, I think that kind of unity, even where there may be certain disagreements on certain things, I think he could be a really great asset for that.
      The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi demurred and deflected when asked by the Democratic strategist David Axelrod to share how difficult it was to have “that conversation” with the president.Pelosi, who pushed subtly but forcefully in public and private for the president to step aside, said it was ultimately Joe Biden’s decision to make but one that ultimately set the party on a path to winning that they had not been on when he led the ticket.“A great sacrifice was made here,” she said. But the rupture between Biden and Pelosi, two devout Catholics who have known each other for decades has been hard on her, she said. “I’ve cried over this. I’m sad about this,” she said.Her highest priority then and now was to win – and not just the White House, but the House and the Senate. She said the prospect of a second Trump term was too dangerous.“Thank God I was the speaker on January 6, last time,” she said, suggesting the assault on the US Capitol would have been far worse if Republicans had been in charge that day. She said:
      You have to make the decision to win, and you have to make every decision in favor of winning.
      Donald Trump, in an interview yesterday, said he would “certainly” be open to appointing Robert F Kennedy Jr to a role in his administration, if the independent presidential candidate drops out of the race and backs him.“I like him, and I respect him,” Trump told CNN after a campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday.
      He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy. I’ve known him for a very long time. I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it.
      Trump said he would “love that endorsement, because I’ve always liked” Kennedy.Asked if he would consider appointing Kennedy to a role in his administration if he wins in November, Trump replied:
      I probably would, if something like that would happen. He’s a very different kind of a guy – a very smart guy. And, yeah, I would be honored by that endorsement, certainly.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr is leaning toward endorsing Donald Trump but the decision is not yet finalized and could still change, ABC News is reporting, citing sources.Kennedy’s hope is in part to finalize things quickly in order to try to blunt momentum from the DNC, one source told the outlet.Kennedy told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that he would not confirm or deny reports that he is endorsing Trump, adding: “We are not talking about any of that.”Robert F Kennedy Jr, who will address the nation about “his path forward” on Friday, has held “advanced discussions” with Donald Trump and his campaign team about dropping out of the race and endorsing the Republican presidential nominee, the Washington Post is reporting, citing multiple sources. More

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      Obamas cast Kamala Harris as their heir and ‘flip script on Trump’, says ex-aide

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      Barack and Michelle Obama have cast Kamala Harris as the heir to their political movement and flipped the script on Donald Trump, former Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Guardian on Wednesday.The Obamas delivered electrifying speeches at the Democratic national convention in Chicago on Tuesday night. The former US president compared Harris’s ascent to his own by observing: “I’m feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible.”Michelle, the former first lady, invoked her husband’s hope-and-change campaign by remarking: “Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?… A familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for too long. You know what I’m talking about? It’s the contagious power of hope.”Both addresses were lauded by Axelrod, chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, in an interview after an event organised by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the convention.He said: “When Barack Obama got the call in 2004 that he was going to give the keynote speech at the Democratic convention, he said immediately, I know what I want to say, I want to talk about my story as part of the larger American story, and he’s always done that. He and Michelle are great American stories and they take pride in that and the values associated with that.“You heard it last night and Kamala Harris is very much rolling down those same tracks. They flipped the script on Trump. Trump’s play is to try and make people alien and what they did was make Trump alien to the values that most Americans share, so I thought those speeches were incredibly effective.”Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama in the White House, said there was “no doubt” that the Obamas regard Harris as their natural heir.“I think they feel very much a kinship with Harris and they see her as carrying that torch forward of what America really is about: the time-honored values of community and selflessness and hard work and all the things that we like to associate with what it means to be an American. She is out there talking about that and it’s one of the reasons why she is right in the middle of this race.”The mood in Chicago has been buoyant, with fears of a repeat of the party’s chaotic 1968 convention in the same city evaporating: instead of division and acrimony there is unity and joy. The gloom around Joe Biden’s candidacy has lifted as opinion polls show Harris pulling narrowly ahead of the Republican nominee Trump in swing states. Can it last?Axelrod, who was a student in Chicago and has spent much of his career in the city, commented: “I don’t know how you measure when honeymoons end but here’s the reality of the situation. This turnover happened very late in the race. She has had a very good month not just because of a honeymoon, but because of the way she’s presented herself, the way her campaign has positioned her. She now has a convention, which is a four-day commercial.“You get to Labor Day because next week is sort of a dead week and then the following week you have the debate. If she does reasonably well in the debate that takes you into late September and people are already voting. I think she has the ability to extend this and it may just turn out that it’s not a honeymoon but the consolidation of the base and then it becomes a scrum for the remaining voters.”As the Obamas define Harris as a personification of American values, Trump has been struggling to land a counter-punch. He has sampled attacks on her racial identity and intelligence as well as peculiar nicknames such as “Laffin’ Kamala”, “Lyin’ Kamala” and “Kamabla”. Axelrod believes that the former president is flailing.“He’s a jazz man when it comes to all of this and he gets in front of a crowd and he tries to find the groove and he throws everything against the wall. It’s generally bile, it’s personal and it’s negative. But he’s just trying out themes. The campaign seems more rational than the candidate and that’s been true from the beginning. The question is whether they can get him under control and on the message.“The best chance is for them to try and make her sort of Biden-lite and make her wear the jacket for whatever it is that people are unhappy with about Biden’s policies. But it’s hard to get people to buy the idea that the vice-president was actually pulling all the strings. That’s the flip side of nobody really knowing much about her. I don’t think they believe that and so there aren’t that many good options for that.”But he warned: “That’s not to say this isn’t a really close race and I’m not sure, if the race were today, that Trump wouldn’t win. But the motion is certainly in her direction.”Asked by the Guardian for a final prediction, Axelrod shot back: “Are you nuts? My prediction is it’s going to be a very close race. And I would not have made that prediction a month ago.” More

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      ‘Small is petty’: Michelle Obama’s artful takedown of Trump widely praised

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      Michelle Obama is being widely applauded for delivering a devastating takedown of Donald Trump in a speech at the Democratic national convention.The former first lady artfully lampooned Trump and belittled his exploitation of race for political gain in a 20-minute speech that was greeted ecstatically by Democratic delegates in Chicago, her hometown.“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. His limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black,” Obama told the gathering, referring to Trump’s well-known hostility to the presidency of her husband, Barack Obama, including promoting a false conspiracy theory that he was born outside the US.Trump also recently used the expression “Black jobs” in a televised debate with Joe Biden in June to describe the economic threat he claimed was being posed to African-Americans by illegal migrants.“I want to know, ‘Who’s going to tell him?’” asked Michelle Obama in her speech. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?’” – a response that provoked prolonged cheering at the convention, and praise on social media.It was far from her only stinging jibe at Trump. She also turned the tables on him by using the term “affirmative action” – a phrase normally applied to government-mandated racial quota schemes, much criticised by rightwing Republicans – to allude to the former president’s inherited wealth as the son of a successful property magnate.Praising Harris, she said: “She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.”In another delicate sideswipe, she appeared to parody the former president’s famous descent down a golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to launch an earlier presidential campaign, by referring to the obstacles many Black and other Americans encounter in their everyday lives.“If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top,” Obama said.She even gave a passing nod to her own previous “we go high” statement – made in a speech at the 2016 Democratic convention – by casting Trump as insignificant and suggesting his approach was to “go small”.“Going small is never the answer,” she said. “Small is petty, it’s unhealthy and, quite frankly, it’s unpresidential.”The New York Times described Obama’s change of tack as moving from “When they go low, we go high” to “when they go low, we call it out”, while Rachel Maddow on MSNBC praised her for “one of the best convention speeches I’ve ever seen by anybody in any circumstance … because it was subtle and deep and thought provoking and surprising … Just a stunning speech.”Commentators also noted Obama’s deployment of mockery and put-down humour in an apparent effort to demystify the Republican candidate – an approach seemingly consistent with that of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has branded Trump and his fellow Maga Republicans as “weird”.The term has been picked up by pro-Harris campaigners and has gradually superseded the Democrats’ earlier message of fear over what a second Trump presidency would do to the country’s democratic institutions.Politico characterised her approach to Trump – and Barack Obama’s in a speech immediately following hers, where he appeared to make an anatomical allusion to Trump’s obsession with crowd size – as “make him small”. Biden’s campaign, by contrast, had long attempted to cast the Republican as such a powerful figure that he could be a threat to democracy itself.Barack Obama picked up on his wife’s theme of disdain with his own fusillade of putdowns of a political opponent whom he famously antagonised by mocking at a 2011 White House correspondents dinner, an occasion often credited with energising Trump to run for president.“This is a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago,” the former president said.On the prospect of a second Trump administration, he said: “We don’t need four more years of bluster and bubbling and chaos; we have seen that movie before – and we all know that the sequel’s usually worse.”“Trump, in this telling, is less a diabolical genius than an irritating, grievance-obsessed buffoon,” John Harris wrote in Politico. More