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      AOC’s power comes from her outsider status. Can that endure? | Moira Donegan

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      She spoke loudly and with confidence, gesticulated broadly, and returned, several times over the course of her seven-minute remarks, to the struggles of working families. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York and standard-bearer for the post-Bernie Sanders US left, may have been an unlikely choice for a lengthy primetime speech at the Democratic national convention’s opening night. The last time she spoke at the Democratic convention, in 2020, she was given just a minute and a half, in which she indicted the party establishment from the left and endorsed Sanders’ campaign for the nomination, which by then had failed.But this time, the party showcased Ocasio-Cortez as one of its prime talents, and her rhetoric was starkly different. Though she focused her remarks on her trademark politics of class, emphasizing the struggles of whose who worry about “rent checks and groceries”, she spoke, this time, in the Democrats’ most comfortable terms. Ocasio-Cortez used to speak of the “working class”. On Monday night, she praised Kamala Harris as “for the middle class because she is from the middle class”.The remarks, and Ocasio-Cortez’s starring role at the convention, underscore both her own transformation in Washington DC and the uneasy integration of the US left into the Democratic coalition. Her presence signals not only that Washington has changed the leftist members of “the Squad” – including AOC as well as the likes of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley – but also that the left’s arrival in Washington has changed the Democrats.For one thing, it would have been easy for the Harris-Walz campaign to freeze her out. After all, AOC has not always been willing to play ball with the House Democratic leadership’s agenda. She has withheld her vote on key legislative priorities, such as Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, frustrating the likes of Nancy Pelosi. And over the course of her time in Washington, she has frequently used Instagram Live, her preferred method of public communication, to sidestep the establishment media and address her constituents and supporters directly, often in ways that counteract the party’s preferred messaging.Most recently, she took to a livestream on 19 July to push back against the then growing number of high-profile Democrats who were calling on the president to drop out of the race, saying that she thought the ageing and embattled incumbent should continue his campaign. Biden dropped out just two days later. As the party rapidly coalesced around the vice-president, it seemed that AOC had made a dramatic miscalculation.Another version of the Democratic party probably would have repaid these affronts with icy exclusion. But for the Democrats of 2024, AOC is an asset that they cannot afford to lose.This is not only because of her youth, or the extreme force of her charisma – whatever the contradictions of her position, AOC remains an uncommonly powerful speaker, signaling the Democrats’ shift to the future after their party had long been criticized for failing to develop younger talent and reflecting a stark contrast with the Republicans, whose millennial talent pool is overrepresented with charmless male grievance grifters and sex-obsessed creeps. But it is also because AOC has unique credibility with two pools of voters that Democrats have alienated over the past year, voters they cannot win without: the left block that was animated by Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, and the young.Biden’s successful 2020 coalition relied heavily on these voters – from the far-left Bernie supporters, who largely put aside their complaints about their hero’s treatment by the party to support Biden against a second Trump term, and young voters, who had similarly bucked historical trends to deliver an uncommonly high turnout for their age cohort.These voters, however, have drifted from the Democrats more recently. Some were turned off by Biden’s distaste for abortion; many felt that his age disqualified him, and found the ageing president an untenable vehicle for their future aspirations. But many from both of these camps began drifting away from the Democratic ticket not only because of the particular weaknesses of Biden as a candidate – they were driven away by moral outrage at his administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. These are voters who will not be so easily won back by a change of candidate; many of them are still waiting to see a change of policy.AOC is perhaps uniquely positioned, among the major Democrats who have quickly lined up to serve as Harris surrogates, to reach these voters. But her cooperation with the Democratic establishment could also threaten her credibility with parts of the left that define themselves by their opposition. At her speech on Monday, Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken critic of the war, said that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire”. The Harris-Walz camp will likely use the clip in campaign promotions targeted at young voters. It is a valuable image for them. It is not yet clear what concessions AOC extracted in exchange for it.How long can Ocasio-Cortez walk this tightrope? Her career has been defined by her status as an insurgent critic of the party. But this position, which has long been AOC’s source of moral authority, may become a victim of her own success. She can’t keep claiming to be an outsider in a party that has rapidly reshaped itself in her image. But then again, it is her credibility with the left – her ability to claim status as an outsider – that is the very source of her influence.AOC’s mentor, Bernie Sanders – who campaigns as an independent, even though he has long caucused with the Democrats – has been able to maintain his distance from party leadership, showing uncommon integrity and consistency. But this stance, though it has won Sanders many moral and rhetorical victories, has largely excluded him from winning legislative ones. AOC seems to be taking a different track.She is embarking, instead, on what for American leftists is something of a novel path: an effort to join a governing coalition – and to take on the ambivalent responsibilities of real power.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Joe cried, Kamala cried and so did I. Can this be the Democrats putting on a better show than Trump ever did? | Emma Brockes

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      “He looks perkier,” said my nine-year-old, passing the screen as I watched footage of Joe Biden speaking on the first day of the Democratic national convention in Chicago. The president did, indeed, look perkier, borne aloft by the gratitude of 23,000 people in the hall and the millions beyond it for the fact he is no longer seeking re-election. By itself, this moment would have lifted the occasion above the norm. But the Democratic convention this year is so uniquely dramatic, so unprecedented in US history, that it rivals and possibly outstrips even President Obama’s nomination in 2008. And Biden’s heart-wrenching appearance was just the beginning.“When we fight, we win,” said Kamala Harris in her opening speech on Monday and there it was, that strange moment of realisation that what she was saying might actually be true. Strange because it’s the kind of thing Democrats always say and that, in recent years, has been accompanied by a terrible wah-wah downward arpeggio on the trombone. Limp, disorganised, outshone by Donald Trump; that had been the campaign to date. The speed of the turnaround and the sheer force of the narrative that now propels Harris forwards, has unleashed a psychic energy so strong that on stage in Chicago it practically gave off sparks. Democrats have the scent of blood in their nostrils and thank God, they’re finally chasing it.Watching footage from the first two days, I kept thinking of Joan Didion’s biting piece about the 1988 presidential race, in which she remarked on the emptiness of staged political events. Reporters, she observed, like to cover a presidential campaign because “it has balloons”. You know what she means, which only makes the genuine emotion witnessed in Chicago this week all the more thrilling. So rare is it for balloon-based political events to do anything other than bore or depress, that when one does, it lets loose not only a primary giddiness, but a second-tier hysteria triggered by incredulity at the presence of the first.And so it was here, in the form of wave after wave of what felt like history. President Biden, smiling, rueful, apparently much more cogent now that the need to perform has been removed, and deeply touching in his ability to do that rarest of things, act for the collective good at his own expense. The alleviation of anxiety in the audience even allowed for the return of some of that old Biden charisma. It was emotional! Friends on the east coast stayed up late watching, and cried. I cried! Harris, in the audience, had tears in her eyes, and Biden himself was emotional as he was led off stage by his daughter. The political obituaries in the US press the next day were elegiac, sentimental, all the things that would’ve been undone had he stayed in the race. Evan Osnos in the New Yorker called Biden “a man whose career describes a half century of American history”, and that was the feeling – a real “thank you for your service” moment.Biden left it to younger Democrats really to go after Trump, and boy, did they. On the first day, congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas called Trump “a 78-year-old lifelong predator, fraudster and cheat” who “cosies up to his role model, Vladimir Putin”. On the second night, Michelle Obama, after the years-long failure of her mantra “when they go low, we go high”, came up with an absolute corker, referring to Trump as the beneficiary of “the affirmative action of generational wealth”.She gave high praise to working mothers – the kind of “unglamorous” labour that holds the country together – while her husband got a huge laugh off Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes”. It was a throwback to the good old days of humour and levity in a party long mired in depression and panic. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” said Michelle and the crowd erupted.What struck you about all this was the way in which it seized for Democrats a dynamic that has lately been the reserve of Republicans. Trump’s success is a side-effect of his pure entertainment value and the fact he is “disruptive” in a way that, for large numbers of his followers, is simply a fun thing to be part of. Now that same sense of drama and disruption animates the other side. People at the convention chanted “USA!” while Hillary Clinton – for whom this moment must be bittersweet – graciously talked up Harris and generational unity came in via the rallying cries of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Bernie Bros.No successful production can do without at least a little hokiness, and here it was in the form of Doug Emhoff, in line to be the first “second gentleman”, should his wife win the White House, on stage doing his lovable dork act. Emhoff, with much aw shucks self-mockery, even described the first time he rang Harris to set up a blind date. It felt like a flex: look at this married couple who actually love one another compared with those estranged freaks on the other side.There were notes of caution and warnings against complacency. The stakes are so much higher now that we know who Trump is, and that, like a squirrel cornered in an attic, his desperation if elected is liable to lead to attack. But there was, this week, also a sense of let us enjoy the sense of glamour, and excitement, and youth, and – yes, hope – of this moment before we get to the terror of the next few months and the actual election.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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      Why did this conservative US judge endorse Kamala Harris? | Margaret Sullivan

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      J Michael Luttig has never endorsed a Democrat before. That’s no surprise since the well-respected legal scholar – a retired federal appeals court judge – leans well right of center.Appointed by the first President Bush in 1991, Luttig is from the old school of the Republican party. He once worked in Ronald Reagan’s White House and served as a law clerk to Antonin Scalia.But now, whatever his policy views or personal politics, Luttig has set them aside. He will pull the lever in November for Kamala Harris.Luttig wrote a withering statement about Donald Trump as he explained his decision to endorse the Democratic rival of the former president and Republican presidential nominee: “In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her public policy views are vastly different from my own, but I am indifferent in this election on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be.”Although couched in restrained language, Luttig’s statement packs a punch.How remarkable to read his view that every American should be indifferent to policy differences between themselves and Harris. Right now, he argues, any such disagreements are not worth quibbling over.What really matters, in Luttig’s view, is getting past January of next year with US democracy intact. We can argue later about how to govern.With that in mind, he sees Trump as utterly unfit and existentially dangerous.Luttig’s statement ought to be a clarion call. It should be emulated by every conservative with a conscience and a sense of patriotism.Sadly, there are too many on the right who ascribe to the misguided view that Trump’s supposed policy positions (what – mass deportations? More tax cuts for the super-wealthy?) should come before the obvious truth that electing him could destroy the United States as we know it.These conservatives may criticize Trump, but they won’t endorse his rival.How many times have we heard from Republican politicians that while, yes, they disagree with Trump’s words and behavior, they still intend to vote for him? Or they stay silent on the alternative.Apparently, the notion of supporting a progressive Democrat such as Harris is beyond the pale.“Respect to Judge Luttig,” wrote James Fallows, the journalist, former presidential speechwriter and incisive commentator. He called Luttig’s endorsement “an instructive contrast” to a long list of prominent Republicans including John Bolton, Nikki Haley, HR McMaster and George W Bush.They and many others of their ilk have (so far) failed the integrity test. At this crucial time, they haven’t fully used their influence to make sure Trump can’t bring his wrecking ball to what remains of the US experiment.Luttig has a greater sense of history – and a truer moral compass. Nor is this the first time he’s proven it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe famously helped to persuade Mike Pence to certify the 2020 presidential election, defying Trump’s vehement urging and not-so-veiled threats.In a series of tweets, Luttig set forth the rationale for the then vice-president to reject efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate victory. He publicly gave Pence a legal foundation for defying his boss.Pence, notably, has said he won’t endorse Trump, startling in itself for a former vice-president; but despite everything he’s been through and all he knows, he has not pledged publicly to vote for Harris. Maybe Luttig’s example will inspire him to go there.Two years later, Luttig endorsed Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the supreme court. While Trump World was portraying Jackson as nothing but a high-level DEI hire, Luttig urged bipartisan support for the accomplished jurist, calling her eminently qualified. Jackson, of course, became the first Black woman appointed to the supreme court.In an interview with CNN, which first reported his endorsement, Luttig explained that arriving at his decision to back Harris wasn’t complicated.He described it as a simple matter of knowing right from wrong – not merely right from left.Simple? Maybe so, but also admirable. And at this singular moment for US democracy, all too rare.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Barack Obama to deliver ‘forceful affirmation’ for Kamala Harris in Democratic convention speech – live

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      The Democratic national convention just released the full schedule of its second night, confirming that Barack Obama will deliver the evening’s keynote speech, and Michelle Obama, second gentleman Doug Emhoff and independent senator Bernie Sanders are also scheduled to make remarks.The grandsons of John F Kennedy and Jimmy Carter will be among the early speakers at the convention, along with Stephanie Grisham, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary.As the night goes on, we’ll hear from Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, and then Sanders, both of whom will speak at the 8pm CT hour. Emhoff and Michelle Obama will speak after 9pm, and Barack Obama is to address delegates starting at 10pm.Do not be surprised if the schedule runs late, as it did last night.Away from the Democratic convention, RFK Jr is considering ending his campaign for president to help Donald Trump, according to his running mate.The startling disclosure was made by Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s vice-presidential candidate, who said the pair was considering dropping their campaign over fears it might help elect Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, as president.Shanahan’s remarks, made on the Impact Theory With Tim Bilyeau podcast, were close to an all-out admission that Kennedy’s campaign had more in common with Trump’s than Harris’s. Kennedy was a member of the Democratic party and attempted to run as its nominee before choosing to stand as an independent.Read the full story here:Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, has warned that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, currently riding high in the polls, faces plenty of ups and downs before November.“You all remember when President Obama won the Iowa caucuses – if you are old enough to remember that,” Jarrett, speaking at Axios House in Chicago, said of Obama’s first primary campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2008. “We got: ‘Oh, my goodness!’ and ‘We are going for gold!’”Then came the New Hampshire primary and a “devastating defeat”, she added. “But out of that, people found out who he was. We came out of that terrible experience. It forced us to have to go to many more states and introduce him to many more people and, in the end, it was actually good for us.”Harris is bound to undergo “a whole multitude of tests”, Jarrett said. “She is absolutely on a roll right now. I think it’s a hands-up enthusiasm. People are just tired of all the negativity, the polarisation, the toxicity. I think what Governor Walz said: she’s full of joy. People want joy. They actually want to like each other.”Harris, who has replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, has embarked on a much shorter campaign than the one Obama fought. Jarrett expressed confidence in Harris and running mate Tim Walz and their advisers to deal with obstacles and keep pushing forward.Hot from his primetime appearance at the Democratic convention on Monday night, Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has been explaining to reporters why he wore a T-shirt imprinted with the phrase “Trump is a scab.”“I’ve been a union member for UAW for 30 years, and we have a term for people that cross picket lines and don’t respect working-class people. We call them scabs, and that’s what Donald Trump is.”Fain said that the political leanings of the UAW’s more than 1 million active and retired members had remained stable over the years at about 65% Democratic and 30-32% Republican. But he predicted that this time around, the gap would widen as union members gravitate towards Kamala Harris.“She’s an amazing, very strong woman. I think people underestimate her, and that’s a huge mistake. I think she’s going to move a massive mountain come November,” he said.The UAW is preparing to launch in the next week or so what has been billed as the biggest field campaign in its history to persuade its members to turn out to vote.Fain said that in his view, people would lean towards the Democratic ticket because when they look at Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, “they see themselves. I mean, no one looks at Donald Trump and says: ‘I identify with that person.’”The Democratic national convention just released the full schedule of its second night, confirming that Barack Obama will deliver the evening’s keynote speech, and Michelle Obama, second gentleman Doug Emhoff and independent senator Bernie Sanders are also scheduled to make remarks.The grandsons of John F Kennedy and Jimmy Carter will be among the early speakers at the convention, along with Stephanie Grisham, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary.As the night goes on, we’ll hear from Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, and then Sanders, both of whom will speak at the 8pm CT hour. Emhoff and Michelle Obama will speak after 9pm, and Barack Obama is to address delegates starting at 10pm.Do not be surprised if the schedule runs late, as it did last night.Lurking in the United Center’s rafters are thousands of balloons that are primed to drop:Political conventions, both Democratic and Republican, typically end with a cascade of balloons. Expect to see that on Thursday night, after Kamala Harris ends her keynote address.Arizona senator Mark Kelly and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke at the Veterans and Military Families Council at the Democratic national convention today, arguing that concepts of patriotism and freedom are not the monopoly of the Republican party.“Folks come from all over our country, with all kinds of backgrounds to serve,” Kelly said. “We’ve all served alongside folks of different political stripes, and some who are not political at all … Some Republicans want to think that their political party has a monopoly on patriotism. No party does. But it’s clear which political candidate supports military veterans, and which one does not.”Kelly took Trump to task for his recent comments suggesting that the Presidential Medal of Freedom was a “better” award than the Medal of Honor because “everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”“The VFW, of which I am a member, called these comments asinine,” said Kelly, a former astronaut and Gulf war veteran. “I agree.”Both Kelly and Buttigieg made oblique references to the attacks made by Republicans on the record of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz.“You can count from the despicable way – the weird way – that he talks about the service,” Buttigieg said, “There’s a through-line that goes all the way back to the days when Donald Trump used his status as a teenage multimillionaire to procure a doctor’s note to pretend that he was unable to serve, so that some working-class man from who knows, maybe the south side of Chicago went to Vietnam in his place. There’s an unbroken pattern right there of not being able to grasp service to others. Veterans understand service to others. Today’s Democrats understand service to others.”Gwen Walz, wife of the Democratic VP pick, spoke with pride of their service as teachers, and his service as a national guardsman. “I will put that service up against anyone’s,” Walz said. “We are building a future for all of us, each and every one of us that we can be proud of.”It’s sound check time inside the United Center, where the Democratic national convention is being held, and the few journalists and guests in the venue early are getting a sneak peak of who’s performing tonight.Rapper Common is onstage now, spitting verse that pays tribute to Kamala Harris.“Let’s go, ya’ll! Chitown! DNC!” he said, to a smattering of applause. There aren’t that many people here, but he will probably get a much louder reception in a few hours.We reported earlier that the US Secret Service was looking into bomb threats made on Tuesday at “various locations” in Chicago where the Democratic national convention is taking place.According to a police scanner, 14 bomb threats were made today, mostly at hotels in downtown Chicago.I’ve been over at the McCormick Place convention center all day again, popping in and out of caucus and council meetings. And I finally had a chance to check out Dempalooza, an expo event with a bunch of vendors – some selling Democratic and Harris merch, some selling local goods, some selling politics.I saw at least five Kamala Harris cardboard cutouts and a “coconut room”, a nod to Harris’ iconic “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree” line that social media loves.One of those cutouts had Harris in a superhero outfit, and people came up to take photos alongside it. There is also a display of presidential footwear, with displays cases of old shoes.The area wasn’t very busy – the Democratic convention is spread across McCormick Place and the United Center, and getting from one to the other was a major challenge for some delegates yesterday, so as the day wears on, the McCormick location is getting quiet as folks start to make their way to the United Center for tonight’s speakers.Singer-songwriter James Taylor was scheduled to perform on Monday night on the first night of the Democratic national convention in Chicago, but as the evening ran long, organizers skipped elements of the program, meaning that Taylor never took the stage.DNC officials said in a statement that because of the “raucous applause interrupting speaker after speaker, we ultimately skipped elements of our program to ensure we could get to President Biden as quickly as possible so that he could speak directly to the American people,” per NBC News Chicago.Taylor himself released a statement this afternoon, saying that it “became clear” as the evening went on that there “wouldn’t be time for our ‘You’ve Got a Friend’” adding that “maybe the organizers couldn’t anticipate the wild response from the floor of the United Center.” “Sorry to disappoint,” he added.
      But a great and inspirational, quintessentially American moment. We were honored to be there.
      Donald Trump, in an interview with CBS News that aired last night, said he would accept the election outcome if he believes the election is “free and fair”. He said:
      I think if I lose, this country will go into a tailspin, the likes of which it’s never seen before – the likes of 1929 – but if I do, and it’s free and fair, absolutely, I will accept the results.”
      “Fair” to Trump “means that votes are counted,” he said, adding:
      It means that votes are fair. It means that they don’t cheat on the election, they don’t drop ballots, they don’t install new rules and regulations that they don’t have the power to do.”
      He added:
      If I see that we had a fair and free election, which I hope to be able to say, but if I see that, I will be – you will never see anybody more honorable than me. I’m an honorable person.”
      Exactly 20 years ago, Barack Obama was a relatively unknown state legislator when he delivered a keynote address at the Democratic party’s convention. Obama said that evening:
      I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on Earth, is my story even possible.
      His 2004 speech offers one of the clearest examples of how convention speeches can elevate a rising political star to national prominence. Four years later, he returned to accept the party’s nomination for president.In 2012, he made the case for his re-election bid; in 2016, he advocated for Hillary Clinton to succeed him in office; and during the 2020 convention, he issued an attack on Donald Trump and urged Americans to back Joe Biden for president.Now, his speech will make the case for the Harris-Walz ticket and the need to defeat Trump.Here’s what else to know about Obama’s speech tonight.Donald Trump, in his interview with CBS News, said he would “gladly” release his medical records and insisted that he is not experiencing any post-traumatic stress disorder or other lasting effects following his assassination attempt last month.Trump said he had recently passed a medical exam with a “perfect score” and that he had “aced” two cognitive tests.Donald Trump said he has “no regrets” over how his appointment of three conservative supreme court justices led to the reversal of Roe v Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion.Trump, speaking to CBS News on Monday night, said:
      The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue. More

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      Obama to bring message of hope on 20th anniversary of Democratic convention speech

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      From “skinny kid with a funny name” to elder statesman: Barack Obama, the former US president, will be the headline speaker at the Democratic national convention in Chicago on Tuesday – 20 years after he first burst onto the national political scene.Obama, a state legislator from Illinois, was days from his 43rd birthday and months from being elected to the Senate when he was given a slot at the party’s 2004 convention in Boston. “Rising star to woo voters with upbeat keynote speech,” was the Guardian headline on 27 July 2004.Obama brought Democrats to their feet with a plea for hope and unity. Two decades later, America is more divided than ever, but on Tuesday the first Black president, back in his home city, will make the case for party nominee Kamala Harris to become the first woman and first woman of colour to win election to the White House.“The president will talk again in personal terms about what it takes to be president in this moment and what he’s prepared to do and that this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, where we all have to get involved,” Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to Obama, said at an Axios House event in Chicago on Tuesday.“One of the lessons we certainly should have learned: it’s not just enough to elect a president. You also have to stay engaged throughout the term of your presidency. Sometimes you elect a president and you go, OK, I’m done, and you go back to your jobs, and that’s not the way democracies work.”Michelle Obama, the former first lady, who is popular enough in her own right that some Democrats floated her as an alternative to Joe Biden, will be speaking on Tuesday night as well.Jarrett, chief executive of the Obama Foundation, added: “Our democracy has been under threat and under attack and it is up to us to be those active and engaged citizens to ensure that we get back on track. I think that’s part of the message you’ll hear from both of them tonight. So be there or be square.”Back in July 2004, in a 16-minute speech, Obama framed the presidential election, talked up nominee John Kerry and told his origin story as the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. He told delegates: “Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.”Obama did not dwell on policy, but his sweeping indictment of divisive politics struck a chord. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America,” he said. “There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”Joel Rubin, a Democratic strategist, recalled: “It was such a wonderful moment. It was an inspiring moment. It was like a moment to feel truly patriotic and proud to be part of a political party that wanted to bring back the country together. It spoke to the power of our country as a unified people.”Two and a half years later, Obama reprised that theme when he launched his presidential campaign before thousands of supporters gathered outside the Illinois capital of Springfield. His campaign motto was “hope and change”.Yet the flipside of hope was fear, an emotion that Republican Donald Trump was able to exploit to win the White House in 2016. After eight toxic years, the young Obama’s dream of a genuinely united nation seems as elusive as ever.Rubin, a former Obama administration deputy assistant secretary of state, added: “He diagnosed the problem in America right now. One speech never fixes a country. It’s part of a process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What you do is you elect leaders who have a commitment to that kind of vision and, unfortunately, we regressed in 2016 because we had Donald Trump come in committed to the opposite vision by not healing but destroying and magnifying difference rather than unity. But the message for the Democratic convention today is similar to the Obama message of unity and forward purpose.”“The historic nature of this convention is not lost on any of us, but especially those of us who grew up in the civil rights movement,” said Rev Al Sharpton. “Last night, we felt the clear through-line from Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964, Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Rev Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and Barack Obama in 2008.”“I think that will be felt as much when Obama takes the stage here in his hometown. I cannot help but think of when I ran for president in 2004 and met briefly with him before each of us spoke. It was clear that night that he struck a tone with the nation – one that still resonates with many of us 20 years later.”On Tuesday, Obama will also honour the legacy of Joe Biden, who served eight years as Obama’s vice-president. Biden will not be in the hall to see his former running mate speak, as he departed Chicago after delivering his own speech.Media reports suggest that Biden is still needled by the role that Obama – along with party leaders Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer – played in pressuring the 81-year-old to not seek re-election due to concerns over his mental capacity.Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, told a CNN-Politico Grill event on Monday: “I’m not going to give my private conversations with the former president. That’s up to him to decide. But we had a number of serious discussions.” More

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      Ex-Nikki Haley voters rally behind Kamala Harris: ‘I picked the side that had the least issues’

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      After the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley dropped out of the Republican primary earlier this year, some conservatives across the US continued to vote for her in subsequent primaries, casting ballots that indicated dissent within a party that has otherwise fully embraced Donald Trump.When Haley finally announced that she would be supporting the ex-president in the upcoming election, she said that it was on him to mobilize her loyalists.“Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me, and not assume that they’re just gonna be with him,” Haley said.But it was the Biden campaign, not Trump’s, that actively began engaging Haley voters. “I want to be clear: There is a place for you in my campaign,” Joe Biden wrote on Twitter/X alongside an ad targeting Haley voters.With the president out of the race now, some of those former Haley voters have organized behind Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in a political action group called Haley Voters for Harris.Craig Snyder, the campaign director for the Haley Voters for Harris Pac, told the Guardian that the impetus for the group came after seeing how other Haley supporters continued to support her even after she was no longer a candidate.“When we cast our votes in the primaries we weren’t really voting for her as an active candidate,” he said. “But we wanted to send a message that this was not the kind of Republican party that we wanted, that Trump’s period as the spirit-bearer of the party needed to come to an end.”Snyder wondered what would become of Haley voters in the general election, and homed in on those who have made the decision, however reluctantly, to support Harris.“For those of us in this group, our feeling has been that while we may disagree with the Democratic party on certain policy issues, the better choice is to continue our opposition to Trump by voting Democratic,” he said. “When President Biden made the decision to withdraw, we made the decision to continue along those lines and to support Vice-President Harris.”John “Jack” Merritt, a self-described “center-right” and “strict constitutional constructionist”, registered to vote as a Republican in 1972. He said that, as a “political junkie”, he subscribes to various-leaning political newspapers and watches all of the major news networks. Though he supported Haley in the primaries and has served as a committeeperson for the Republican party in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, Merritt has decided to vote for Harris in November.“I became incredibly disenchanted with the polarization of the two parties in the US,” Merritt said. “I picked the side that had the least amount of issues. I think [Harris and Walz] are more likely to ask for everything they want, but accept what they can get, especially if Congress turns out to be Republican this year. I’m looking for people who can truly govern, not just people who have ideological standards.”Former Haley voters, many of whom are in swing states, will be vital in determining the outcome of the election, according to Snyder. As a result, Haley Voters for Harris is primarily targeting center-right voters by engaging in direct communication and education on political issues.“We are developing the strongest arguments and factual accounts to give to voters to help them cross that last line,” Snyder, a registered Republican, said. “They’ve already taken their journey away from their Republican leaning. The question is: do they go the last mile and vote for the Democratic nominee? We want to get them across that last mile.”But Snyder understands the difficulty that lifelong Republicans might face in trying to stomach support for a Democrat. Still, he said: “There may be disagreements between these voters and a Harris-Walz administration on matters of policy, but they are not fundamental moral values disagreements.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn fact, some aspects of Harris’s history that may have dampened her appeal to progressives, such as her prosecutorial record, could work in her favor with Republicans.“Her greatest weakness to a lot of people turns out to be kind of a strength for winning over Republicans. [She’s] now been kind of leaning into the law and order persona. But I think it’s smart politics that she’s doing that,” said Emily Matthews, a ​co-chair of Haley Voters Working Group, a coalition of Haley supporters and volunteers.After Harris picked Walz as her running mate, Matthews said there was a lot of disappointment in the group, as they had favored Shapiro. But they’ve been focusing on Harris’s recent messaging as a bright spot.“The border is just really important to a lot of kind of more moderate Republicans and, well, Republicans in general,” she said. “We’ve seen a change in tone from Harris and that has been very welcomed.”Matthews is hoping Harris and Walz use this week’s Democratic national convention to share tangible policy shifts to the center, and to continue reaching out to disaffected Republicans and moderate voters. She said it’s important for the messaging to be clear about the Democrats’ more moderate and center successes.Synder agreed. “When our voters hear those kinds of facts – there’s been more oil production under the Biden-Harris administration than under the Trump administration, the Biden-Harris administration pushed forward a bill to increase the number of border agents far greater than what Trump ever proposed – that is the way to have people get over this obstacle,” he said. “There’s a whole variety of just plain facts about a more moderate kind of approach that Harris has shown compared to this crazy leftwinger that she’s going to be depicted as by the Republicans.”Last month, Haley’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to Haley Voters for Harris, urging the Pac to refrain from implying Haley’s “support for the election of Kamala Harris as President of the United States”.But the letter hasn’t deterred Snyder. “Our organization has formally responded through our attorneys, and as of yet nothing further has happened,” he said. “We are continuing our work. At no time have we misrepresented Governor Haley’s position on the race, which is well-known to be support for former President Trump. We are merely calling our group what we are: Haley voters who have decided to vote for Vice-President Harris.” More

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      Biden at the Democratic convention was unrecognisable from his disastrous debate

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      Joe Biden took the stage and held his daughter, Ashley, in a long embrace, whispered some tender words and wiped tears from his eyes. She smiled and kissed the hand of her ageing dad. The pair seemed to be at the quiet centre of a storm.Around them more than 20,000 stood, applauded, roared and chanted, “We love Joe.” They held tall narrow signs that said, “We ♥️ Joe”. The US president walked to the lectern, smiling, pointing, looked pensive, smiled again and dabbed his nose with a handkerchief.“I love you!” he shouted back, knowing there won’t be another night like this. “That was my daughter!” The adulatory cheering continued for all of four and a half minutes. It was the culmination of a night that for Biden must have felt either like receiving an honorary Oscar or giving the oration at his own funeral.Among those holding a sign and chanting “Thank you, Joe” was Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives. Call her Pelosi the Pitiless. She was among the party leaders who decided to override the primary election and tell the 81-year-old president that his time is up.Asked by the New Yorker magazine if her long friendship with Biden can survive, Pelosi replied: “I hope so. I pray so. I cry so… I lose sleep on it, yeah.”That intervention changed everything at this Democratic national convention in Chicago. Biden had expected to give the closing speech after accepting the presidential nomination on Thursday night.Instead he was the opening act on Monday. His old foe Donald Trump observed on social media: “They are throwing him out on the Monday Night Stage, known as Death Valley.” Worse still, Biden did not appear until 10.26pm Chicago time – which was 11.26pm in New York and Washington.Yet again Democrats had decided that he was not fit for prime time.All of it shows the mercilessness of politics and, as anyone with an ageing relative understands, the mercilessness of time. How quickly the golden boy becomes yesterday’s man.There may be a kernel of Biden seething with a lifetime’s resentments. The needless plagiarism row that scuppered his first run for president in 1988. The failure to get off the ground in 2008. The way that Barack Obama gave Hillary Clinton the nod instead of him in 2016.He overcame it all to reach the summit in 2020, proving be the man for the moment of the bleak pandemic winter. Yes, his victory said, unglamorous strivers can be president too. Biden will forever be in the school textbooks as 46.But as a one-term president rather than two. He didn’t quite have the last laugh as Obama, Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries concluded that he had to hand back the crown. Somehow the old truism reared its head again: all political careers end in failure.“I’ve got five months left in my presidency,” he told his 13th Democratic convention. “I’ve got a lot to do. I intend to get it done. It’s been the honour of my lifetime to serve as your president. I love the job, but I love my country more.”The relief in Chicago has been palpable, as the ecstatic reaction to a surprise appearance by Kamala Harris on Monday night made clear. Democratic aides say it is the same plane with a different pilot but anyone in Biden’s shoes would surely be hurt by their eagerness to move on. The crowd was far warmer to him as an outgoing president than it would have been if he were still their last hope of defeating Trump.The irony of it all was that, despite the late hour, Biden came out with all guns blazing. Standing at the lectern, surrounded by white stars that resembled a Star Trek teleport pad, he was a man unburdened, liberated, unrecognisable from the doddering June debate. Biden 2028!He spoke for nearly 50 minutes, his voice strong and clear. He said pro-Palestinian protesters outside “have a point”. He articulated a vision for America in the world. And he issued a clarion call: “Democracy has prevailed. Democracy has delivered. And now democracy must be preserved.”He also hammered Trump with relish. “You cannot say you love your country only when you win.” And: “Donald Trump promised infrastructure week every week for four years and he never built a damn thing.”Trump regularly speaks to blood, as in “bloodbath” or “poisoning the blood” of the nation. For Biden, it’s all about soul.Recalling the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, he said: “I could not stay on the sidelines so I ran. I had no intention of running again. I had just lost part of my soul,” – a reference to the death of his son, Beau.Wistfully reflecting on the long journey here, he told delegates: “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career but I gave my best to you for 50 years. Like many of you, I gave my heart and soul to our nation.”Earlier, Jill Biden, the first lady who has been married to Biden for nearly half a century, recounted the moment that she saw him “dig deep into his soul and decide to no longer seek reelection – and endorse Kamala Harris”.No wonder Biden has a love of Irish poetry, unrivaled in its soulfulness. Of course WB Yeats’s lines, “When you are old and grey and full of sleep/ and nodding by the fire,” seems all too applicable these days. But you can also imagine him telling Jill: “One man loved the pilgrim soul in you/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”Democratic convention highlights:

      What is the DNC?

      Joe Biden speaks at DNC night one following surprise appearance by Kamala Harris

      Pro-Palestinian protesters march before DNC

      Here are the rising stars and politicians to watch this week

      What to know about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz More