Former United States President Barack Obama has taken to the stage of the Democratic National Convention in a show of support for Kamala Harris in her 11th-hour bid to become the country’s next president in November’s election.
Obama walked onto the stage in Chicago to deafening applause from a crowd that had just heard from Obama’s wife Michelle, Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff and other veterans of the party, as well as Republicans who had abandoned their party because of Donald Trump.
The first Black American ever elected to the White House, 63-year-old Obama quickly showed his skills as an orator, paying tribute to President Joe Biden as a man he was “proud to call president, but even prouder to call my friend”.
Acknowledging the scale of the fight facing Harris and her running mate Tim Walz to win the White House over the next 11 weeks, he urged people to “fight for an America we can believe in” and get out the vote.
“This will be a tight race in a divided country; a country where too many Americans are still struggling,” he warned.
“Donald Trump sees power as nothing more than a means to his own ends,” Obama added. “We do not need four more years of bluster, bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter. For a new story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.”
Obama, who spoke for more than half an hour, has thrown his considerable political capital behind Harris as she seeks to make history on November 5 and become the first woman, and first person of Black and South Asian descent, to be elected president.
Obama was preceded on stage by his wife Michelle, who was welcomed with raucous applause, cheers and whistles.
“Hope is making a comeback,” she said, as she embarked on an enthusiastic endorsement of Harris and Walz.
The former first lady spoke of the need for the country to turn the page on fear and division, and cautioned that Trump would try to distort Harris’s truth, much as he did “everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” referring to her and her husband.
“His limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who also happened to be Black,” she said to deafening applause.
The Obamas were in the White House from 2009-2017.
“Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” she asked, drawing laughter from the crowd.
Trump and his vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, are also barnstorming key battleground states this week in a bid to steer attention away from the convention in Chicago.
Republicans who have left the party, including Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham and former Trump voter Kyle Sweetser, also addressed the Democrat convention on Tuesday.
