HOPE INTERRUPTED — Twenty years ago this summer, an up-and-coming Senate candidate from Illinois delivered one of the most electrifying speeches in political convention history. When Barack Obama finished speaking — after being interrupted 33 times for applause — delegates leapt out of their seats, many in tears. Those who were on the floor in Boston in 2004 speak about the moment with almost mystical reverence. “We’ve just seen the first black president,” television commentator Chris Matthews predicted as the youthful pol concluded. It was a speech so good that it propelled Obama to the presidency four years later. But after eight years of his leadership and eight more of Donald Trump, followed by Joe Biden, it also looks like a curious antique. Segments of the address read like an almost hopelessly naive relic. And as Obama prepares to take the convention stage tonight to make an affirmative case for Vice President Kamala Harris, his message is sure to be shaped by two decades of politics that have been exceptionally bitter and polarizing — the opposite of the aspirational message he laid out at the Boston convention. Back then, Obama began his speech with a personal biography that sounded like the quintessence of the American dream, and his soaring oratory crescendoed with the idea that powered his presidential run — “the audacity of hope.” It was more than just the simple notion that a better America is possible, but that a better America is already there, if we look for it. That noble kids will still serve their country, that moms living in inner cities and rural farmers are fundamentally asking for the same thing, that — more than anything else — there are set values unique to America that stretch across the political spectrum. “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States,” he said from the podium to raucous cheers. Two decades later, Little League may be growing but religious participation is down. States and school boards across the country are eagerly banning books (and Obama himself extended the Patriot Act, which allowed federal agents to access library records) and gay marriage became the law of the land but legal experts now believe it could be in jeopardy. Beyond the specific hopes for America that Obama espoused, though, the inspirational construct that knitted his ideas together in 2004 — a stirring belief that Americans can escape the gravitational pull toward political polarization — feels anachronistic. The ease with which Trump’s caustic and proudly divisive rhetoric took root, triumphing over Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” speech at the 2016 Democratic convention, seemed to be an inflection point. But it might also be said that her husband, the 44th president, had largely abandoned his idea of a presidency governed by universally shared political values by the time he ran for reelection in 2012. Stymied even by moderate Republicans in his attempts to pass the landmark healthcare legislation that eventually became Obamacare, he internalized a political lesson — success is measured not by a magic number of bipartisan collaborators but by your ability to wield the power you have. “I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention. Times have changed, and so have I,” he said at his party’s 2012 convention. “America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together.” It was by no means a total abandonment of his original vision, but his 2012 speech also reckoned with and recontextualized his understanding of America as a nation with less goodwill than he had once imagined, and far sharper dividing lines between its Red and Blue States. By 2020, at the convention nominating Biden to take on a president who advanced wild conspiracy theories and lies about his own birthplace, Obama abandoned any patina of shared bipartisan vision and proclaimed that “[the Trump] administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” just months before a riot at the Capital that shook the basic foundation of America’s political institutions. Tonight, we can expect an even more significant departure from his original 2004 vision. “At his core, I think President Obama still believes most Americans share the same hopes and dreams and that there is more that unites us than divides us,” said Jim Margolis, an Obama advisor who co-produced his 2008 and 2012 conventions. “I think he would also acknowledge that the divisions between red states and blue states are real and more pronounced than in 2004 — despite those shared values.” As it turns out, it’s hard to build a durable legacy. In 2004, Obama was the darling of the political world. In one important way, the legacy of his 2004 speech lives on. Obama’s speech in Boston inspired a newly elected San Francisco district attorney in attendance, Kamala Harris, who co-hosted a fundraiser for his Senate campaign later that summer. Now, Harris is counting on Obama to deliver a similarly galvanizing message, though perhaps tempered by what he’s learned since 2004. “There is an exponentially bigger need to bring people together today than there was 20 years ago,” says Steve Hildebrand, who joined what would become Obama’s first presidential campaign in its nascent stages in 2006 and served as his deputy national campaign manager in 2008. “I think [Obama’s speech tonight] needs to be sharper, more focused, more pointed than ever before.” This evening, Obama will reportedly “bring into focus the values at stake in this election and at the heart of our politics.” It’s difficult to imagine his understanding of shared American values will be as impossibly optimistic as they were in 2004. But even after enduring years of Trump’s attempts to tear down his political legacy — and witnessing the country torn apart at the seams — as the author of one of America’s most memorable and stirring speeches, a sense of hope will always be attached to his mission. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @Calder_McHugh. PROGRAMMING NOTE: Nightly is taking its annual end-of-summer hiatus starting Monday, Aug. 26. We’ll be back Tuesday, Sept. 3, just in time for the election homestretch.
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