Obama trying to save legacy
‘‘Unlike some people, I don’t just make stuff up when I talk. I’ve got facts to back me up.’’
Former president Barack Obama
The 7000 people packed into an Indiana convention to hear Barack Obama speak cheered almost every time he paused but the biggest surge came when he threw the crowd back in time to 10 years ago – when he won the 2008 election.
‘‘I had less grey hair then. But you know what I earned this grey hair,’’ Obama said.
‘‘When I came into the presidency, Republicans had been in one of those periods of retrenchment. They had been cutting taxes for the rich and cutting regulations for polluters, and we had the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Then Democrats came in and had to clean that up.’’
The former US president was in Gary, Indiana, a Rust Belt town about 40 minutes drive from his home town Chicago that might as well be in a different country.
Gary’s population has roughly halved in the past 50 years, as factories have closed and people have moved away.
Obama was in town to campaign for Senator Joe Donnelly, one of the most conservative Democrat senators left.
Donnelly doesn’t really have a choice but to swing Right: this is a state that went for Trump by 19 points.
He is up for re-election in two days in the midterms, and Republicans see him as one of their best targets.
But Obama won here, once, in 2008 – largely with votes from towns like Gary.
And he used his visit not just to campaign for Donnelly but for his own legacy, and for politics based on facts and tolerance. ‘‘We all try to put a favourable light on things,’’ Obama noted, recounting efforts to soften the blow from his wife Michelle when he had done something wrong – by washing dishes.
‘‘But unlike some people, I don’t just make stuff up when I talk. I’ve got facts to back me up,’’ Obama said.
‘‘I believe in fact-based campaigning. ‘‘I believe in reality-based governance. ‘‘It shouldn’t be Democrat or Republican to say your word means something. It shouldn’t be Democrat or Republican to say we don’t attack certain groups because of the way they pray.’’
Obama took care to never mention President Donald Trump by name, somewhat respecting the convention of past presidents holding off from criticising current ones.
But this is 2018 – conventions are dead, and Obama’s speech was almost entirely shaped by the evident horror he has when looking at Trump and Trump’s party.
‘‘Nobody in my administration got indicted. Which by the way is not that high a bar,’’ Obama noted, a now-familiar line.
But as he did all throughout his career, Obama tried to use history to contextualise the modern moment, saying progressive achievement is always followed by conservative retrenchment.
‘‘You win the right to union; suddenly someone wants to bust your union.
‘‘You win a higher minimum wage suddenly they stop raising the minimum wage for 10 years ... Progress never comes without a fight.’’
The main topic of the speech was Obama’s healthcare law, passed in the first years of his term without a single vote from the Republicans.
After being seen as politically toxic for years, ‘‘Obamacare’’ is more popular than ever, particularly as Republicans have struggled with how to reform it.
For Democrats like Donnelly, who do their best to avoid anything that looks close to a ‘‘progressive issue’’, this has been a godsend.
Suddenly he can talk about how he will protect insurance for those with preexisting conditions, while the Republicans won’t.
Republicans all over the country are now promising to protect those preexisting conditions, after voting to repeal the act tens of times, an about-face Obama found particularly galling.
‘‘Democrats are going to protect your care – period. Joe Donnelly will protect it and they won’t,’’ Obama said.
‘‘If the Republicans want to stand up and defend the fact that they tried to take away your healthcare they should do so.
‘‘But for them to go out there and pretend like they didn’t do it – like we are stupid?’’ And yet, Democrats have not been above skulduggery in Indiana.
The party has been paying for Facebook ads that promote the Libertarian candidate Lucy Brenton as the true conservative choice in the state, in an attempt to split off votes from Republican candidate Mike Braun. Brenton is polling somewhere in the single digits, while Donnelly and Braun are neck-and-neck, so those Brenton votes really could make the difference.
Trump called out this behaviour on his Twitter account, writing: ‘‘Donnelly is trying to steal the election? Isn’t that what Russia did!?’’
Given the Democrats look likely to lose a Senate seat in North Dakota, pulling off a win in states like Indiana and Missouri that voted for Trump will be essential to any chances they have to win a majority in the Senate, now or in 2020. For it to happen this year with North Dakota going so badly, the party would need to keep every other seat it is defending, win battlegrounds Nevada and Arizona, and a long-shot race in Tennessee or Texas.
Since Obama is touring the states the Democrats already hold, instead of Nevada and Arizona, it looks like the party has accepted the best it can do in the Senate this year is keep the seats it already holds.
Indeed, The Atlantic reported that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer himself asked Obama to come to Indiana.
Trump has also kept his focus on the western states the Democrats currently hold, signalling a sort of acceptance from the White House that the Republicans are likely to lose the House of Representatives.
None of the Republicans in those closerun suburban House seats have had a visit in weeks. Trump came to Indiana on Friday, taking care to draw out the ‘‘H’’ in ‘‘Barack Hussein Obama’’, and is visiting again tomorrow.
The current president has been complaining recently that the ‘‘momentum’’ of the Republican campaign was halted by the ‘‘two maniacs’’ who sent bombs to Democrats and killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
‘‘We did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible, because for seven days nobody talked about the elections,’’ Trump said in Missouri.
That momentum – on both sides of the aisle – is definitely back on in the final days of the campaign. The Gary crowd was in very high spirits, screaming ‘‘four more years’’ every time Obama paused.
Steve Eirick, at the rally with daughter Rebecca, told me he would have loved to vote for Obama a third time. ‘‘I mean look at what we have now,’’ he noted.
But term limits exist for a reason and Obama knows that. He and his team – if you read between the lines in their memoirs – feel like they gave Hillary Clinton an easy race to win in 2016 that she fumbled into a loss. But Clinton wasn’t on the ticket when the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 2010 and 2014.
That’s why Obama is campaigning so hard this year: his legacy is on the line.
The Democrats may still win big cheers with friendly audiences talking about the economic recovery or the killing of Osama Bin-laden but it’s Obamacare that will stay with people. If Obama wants to protect that legacy for the decades to come, he’d better hope all the people who supported him 10 years ago follow his signature piece of advice on Tuesday.
‘‘Don’t boo. Vote.’’