Obama warns US democracy could falter under Trump
Former US president Barack Obama warned that American democracy could falter if Donald Trump is re-elected – a stunning rebuke of his successor that was echoed by Kamala Harris at the Democratic Convention as she embraced her historic role as the first black woman on a national political ticket.
Mr Obama, himself a barrier breaker as the nation’s first black president, pleaded with voters on Wednesday night to “embrace your own responsibility as citizens – to make sure that the basic tenets of our democracy endure, because that’s what is at stake right now – our democracy”.
Throughout their online convention, the Democrats have summoned a collective urgency about the dangers of Mr Trump as president. In 2016, they dismissed and sometimes trivialised him. Now they are casting him as an existential threat to the country.
The tone signals anew the autumn campaign between Mr Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, already expected to be among the most negative of the past half-century, will be filled with rancour and recrimination.
Yet on the third night of the Democrats’ four-day convention, party leaders also sought to put forward a cohesive vision of their values and policy priorities, highlighting efforts to combat climate change and tighten gun laws. They drew a sharp contrast with Mr Trump, portraying him as cruel in his treatment of immigrants, uninterested in the nation’s climate crisis and in over his head on virtually all of the nation’s most pressing challenges.
Democrats also demonstrated a hope that Mr Biden, a 77-year-old white man, can revive the coalition that helped put Mr Obama into office, with minorities, younger voters and college-educated women blunting Mr Trump’s lock on many white and rural voters. The evening marked a celebration of the party’s leading women, including remarks from Hillary Clinton, the first woman to become a major ticket presidential nominee.
Harris, a 55-year-old California senator and the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, addressed race and equality in a personal way Mr Biden could not when he formally accepted his party’s presidential nomination yesterday. “There is no vaccine for racism, we have got to do the work,” Ms Harris said.
She added: “We’ve got to do the work to fulfill the promise of equal justice under law. None of us are free until all of us are free.”
Mr Biden must energise the disparate factions that make up the modern Democratic Party. Democrats hope Ms Harris and Mr Obama, in particular, can help bridge the divide between those reassured by Mr Biden’s establishment credentials and those craving bolder change.
The pandemic forced Biden’s team to abandon the traditionalconventionformatinfavour of an all-virtual affair.