Barack and Michelle at the DNC.

When and if the republic ever gets around to amending the Constitution so that Clarence Thomas can chip in for his million-dollar, private-jet vacations to Komodo (Indonesia) now paid by “In-the-year-2025” influence peddlers, the framers might add a few clauses banning former presidential families from speaking at political conventions, so that in the future we’re spared more orations from Barack and Michelle Obama, if not the Clintons (“In deception we trust”) .

As a warm-up band for the Kamala Harris coronation tour, the Obamas were trotted on stage this week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago’s United Center (the House that Michael Jordan built), and for close to an hour—if you add in some Bruce Springsteen working-class sound tracks—the country was reminded why one legacy of the Obama presidency was a Tea Party ascendancy in 2010 and, more recently, the Donald Trump Horror Show.

Had the Democrats acquiesced to President Joe Biden Jr.’s own goal nomination, we still might have been subjected to speeches by the self-satisfied Obamas, but at least the tone (knowing that Biden was shipping more water than the Titanic) could have been a touch less about the importance of being Barack.

Now with Vice President Harris in perfect lockstep with a Hope & Change restoration, there was nothing standing in the way of yet another Obama duet, more singing songs of themselves. Whether such lullabies of self-congratulation will elect Democrats in the 2024 election remains to be seen.

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In case you had other things to do on a summer evening than to watch an Obama rerun on cable, Michelle went first, dressed in an armless black number (her abs as a national monument) and speaking in the solemn tones of a street detective (Sergeant Joe Friday?) or perhaps a prosecutor at a National Grievance Trial.

Otherwise, her point was that Kamala is a Michelle doppelgänger, and that while you might want Mrs. Obama to run for president, the best you can do this time is to vote for Harris. Michelle intoned:

My girl, Kamala Harris, is more than ready for this moment. She is one of the most qualified people ever to seek the office of the presidency. And she is one of the most dignified—a tribute to her mother, to my mother, and to your mother too. The embodiment of the stories we tell ourselves about this country. Her story is your story. It’s my story. It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life.

Insert the name Michelle for each mention of Kamala, and the meaning of her remarks is clear.

* * *

Otherwise, Michelle’s speech was just one long guest appearance on The View during which she recounted for the live studio audience (what’s left of the Democratic Party) the sadness of her mother’s passing or how Barack was “the love of her life”.

To open her remarks, Michelle said:

But, to be honest, I am realizing that until recently, I have mourned the dimming of that hope. And maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings—it’s that deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future. And for me, that mourning has also been mixed with my own personal grief. The last time I was here in my hometown was to memorialize my mother, the woman who showed me the meaning of hard work and humility and decency. The woman who set my moral compass high and showed me the power of my own voice. Folks, I still feel her loss so profoundly. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be steady enough to stand before you tonight, but my heart compelled me to be here because of the sense of duty that I feel to honor her memory and to remind us all not to squander the sacrifices our elders made to give us a better future.

It was a heartfelt passage, delivered in a somber monotone, and no doubt it tugged at the heartstrings of the 50,000 delegates, supporters, and donors who clogged the United Center, but it didn’t address the question of why Kamala Harris might be qualified to lead the nation.

Michelle added:

You see, my mom in her steady quiet way, lived out that striving sense of hope every single day of her life. She believed that all children, all people have value. That anyone can succeed if given the opportunity. She and my father didn’t aspire to be wealthy—in fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed. They understood that it wasn’t enough for their kids to thrive if everyone else around us was drowning.

Perhaps someday when the Obama girls are remembering their own mother, one of them might say, in the same vein:

My parents honed the art of the common man down to a T, posing as community organizers (although I doubt many travel around on private planes) and the peoples’ choice in the White House, while it was all a schtick to hold up Random House for $65 million in book advances and Netflix for another $60 million—to tell the world everything they had been saying on talk shows and at press conferences for ten years.

* * *

Since the Obamas are a package deal (as were The Osmonds and The Jackson Five), Barack followed Michelle to the stage, which seemed to float above the convention delegates, more a stairway to heaven than a soap box that once might have supported William Jennings Bryan.

Barack started out by saying, “Chicago—it’s good to be home. It is good to be home,” as if maybe after his speech he might drop in at a constitutional law class at the University of Chicago, for old time’s sake, or sleep over at his Greenwood Avenue starter mansion, that which he paid for, in part, with easy money from Tony Rezko (a Chicago bagman for many politicians, including Barack, who went up the river to the big house when Obama went to the White House).

Since that time that Obama paid $1.65 million for his Greenwood Avenue house (it looks like a failed savings bank), his Chicago real estate ambitions have grown now to include a pyramidal holding in Jackson Park along Lake Michigan, where for a cool $830 million the Obama Presidential Center will rise from the ashes (and cut down oak trees) of several softball fields.

The Obama Center will have a digitized (privately owned, for all you community organizers keeping score at home) library and conference hall, but mostly it’s a presidential crypt with a gift shop, for which the city of Chicago donated 19 acres of prime city parkland and Democratic fats cats ponied up the $800 million (soon to exceed $1 billion) for a burial site worthy of Halicarnassus (whose mausoleum was an ancient wonder of the world).

* * *

I know that Obama is one of the greatest political orators since Pericles and Demosthenes, but to me his speeches are cringeworthy, one long song of himself delivered at times in falsetto tones and accompanied by more hand affectations than those performed by a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader with pom-poms.

The pantomime suggesting that Trump has a small penis (accompanied by the Obama phrase, “There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes…”, with the trouser snake hand gesture delivered on the word “sizes”) was unworthy not just of a former president, but any politician above the rank of Shakespearean court jester.

Equally disingenuous and self-serving was Obama’s faux love song to the discarded Joe Biden. Obama said, almost weepily:

History will remember Joe Biden as an outstanding President who defended democracy at a moment of great danger. And I am proud to call him my President, but I am even prouder to call him my friend.

A more accurate telling might well be something Biden could have whispered in the quiet of the White House residence, or maybe at his Delaware beach house, along these lines:

Barack needed me in 2008 to win over the white political establishment, not to mention the Senate and working class Catholics of the Scranton variety. He needed me in 2020 to take down Bernie’s L.L. Bean socialism. And he even needed me in 2024 (against my better judgement) when it looked as though Trump would run the table in the House and Senate if the prickly Harris were the nominee. But then he, helped by Mother Superior Nancy Pelosi, decided that I was a doddering fool and pushed me over the side while I had covid, when it suited his ego and the donors for whom he shills. Thanks for everything, Barry.

* * *

To hear Obama recount the eight years of his presidency, you might well conclude that he talked tough to the corporations (who in 2008 otherwise bankrupted the country but still managed to bail themselves out with public money and avoid jail time for their chairmen), stood toe-to-toe with Vladimir Putin and the Russians (who in case you’ve forgotten during the Obama years waltzed unopposed into Crimea), and extended health insurance to all Americans (even though some 26 million citizens remain without health coverage).

With rhetorical flourish Obama intoned,

Well, we have a broader idea of freedom. We believe in the freedom to provide for your family if you’re willing to work hard. The freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and send your kids to school without worrying if they’ll come home. We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life, how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry. And we believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have the freedom to make choices that are different than ours. That’s okay.

Who would not sign up for that…except that, if you lived through the Obama years, what in fact happened is: he allowed (by passive behavior bordering on supine) the Republicans later to pack the Supreme Court with the likes of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett; he fought forever wars all over the Middle East; he did nothing to advance gun control, especially of all the semiautomatic weapons that were turned loose on school children; and then, when all the dust settled and Trump was president, he cashed in his man-of-the-people street credentials and Nobel Peace Prize for a $12 million beach house on Martha’s Vineyard and private-jet vacations with the likes of George Clooney and Richard Branson.

* * *

Perhaps the most glaring exceptions from Obama’s convention speech were any mention or passing allusion to the genocide in Gaza or the war in Ukraine and how the next president should deal with these haunting issues. Instead he settled for this warmed-over pabulum:

We shouldn’t be the world’s policeman and we can’t eradicate every cruelty and injustice in the world. But America can be and must be a force for good: discouraging conflict, fighting disease, promoting human rights, protecting the planet from climate change, defending freedom, brokering peace.

I guess that sounds better than: “I looked the other way when Sisi staged his coup in Egypt, sent troops to Afghanistan for reasons that today I cannot remember, and sucker punched the Russians by staging coups in Syria and Libya. Oh, and I gave Israel $38 billion to buy cluster bombs. What could I do? It’s what my donor base (all of you here in this hall!) wanted.”

* * *

At the end of his speech—well, just before, Obama too, publicly mourned the passing of his mother-in-law—the former president well full on Ronald Reagan, practically declaring that it’s “morning in America” with Kamala Harris on the ticket. Obama said:

But here’s the good news, Chicago: All across America, in big cities and small towns, away from all the noise, the ties that bind us together are still there. We still coach Little League and look out for our elderly neighbors. We still feed the hungry in churches and mosques and synagogues and temples. We share the same pride when our Olympic athletes compete for the gold. Because the vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided. We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone.

Omitted from the closing stanzas, as from the rest of the speech, was any mention of the Supreme Court, runaway inflation, the insufficient minimum wage, genocide in Gaza, climate destruction, monopolistic corporations, or the tilted wheels of most markets. Instead we’re all out there coaching Little League and feeding the homeless.

Obama used the same empty imagery in 2010 when he lost the House to the deranged Tea Party, and in 2016, when he tried to gift the presidency to the compromised Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he put his thumb on the democratic wheels to deny the nomination to Bernie Sanders, just as in 2024 he deep-sixed Biden and elevated Harris—without so much as a straw poll.

Maybe by now the country should be on to the continental divide between Obama’s words and deeds?