Obama devoted time in his speech to Harris, too, with whom he has some things in common (“this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible,” he had said at the D.N.C.). Now Obama mostly stuck to the biographical data points that Harris has used to talk about herself. There were no unexpected personal anecdotes. I was standing behind an older man dressed in white who enthusiastically cheered on the speakers and at times waved a small Jamaican flag. For longer than I care to admit, I did not put it together that he was waving the Jamaican flag not just for himself but for Harris as well, so little does she talk about the Jamaican side of her family. Obama, who wrote a whole book about his complicated relationship with his dad, said, “I didn’t have a father in the house, but I did have people around me—stepfather, grandparents, teachers, coaches, and, most of all, my mother—who tried to teach me the difference between right and wrong, who showed me what it meant to be honest and responsible.” But his speech wasn’t focussed on the personal. It was about highlighting the contrast between Trump’s posturing (“that macho, ‘I’m going to own these folks, I’m going to put ’em down’ ”) and Harris (“who knows what real strength looks like, who will set a good example and do the right thing and leave this country better than she found it”).
Harris came on and gave the same stump speech she has been giving for the past three months. Some knowing audience members left early, perhaps to avoid the Secret Service lockdown that delays exits after Harris departs a venue, or perhaps because one doesn’t need to be a campaign reporter to have heard this speech before.
Photograph by Kyodo via AP Images
Two days later, at a rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, it was Michelle Obama’s turn to make her first appearance with Harris on the ground. Apart from a speech at the D.N.C., Michelle Obama has been less present than her husband this election cycle, keeping with her tradition of largely eschewing party politics despite being one of the Democrats’ most high-wattage figures. Since her 2018 book, “Becoming,” which has sold more than ten million copies, became one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, she has achieved an almost Oprah-like status, especially among women. In the audience, a retired educator named Chris Kurtz, one of several people wearing T-shirts that said “Kamalazoo,” told me that she had already been to two Kamala Harris rallies this campaign season, but that seeing Michelle Obama “has been a bucket-list item.” A young man named Matt Jansen told me that he had driven all the way from Saint Louis, Missouri. Missouri is a red state, and it was the Obamas, he said, who had first influenced him, when he was twelve years old, to question the conservative politics of his parents. Then there were those who were more practical: “Every person that we can bring in to maybe change a few minds, a few hearts, that’s going to help,” an attendee named Rubbie Hodge told me.
The Wings Event Center, where the event was held, was festooned with bunting and flags—this rally was meant to be televised. Obama cut a glamorous figure as she walked onstage wearing a tortoiseshell-patterned suit and gold earrings, her hair gathered in a long braid down her back. Barack Obama’s speech on Thursday had been good, but it had stayed within standard parameters. Perhaps because she was speaking at a rally only once, Michelle Obama didn’t hold back, and her speech in Kalamazoo might go down as one of the most powerful of this entire election.
She began by pointing out that Harris was being held to a double standard, asked “to dazzle us at every turn,” as Obama put it, versus Trump, from whom, she said, “we expect nothing at all: no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.” In a campaign season in which the subject of police violence against Black men—and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020—has rarely been mentioned, Obama dared to address it: “If you are a mother who has lost sleep worrying if your son could be the victim of a nightmare traffic stop going bad, if you’ve ever been out there marching and weeping for justice, who do you think is going to have your back?” she asked. But then she veered in another direction. Without recrimination, she evoked the irony that in an election to potentially elect the first woman President, in which women’s health care and very lives are at stake, so much of recent discourse has focussed on how to uphold the ego of the American man, and which vision of masculinity should prevail in the nation.
Obama brought it back to the intimate matter of the body. “I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this,” she said as she began the second part of her speech, “because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth.” She described a woman’s body as a “complicated business,” and spoke about abnormal pap smears, mammograms, infections, and miscarriages; about menstrual problems and menopause; and about inequities in funding for research into women’s health. She suggested that restrictions on abortion have reverberations that go far beyond abortion itself. “We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing life-saving treatments because they are worried about being arrested; more medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all; more ob-gyn clinics without enough doctors to meet demand closing their doors.”
She evoked worst-case scenarios, addressing men in particular:
She had the arena’s attention. And then she made a plea to men—“from the core of my being”—to take women’s lives seriously. “Please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us, because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health,” she said. “And let me tell you all, to think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equality. So fellows, before you cast your votes, ask yourselves, what side of history do you want to be on?”
This was a big speech to follow, but unlike two nights before in Georgia, Harris held the room’s attention. This time nobody was leaving. It was hard to tell what was different—maybe it was the more intimate venue, maybe getting endorsed by Beyoncé, as Harris had the night before, will give a person a certain confidence, or maybe it was that after the gravity of Michelle Obama’s speech Harris’s arrival gave the crowd a chance to relax again, but she seemed more at ease. There were ten days left until the election. “This is going to be a tight race to the end so we’ve got a lot of work to do,” she said. ♦
