When Barack Obama visited the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, he couldn’t even get a floor pass. The young Illinois state senator had just lost a bruising congressional primary to Bobby Rush.
By 2004, he was back at the DNC in Boston, giving the keynote address. This time round, he was the self-proclaimed “skinny kid with a funny name” turned Democratic nominee for an Illinois Senate seat, and delivered the speech that would ultimately define him.
“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America,” he said at the time. “There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”
Four years later, Senator Obama approached the convention stage in Denver as a conquering hero. It preceded his monumental victory that made him the first Black person to become president and occupy a building built by enslaved people who looked like him.
But despite this, Obama remained largely an outsider. He had defeated Hillary Clinton, and by proxy, Bill Clinton.
As president, he often chafed at the typical gladhanding and building of relationships with Congress, handing it off to his vice president Joe Biden, who was a senator for 36 years.
Yet at the DNC in the United Center in Chicago on Tuesday, Obama heaped praised on his more garrulous former right-hand man.
“Looking back, I can say without question that my first big decision as your nominee turned out to be one of my best – and that was asking Joe Biden to serve as my vice president,” Obama said.
The speech was delivered without Biden in the arena after the president had decided not to seek re-election last month and endorse his own vice president Kamala Harris for the top of the ticket.
Biden delivered his farewell address on Monday night, reportedly after Obama and other senior Democrats not-so-gently nudged him off the stage.
Now, 20 years after his first keynote address, Obama was back in his hometown to speak to a party that he fundamentally reshaped.
“I am feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible,” he said.
As he took the stage at the United Center, crowds of delegates and supporters shouted “Yes We Can” – Obama’s iconic chant.
“I’m feeling fired up. I’m feeling ready to go,” he told the crowd.
When the crowd booed one of his remarks on Donald Trump, he reiterated another of his famous lines: “Don’t boo, vote.”
The “no-drama Obama” approach that once frustrated Democrats now stands in stark contrast to the frantic and ad-hoc presidency of Trump that came after. And Obama could not help but take a swipe at his successor who had questioned whether the first Black president was born in the United States.
“We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos,” he said.
“We’ve seen that movie and we all known that the sequel’s usually worse,” he said.
He also compared Trump to a “neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.”
Obama’s return to Chicago — the city where he moved as a young man after college to become a community organizer and where he fell in love with a lawyer named Michelle Robinson — was also a moment for him to endorse the future of the party.
Obama heralded Kamala Harris, who attended his 2007 announcement of his candidacy in Illinois.
Like him, she is a biracial candidate who earned comparisons to him almost as soon as he was elected. While much of California’s Democratic establishment got behind Hillary Clinton, Harris got behind Obama.
“Now the torch has been passed,” Obama said on Tuesday. “America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a president Kamala Harris.”
Toward the end of the speech, Obama played the hits from his original 2004 speech, talking about being the grandson of a “white woman born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” and about his mother-in-law Marian Robinson, who passed away earlier this year – and tied it into Harris and Walz.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
Obama once again had the party on its feet.
As former Democratic congressman Steve Israel told The Independent: “It’s poignant, particularly given the fact that he just emerged as a superstar on the political scene.
“And is now kind of the North Star for the Democrats.”