Michelle Obama says that “Harris is one of the most qualified people who has ever aspired to the Presidency”
Former US President Barack Obama took advantage of his speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday to praise the current president, Joe Biden, who was his running mate, considering that history will remember him “for defending democracy at a time of great danger” and he celebrated that “he has passed the baton” to his ‘number two’, Kamala Harris, who will face the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, in the November presidential elections.
“The United States is ready for this new chapter. The United States is ready for a better story. The United States is ready for Kamala Harris to be president. And Kamala Harris is ready for this job,” he said during his closing speech on the second day of the convention.
“Now it’s up to all of us to fight for the country we believe in. And make no mistake, it’s going to be tough. Despite the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate in recent weeks — at rallies and on social media — it’s going to be a tight race in a very divided country, where many Americans don’t believe the government is there to help,” he said.
Obama has attacked Trump, saying that what he is “sure of” is that he “doesn’t lose sleep” over the problems of ordinary people, since he is “a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped complaining about his problems since he came down his golden escalator”: “It’s been a constant stream of complaints and grievances that has actually gotten worse now that he fears losing to Kamala. The crazy conspiracy theories, this strange obsession with crowd sizes. And it goes on and on.”
Thus, she has assured that “the truth is that Trump sees power as nothing more than a means to his ends,” among which he highlights that “the middle class pays the price for another of his enormous tax cuts that will mostly help him and his rich friends” or that he has “destroyed a bipartisan migration agreement written in part by one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress because he thought that trying to solve the problem would hurt his campaign.”
“Don’t boo. Vote,” she urged, also mentioning that “he doesn’t seem to care that more women lose their reproductive freedom” and that, “above all, he wants the idea to be that the country is irremediably divided.” “We don’t need four more years of bravado, clumsiness and chaos. We’ve already seen that movie and we all know that sequels are never good,” she reasoned.
Obama, who at the beginning of his speech recalled that 16 years ago he had “the honor of accepting this party’s nomination to be president,” said that “looking back” he can “say without a doubt that his “first big decision,” which was to choose Biden as his vice president, “was one of the best.” “While we worked together for eight years, sometimes quite hard, what I came to admire most about Joe was not his intelligence or his experience,” but his “empathy, decency, hard-earned resilience.”
Thus, he considered that these values are what the country “has needed most” in the last four years: “At a time when the other party had become a cult of personality, we needed a leader to unite people. We needed a leader who was selfless enough to do the rarest thing you can do: put aside his own ambition for the good of the country. History will remember Joe Biden as an exceptional president, who stood up for democracy in a time of great danger, but I am even prouder to call him my friend,” she said.
SECOND DAY OF THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
Former first lady Michelle Obama was the one who gave the floor to her husband on stage, from where she said that she and Harris have built their lives on the same founding values, despite the fact that their mothers were born on the other side of the ocean, making a veiled reference to Trump’s statements about the origins of the vice president, since he questioned whether she was black and suggested that it is a strategy to get votes, since her mother is from India and her father is from Jamaica.
“Harris is more than ready for this moment. She is one of the most qualified people who has ever aspired to the Presidency. And it’s one of the most worthy,” he said. In this sense, he added that the vice president’s story “is that of most Americans who are trying to build a better life” because “no one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American.”
During this second day, while Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, were at a rally in Wisconsin, where he symbolically accepted the presidential nomination, several prominent Democrats took the stage, such as the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, and the independent senator for Vermont, Bernie Sanders. But also some Republicans who have distanced themselves from Trump, such as Stephanie Grisham, Kyle Sweetser, and John Giles.
