The ex-President has returned to the campaign trail with relish, hoping to send a jolt through Democratic voters in the states that will decide next week's midterm elections. But in the process, he’s reminding the party’s fans of what they've been missing — a rockstar political personality with the capacity to distill the stakes of an election into a pithy and relatable stump speech.
Obama has lampooned Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker — a former college football star with no apparent qualifications for the job he’s seeking. (You wouldn’t get to the airport and ask him to fly the plane, so why would send him to the Senate to make laws? Obama asked). He turned the tables on a heckler over the weekend to make him an exemplar of the loss of civility in politics. He is issuing urgent new warnings about the threat to democracy posed by Republicans loyal to Donald Trump. And he’s come up with the most compelling case yet for why younger voters (who usually support Democrats but are notorious no-shows in midterm elections) should get to the polls, channeling the Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights and warning same-sex marriage could be next.
“Is it Republican politicians and judges who think they should get to decide when you start a family or how many children you should have, or who you marry or who you love?” Obama said in Wisconsin over the weekend. “Or is it Democratic leaders who believe that the freedom to make these most intimate personal decisions belongs to every American, not politicians, mostly men, sitting somewhere in Washington? That’s the choice in this election; that’s what you have to decide.”
Obama is giving every impression he’s having a great time, like a basketball star who’s back effortlessly shooting three pointers after a spell in retirement. He’s better at this than almost every other current politician — and he knows it. President Joe Biden lacks his old boss’ slick rhetorical skills, and Democrats don’t have anyone else who can close an argument like the 44th President.
Yet Obama’s facility on the stump is unlikely to spare Democrats a rough night on November 8. After all, he couldn’t save himself from the first-term president’s curse when Republicans won the House and delivered what he called a “shellacking” in the midterm elections of 2010. While he was in office, his endorsements and efforts on behalf of candidates lower down the Democratic ticket were a mixed success at best. And despite Obama's best efforts, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
At least Obama, like President Bill Clinton before him after the 1994 midterms, was able to turn a huge congressional election loss into a platform for a reelection win two years later. By next week, Biden is likely to be facing a similar assignment.
