'Yes, she can': Obama's slogan back for Kamala Harris's campaign after his speech at DNC 2024

Former US President Barack Obama returned to the national stage on Tuesday night on the second day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) 2024.

America’s first Black president, Obama has thrown his considerable political capital to boost his longtime Democratic ally Kamala Harris in her 11th-hour presidential bid against Republican Donald Trump after President Joe Biden stepped back.

Here are the highlights from Obama’s address:

1. America’s role on the world stage: “We shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, and we can’t eradicate every cruelty and injustice in the world. But America can be, must be, a force for good – discouraging conflict, fighting disease, promoting human rights, protecting the planet from climate change, defending freedom," Obama said. As he added, that that’s what Kamala Harris believes in, the crowd began chanting “Yes, she can!” The slogan is a callback to Obama’s own campaign slogan “Yes, he can!” from his presidential campaign years ago.

2. Praising Joe Biden: The former president began his address by praising President Joe Biden. “I can say without question that my first big decision as your nominee turned out to be the best. And that was asking Joe Biden to serve by my side as the vice president,” he said.

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What I came to admire most about Joe was “his empathy, and his decency, and his hard-earned resilience,” he said.

The crown soon erupted in chants of “Thank you, Joe”, prominent on the first day of DNC, too.

3. Attacks on Trump: Taking a shot at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, he said “Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire who has not stopped talking about his problems since he rode down on his golden escalator nine years ago.”

He said Trump’s “gripes and grievances” have been getting worse because he is “afraid to lose to Kamala”. He took a jab at the “childish nicknames, crazy conspiracy theories, and this weird obsession with crowd sizes…it just goes on and on and on.”

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He called Trump a guy whose “act has gotten pretty stale”. He said, “We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos. We’ve seen that movie – and we all know that the sequel’s usually worse.”

4. “Kamala Harris is ready for the job”: Obama said Harris, as a prosecutor, stood up for children who’d been victims of sexual abuse.

He said that as the attorney general of the most populous state in the US, she fought big banks and for-profit colleges, “securing billions of dollars for the people they have scammed”. He said she pushed him and his administration hard after the home mortgae crisis of 2008 to ensure homeowners got a fair settlement.

He said that as vice president, “she helped take on drug companies to cap the cost of insulin, lower the cost of healthcare, and to give families with kids tax cuts.” He added, “she is running for president with real plans to lower costs even more, protect medicare and medicaid, and sign a law to guarantee every woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions.”

5. Slamming Donald Trump’s donors:
“Donald Trump and his donors…for them, freedom means that the powerful can do pretty much whatever they please– whether it’s to fire workers trying to organise a union, or poisoning our rivers, or avoid paying taxes,” he said.

6. On freedom, gun control, and queer rights: Continuing, Obama said, “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 to send your kids to school without worrying if they will come back home.”

He said true freedom gives each individual the right to make decisions about their own life: “How we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry.”

7. Praise for Tim Walz “I love this guy. Tim’s the kind of person who should be in politics – somebody who was born in a small town, served his country, taught kids, coached football and took care of his neighbors,” Obama said about the Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.

8. “Get to work”: Concluding his address, Obama urged Democrats to get to work to elect Harris and Walz. “If we knock on doors and make phone calls and talk to our friends and listen to our neighbours…if we work like we’ve never worked before…we will elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States, and Tim Walz as the next vice-president,” he said.

“We’ll elect leaders up and down the ballot who will fight for the hopeful, forward-looking America we believe in…So let’s get to work,” he said.