Barack Obama left the White House nearly 10 years ago. And yet, at 65, he remains a full 15 years younger than the sitting president, Donald Trump, who celebrated his 80th birthday in June by hosting a UFC extravaganza on the White House lawn, and 18 years younger than former president Joe Biden, who is seldom seen now, and ill with cancer – and who would have been halfway through his second term in office had the 2024 election gone according to plan for the Democratic Party.
That age differential seems shocking whenever Obama makes a public appearance. Around Atlanta on Wednesday night, he campaigned along with Jon Ossoff, the 39-year-old up for re-election as Georgia’s junior senator and for Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s former mayor campaigning to become the state’s first black governor. Obama failed to win Georgia during his two presidential election campaigns but on Wednesday night, he was introduced by Ossoff to a predictably ecstatic reception.
The billing of Obama in Georgia is redolent of rich civil rights-era history, but this event took place in an unlovely and unapologetically consumerist suburb of Morrow, 24km south of Atlanta. A line of many thousands snaked around the shopping emporiums and a rush occurred when Obama arrived at the venue, leading to chaos at the security entrance and, soon afterwards, an announcement that the venue was full. Thousands trooped back to cars ditched in parking lots around the area.
It was after 8pm when Obama took to the stage, with the familiar panther-light stride, an open-necked white shirt and that famous, irrepressible grin. For almost an hour he treated the crowd to a demonstration of what has long been acknowledged as his gifts as an American orator of the first rank. He was, in turns, caustic and funny and urgent in reminding people to get out to vote. But it was something he said at the beginning of his address, as an aside, that stuck in the mind afterwards. “There are some people who say I’ve been doing this for too long,” he noted, invoking the folksy twang he employs on public occasions. “One of those people is Michelle Obama.”
Contained within the slightly melancholic observation was the truth that his powers are limited now; that the soaring promise on which he campaigned in 2008 ultimately and inevitably fell short of aspirations, and that his function in American politics is largely ceremonial. One of the difficulties for the Democrats in every single election cycle lies in how and when to use their most beloved political figure. Obama retains the capacity to generate, in supporters, the fervent optimism and good feeling that marked his first coming. The danger is that he is so good at this stuff that those running for election risk being eclipsed in his presence.
And then there is the more complicated fact that Obama’s two terms in office directly preceded the era of Trump. The pair are weirdly connected. While Obama spoke in Atlanta on Wednesday, Trump was back in Ohio, this time Chillicothe, where he campaigned for Jon Husted, the GOP senate candidate, and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose gubernatorial campaign produced an advert quickly declared the most despicable in the history of US politics.
It has been a bruising month for president Trump’s ego. Although his surprise appearance in Corinth, Mississippi, on Monday drew an enthusiastic full house, other states have chosen smaller venues to avoid the spectacle of empty seats. A feature of his barnstorming series of rallies in Republican strongholds such as Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina and Texas has been the brazen and repeated interruptions by protesters. In Ohio on Wednesday evening, the president was confronted by a heckler yelling: “Trump went on the Epstein plane.” In Mississippi, Trump seemed temporarily shocked, and silenced, when a man wearing an Ole Miss sweatshirt shouted at him: “Shove the ballroom up your fat ass.”
If there is something unpleasant about base rhetoric directed at a US president, Trump knows that nobody has employed mudslinging and insults as frequently or as witheringly as he has done. Now, they are coming back to bite.
These midterms have been described by politicians from both parties as the most important in living memory. But the level of debate has been oddly limited, and repetitive. The general message from the Republican candidates in the imperilled red states has been that to allow the Democrats to control Congress would be to return to Biden-era open-border folly and usher in adolescent transgender surgery promotion and a raft of “communist” infiltrators in Capitol Hill. The Democrat manifesto is that Trump has failed on his two basic election promises to lower prices and the cost of living, and to end the “forever wars”.
These midterms will be remembered mostly for the deeply personalised and reckless attack lines in debates and many advertisements. The advert approved by the Ramaswamy campaign featured Donna Arthur, the mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton. The family has been estranged since Acton was taken into social services at the age of 14 after years of physical and sexual abuse by her stepfather. Arthur remained with the stepfather and the pair fled the state. In the advert, Arthur accused her daughter of having “lied her entire life”.
The advert generated general revulsion and was criticised by outgoing Ohio governor Mike DeWine and other Republicans.
And the episode was a sharply grim reminder of that fact that the age of Trump has sucked the entire apparatus of US political campaigning and discourse into a reality that was unimaginable when Obama was president. Hence Obama found himself, near Atlanta, contextualising a quip he had made in Michigan when he compared Trump’s White House gold-tipped glow-up to a version of The Cheesecake Factory, a US restaurant chain famous for its kitsch, over-the-top decor. It was a niche line and one the Republicans instantly tried to weaponise as an example of Obama’s elitism.
“I joked over the weekend that he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama told the crowd before critiquing the response of the administration.
“They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. They did not argue with that. I accused this administration based on the facts that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him. But he was every upset about the Cheesecake Factory comparison. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the ... artisans in the White House. They mobilised a whole response to that joke. Not inflation! This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems. So, they would rather have the media, and you, talking about The Cheesecake Factory. That’s the game they’ve been playing for the past two years. Just keep throwing distractions out there – attacks, fabrications, phoney outrage and hope you won’t notice that your bills are higher and your life is tougher. Except that okey-doke will not work this time, Atlanta.”
The sight and sound of both Obama and Trump campaigning on the same evening, days out, felt epochal. Yes, these are the “just” the midterms: it’s difficult to gauge how deeply those performances resonate on a national level. Still, here, duelling on different microphones in different states, were the two men who have chiefly shaped the trajectory of the United States in the 21st century.
[ Jon Ossoff might just be the Democrats’ best answer to the US decade of chaosOpens in new window ]
Trump’s answer to the alarming dip in polling numbers has been to provide the public with more Trump. Actual candidates at his rallies speak sparingly, if at all. Obama, a gilded retiree now, is careful to constantly redirect the spotlight towards the contenders. Turning to Ossoff on Wednesday night, he said something that might be interpreted as a passing of the torch:
“And it’s not because he’s so well put together,” he said of the younger man’s accomplishments.
“It’s not because he looks like a Kennedy, all handsome in the videos. It’s because he learned from his mentor. And my mentor. One of the greats, John Lewis. What it means to stir up some good trouble. That’s what he’s been doing on your behalf.”
Ossoff is one of a stable of Democratic talents who were teenagers or young adults during the Obama era. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is 37. James Talarico is 37. Obama’s influence is detectable in each of their speaking styles – even if Ossoff speaks of the Trump administration with naked contempt rather than the playful, provocative style of the former president.
“They promised to drain the swamp,” Ossoff said during his speech.
“Instead, it’s the most corrupt administration of all time and everybody knows it. And while the crook president and his crook family rake in billions from all over the world, you pay more for everything. They doubled his insurance premiums and slashed Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich; they lied us into war and spent most of the last year covering up for the world’s most famous paedophile. A wave is building – the kind of wave that comes once a generation when the people have been pushed too far and decided all together all at once that enough is enough. We have six days, Georgia. And Georgia will bow to no king.”
All of the polling data suggests a historic night may indeed be on the cards: a humbling of the Republican administration that seemed unimaginable when Trump made his inauguration speech during the ice storm of January 2025. If that transpires, much of it will be self-inflicted. Had Trump not plunged the US into the Iran conflict, there would be no crisis at the petrol pumps. Had he not picked a tariff war with Canada, there would be less Republican discontent in the farming heartlands. Had he endorsed Texas senate institution John Cornyn rather than the deeply flawed Ken Paxton, the Lone Star State would be easier to defend. Had he not insisted on selecting the inexperienced Carline Graham to succeed her late brother Lindsey as senator, then the safe house of South Carolina might not now be jeopardy.
There have also been signs the fever-grip in which Trump has held the Republican Party is beginning to fragment internally. In Maine, Susan Collins is campaigning to retain the senate seat she has held since 1997 by placing as much distance between herself and the president as possible. Across the border in New Hampshire, John E Sununu, the son of Bush-era chief of staff John H Sununu, is running for senate and spoke about a post-Trump landscape during his debate against Chris Pappas, the Democratic congressman who is hoping to retain the seat vacated by his party colleague Jeanne Shaheen.
“In two years, the president will leave office. And my question is, where will we go next? This senate election is about the future. Not the next year, not the next six years, but the long-term future of the country.” Sununu said.
Not so long ago, a Republican candidate daring to envision a Washington, or a world, without Trump at its epicentre would have guaranteed a savage backlash. But not now.
On Thursday afternoon, it emerged that Trump had cancelled a rally in Salina, Kansas, where Roger Marshall is fighting to hold on to a senate seat the Democrats last won in 1932. A weekend rally in Iowa was cancelled a few hours later. Those scrapped events coincided with new polls, released by CNN, offering the grimmest forecasts for Republicans. In Texas, Talarico was ahead by six points. Paxton had an approval rating of -29. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, despite a concerted campaign to label him an Islamist extremist, was polling six points ahead of his opponent, Mike Rogers.
If Tuesday nights election results contradict the numbers, it will seriously and perhaps permanently undermine the credibility of the $10 billion public opinion and election polling industry.
But as election eve looms, all the numbers are alarming even to the Republican commentariat clinging to the argument that the party, as redefined by Trump, outperforms the polls.
After 25 straight days of speaking engagements, Trump sounded tired, on Thursday, in Rock Hill, South Carolina. At one stage, he drifted into an anecdote he has told before about a friend of his, “a Wall Street guy” marvelling at Trump’s ability to speak before large crowds, with all those cameras in front of him. “How do you do that? So amazing,” Trump remembered him asking. He sounded almost wistful as he quoted the answer he gave.
“It’s really easy. It’s because there’s such love in the room. There’s love in the room.”
The believers cheered loyally but across the country, the data crunchers continued to flood media outlets with a colder appraisal of Trump’s current standing in American life. “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” he has urged the Republican electorate for the past month. The fear for Trump, if the results are as grim as predicted, is the people may have done just that.
The endless talking and campaigning is almost over. Trump’s uncanny ability to outrun and outfox the polls is unsurpassed. But the political environment this Halloween weekend carries echoes of the famous line by the Hemingway character who described how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
Source: The Irish Times · Keith Duggan
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