Obama’s Defense of Democracy Sounds in the Midst of National Crisis

Former President Barack Obama Spoke at the National Democratic Convention last night at the Museum of the American Revolution.

Daily Democratic National Convention Opinion Coverage in Sepia

Thursday, August 20, 2020 Day 3 Coverage

It was a voice we came to know in Dreams From My Father — deliberate, circumspect, cerebral and cunning. It flashed with passion and promise in Boston at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and we marveled at it. Over Trayvon and Sandy Hook it sounded above innocent dead children. At Emmanuel A.M.E. in Charleston it stammered and weeped before the knowing congregation, and then sang a threnody in cracked, croaking cadence.

The nation has watched Barack Obama through a course of years shift through permutations of leadership that have taken up the causes of the commonweal — observed him survey the cragged terrain of our common associative lives and have heard him lift up the prospects of our better collective selves, even against the harsh realities of civic animus and fear, the xenophobia, the racial hostilities and the retrenchment from our collective ideals.

On last night, at the Democratic National Convention, Obama travelled to Philadelphia’s Museum of the Revolution to deliver a speech to a country spiritually bruised and on the cusp of crisis — a country caught in a pandemic that has cost the lives of more than 170,000 people, a country…