Last month, when Joe Biden’s candidacy was in tatters and speculation was rife about whether he would withdraw, a poll suggested that only a Democrat could beat Donald Trump.
According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, this candidate was Michelle Obama.
The former first lady is consistently the most popular Democrat in America in polls. And although Mrs. Obama has repeatedly made it clear that she has no political ambitions, there have long been reports from Trump’s world that fear she might fulfill the fantasies of many Democrats and decide to run.
And after their performance last night in Chicago, it’s easy to understand why they were concerned.
On the second night of the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, Mrs. Obama wowed with what some commentators said was the best political speech they had ever heard.
At the same event eight years ago, Mrs. Obama famously said, “When they go low, we rise high.”
But last night she and her husband took a different tack. They portrayed Trump as a complainer obsessed with nagging, whose appearance was no longer in keeping with the times.
There was no doubt who Mrs. Obama meant when she said, speaking for most Americans, “When things don’t go the way we want them to, we don’t have the luxury of complaining or cheating others to get ahead. … We can’t change the rules, so we always win.”
Mrs Obama said she knew from experience that Trump would likely resort to “ugly, misogynistic and racist lies” about Kamala Harris.
And she drew great laughter when, referring to Trump’s remark in June that illegal immigrants were taking “black jobs,” she said: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s looking for right now might be one of those black jobs?”
Laughing at the former president is a new approach for Democrats, but it could be very effective. The changed approach is often attributed to Harris’s vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, who has repeatedly called Trump “weird” – a label other Democrats have also used in recent weeks.
Joe Biden has often issued dire warnings that Trump poses a dangerous threat to democracy, portraying the former president as a sinister but significant figure.
Both Michelle and Barack Obama took the new approach by using jokes to denigrate him. Their jokes aimed to portray Trump as self-centered and petty. In their portrayal, he is not so much an evil threat as a self-centered irritant.
Like “the neighbor who runs his leaf blower outside your window every minute of the day,” as Barack Obama put it.
When Obama made fun of Trump’s comments about crowd size in his speech, his hand gestures made it clear that he was referring to a specific part of the male anatomy – and the crowd roared with laughter.
At the same time, Ms. Harris was holding a campaign rally 80 miles away in Milwaukee.
In exactly the same arena where Trump accepted his party’s presidential nomination last month. And if anyone wanted to compare the audience numbers: The hall was packed, a fact that the Harris team made journalists aware of.
Joe Biden declared on Monday night that the November election was “a battle for the soul of America.” But the Obamas offered a less threatening – and perhaps less divisive – view. Mr. Obama urged Democrats to listen to the concerns of people who do not yet support Ms. Harris and warned against demonizing Trump supporters.
“When a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people,” he said. “We know the world is moving fast and they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up.”
By criticizing Trump rather than his supporters, and by making fun of him rather than stoking fear of him, the Obamas may have found a more effective way to campaign against a candidate who seemed virtually unassailable at the Republican National Convention just a few weeks ago.
