Democratic Party's 'north star' points the way forward

Obama gets a rapturous reception as torch is passed to Harris

- ERIC GARCIA

When Barack Obama visited the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, he couldn’t even get a floor pass. The young Illinois state senator had just lost a bruising congressional primary to Bobby Rush. By 2004, he was back at the DNC in Boston, giving the keynote address. This time around, he was the self-proclaimed “skinny kid with a funny name” turned Democratic nominee for an Illinois Senate seat, and delivered the speech that would ultimately define him.

“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America,” he said at the time. “There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”

Four years later, Senator Obama approached the convention stage in Denver as a conquering hero. It preceded the monumental victory that made him the first Black person to become president and occupy a building built by enslaved people who looked like him.

But despite this, Obama remained largely an outsider. He had defeated Hillary Clinton, and by proxy, Bill Clinton. As president, he often chafed at the typical glad-handing and building of relationships with Congress, handing it off to his vice-president Joe Biden, who had been a senator for 36 years.