Twenty years ago, a young Illinois state senator took to the Democratic National Convention stage in Boston and delivered a speech that would help catapult him to the top of the presidential ticket four years later.
On Tuesday, now firmly established as a Democratic elder statesman, former President Barack Obama took the DNC stage again, this time to help pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.
The impact of Obama’s 2004 keynote address to a rapt audience of fellow Democrats would likely be difficult for this week’s convention speakers to replicate: Not only was Obama’s personal story and storytelling style uniquely his, but polarization — both in the media and the political landscape — have drastically transformed the audience, making his optimistic message of hope and unity a tougher sell.
“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America,” Obama said in his speech on July 27, 2004. “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states.”
While hitting many of the themes from that keynote in his speech at this week’s DNC, Obama seemed to acknowledge how much times had changed.
Former President Donald Trump, this year’s Republican nominee, “wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them; between the real Americans who support him and the outsiders who don’t,” Obama said. “Our job is to convince people that democracy can actually deliver. … We need to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s keynote, some contemporaries acknowledged that Obama’s 2004 speech — tracing his international heritage, sharing lessons from his constituents in Illinois and laying out a vision of unity and hope – might now come across as quaint. With media audiences now sliced so narrowly, some were skeptical a single address could still provide as powerful a political accelerant as the one delivered by Obama.
“In some ways it may seem sepia-toned and in others it’s as timely as ever,” said David Axelrod, who was Obama’s media adviser during his 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Profit-driven media has kept “people engaged by anger, resentment, and outrage,” Axelrod said. In the intervening years and through Trump’s presidency, he said, “We build these silos — or we have silos built for us that we get shoved into — and everyone outside the silo we view as alien and menacing and dangerous. That has been a tremendous barrier to the vision that (Obama) articulated.”
Several stars had aligned for the then-42-year-old Obama in the summer of 2004. Four years earlier, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush had trounced him when Obama made a primary challenge. In debt from that campaign but determined to try again, he asked his wife, Michelle, for the go-ahead to take one last shot — at the open U.S. Senate seat left vacant when Republican Peter Fitzgerald chose not to run for reelection.
He emerged from a crowded and at times scandal-filled Democratic primary in March, then saw his Republican challenger, millionaire Jack Ryan, drop out in late June following a sex scandal involving his TV star ex-wife.
He was already well-positioned to win one of the most closely watched down-ballot races in the country — with hopes he would help deliver a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate — when he was tapped as the DNC’s keynote speaker by Sen. John Kerry’s team over a slew of more established and well-known Democrats, including incumbent governors.
The run-up
Obama’s stars didn’t align by chance. His inner circle, including Axelrod’s business partners David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs, a Kerry press secretary who joined Obama’s team, lobbied friends on the presidential campaign for the slot, Axelrod said. Kerry had been impressed after seeing Obama speak at a party fundraiser following his primary win, Axelrod said. “We were pushing on an open door,” he said.
In an interview, David Mendell, the Tribune political reporter assigned to cover the Senate race, said Obama fit what the party was looking for: “New stars, new heroes. He was the right guy in the right place.”
In addition to being a young, Black state senator who won what was expected to be a competitive primary in a romp, Obama opposed the war in Iraq, making him a counterbalance to Kerry, who supported it. If he won, Obama would have been the only Black person in the Senate, and only the third since Reconstruction, placing him in the “upper echelon of black leaders and … a significant voice in the national Democratic Party,” Mendell wrote in the Tribune at the time.
Obama was well-positioned to succeed in the general election around convention time. After Ryan dropped out, the GOP, hamstrung by infighting, was briefly without a candidate. Former Bears coach Mike Ditka declined the spot, and the party eventually chose conservative talk show host Alan Keyes as Ryan’s replacement on the ticket. Keyes, a Maryland resident, never saw his candidacy take off.
Obama insisted on writing the convention speech himself. Associates said it was an amalgam of stump material combined with what he’d learned from campaign stops outside Chicago, where he found common ground with rural voters far from his Hyde Park district.
“He was not a limousine liberal who never went downstate. Sometimes he’d complain about being exhausted, but he did it,” said Dan Shomon, a legislative staffer and campaign aide who’d pushed Obama to tour counties outside Cook and the collars. Those events helped hone Obama’s oratory skills from “low-key professor” to “hard-nosed professional,” Shomon said.
“When he spoke at Black churches and big events and these dinners where there were 300 people, he really fed off of crowd energy and became a really great storyteller. That was learned, that was not instinctive,” Shomon said.
Axelrod received an early draft of the speech in the middle of the night, when Obama would typically have time to work and think. “And I read the first page, handed it to my wife, read the second page. By the third, I said, ‘This is going to be one of the great convention speeches of all time,’” Axelrod recalled. “It was so palpably a great speech. Literary.”
It was, however, too long. Kerry’s team told Obama’s they would have eight minutes. The draft was closer to 25. After edits — including trims from Kerry’s team, which also added more about Kerry — it got down to 17.
Mendell, who traveled to Boston to cover the keynote for the Tribune, received an advance copy a few hours before the speech was to be given.
“I said, ‘Man, if this dude delivers this speech in the way that I know he can deliver this speech, he is going to be a star,’” he recalled telling other reporters at the convention, to some skepticism. “It was just extraordinarily well written. … And it was a message I think Americans wanted to hear at that time about us all trying to come together and trying to unify.”
Though he needed schooling from speech coach Michael Sheehan to learn how to use the teleprompter and to make a delivery suitable for the acoustics of the arena, Obama was supremely confident.
“I’m LeBron, baby,” Mendell later reported Obama saying in his book, “Obama: From Promise to Power,” referring to Cleveland Cavaliers rookie LeBron James. “I can play on this level. I got some game.”
The speech
Valerie Jarrett, the Obama campaign finance chair who had struggled to get donors to chip in early on, remembers the speech as a tremendous opportunity. She had jitters, but “never any doubt that the content of the speech would resonate.”
Dick Durbin, Illinois’ sole Democratic senator at the time, gave Obama a brief but glowing three-minute introduction. Drawing comparisons to the late Illinois Sen. Paul Simon, Durbin described Obama as a man “whose family reflects the hope of an embracing nation … whose values rekindle our faith in a new generation … and has the extraordinary gift to bring people together of all different backgrounds. I’ve seen it. I’ve witnessed it.”
Conventioneers in the pit in front of the podium waved Obama signs as he kicked off.
“Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely,” he began, talking about his father’s upbringing in a small village in Kenya and his maternal grandparents contributing to the national effort during World War II before moving to Kansas.
He said there was “work to do” to measure up “to the legacy of our forebears, and the promise of future generations.” He cited union job losses in Galesburg, an East St. Louis student with the grades but no money to attend college, and a Marine from East Moline about to deploy to Iraq.
Shomon, watching from Springfield, said Obama hit his stride about one-third of the way through: “He started feeding off that crowd, he just went for it, went full guns. I’d never seen him that enthusiastic and energetic.”
Obama extolled Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, sharing one of several Obama-isms that would pepper future speeches. Kerry shared the “fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper,” he said, charging ahead to the memorable part of his speech about red and blue states.
“In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?” Not blind optimism, but “the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores … the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!”
Axelrod remembered the murmurs in the hall that usually served as a backdrop for unfamiliar speakers dying down. “You could see how engaged people became, they started standing and cheering,” he said. “There was an African American woman nearby with tears coming down her face. I turned to Robert Gibbs and said, ‘You know, his life just changed and maybe ours too.’”
The address would become a foundational document Axelrod said he often told his speechwriters to return to for inspiration.
Durbin said he was unsurprised at the crowd’s response.
“Thousands of people spend personal savings for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come to a national convention. They throw themselves into it completely,” he said. “To be perfectly cynical about it, I’ve been to enough conventions and rallies you just know you’ve got an audience that’s ready to explode at a moment’s notice. What really surprised me the most was not how well he did, but the impact after the convention.”
The aftermath
The Illinois delegation gave Obama five-star reviews the next day. Mayor Richard M. Daley declared it a “grand slam home run,” according to Tribune reports at the time. House Speaker Mike Madigan said it reflected “perfect, big-tent Democratic politics.” Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Obama was “on the verge of getting 100% of the vote.”
State Sen. Terry Link’s review was especially colorful, the Tribune reported: Any prospective Republican challenger would be better off throwing their campaign cash out the window, starting in far downstate Cairo, he said. That way, they could say “they helped some people on the way because that’s about the only good that money would be right now.”
Though the speech wasn’t carried on the major networks, only on PBS, cable news and C-SPAN, the national press soon swarmed — and fawned.
Back on the trail in Illinois, crowd sizes grew, Shomon recalled. Strangers began photographing Obama when he was in public, Jarrett noticed. Durbin recalled meeting Obama event attendees in west suburban DeKalb and even farther west Freeport — “not necessarily Democratic territory” — who came from Iowa, Indiana and Missouri.
“I said, ‘Well, what brings you here?’ and they all said the same thing. ‘The speech.’ So that speech reached out into America in a way that I didn’t anticipate,” Durbin said.
The possibility that the speech would launch Obama into the 2008 presidential discussion “wasn’t even remotely on our minds,” Axelrod said. But “in baseball, there’s an expression: You look the ball into the glove, don’t assume you’re going to catch it. We thought it would help us raise money nationally and yeah, we knew it would put him in the mix nationally.”
Within days of the speech, the campaign received $150,000 in unsolicited donations, the Tribune reported.
State Rep. Nick Smith, a contemporary of Obama’s in the Illinois General Assembly whose district includes a substantial Black population, said he knew early on that Obama could pull off such a feat, even though “a lot of people, even in my community, didn’t think he had a chance in the U.S. Senate because he wasn’t well known. He was a Black man with the name Barack Hussein Obama.”
But he acknowledged Obama was a beneficiary of tremendous luck, too. “Had he won that congressional race in 2000, he wouldn’t have given that speech and would probably still be in D.C. trying to give a speech like that somewhere in front of a lot of people.”
Though the message hope and change delivered for him, Obama acknowledged Tuesday that such an optimistic approach might not be such an any sell for Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
“The other side knows it’s easier to play on people’s fears and cynicism,” he said. “They’ll tell you that government is corrupt; that sacrifice and generosity are for suckers; and that since the game is rigged, it’s OK to take what you want and look after your own.”
Still, Jarrett said Obama’s 2004 message was a timeless one. Given the nation’s extreme political temperatures, reaction to the speech today would be even “more profound,” she said.
“I think (the speech captured) the enthusiasm that we’ve seen for Vice President Harris, her messages and optimism and bringing us together and seeing the infinite possibilities we have as a country going forward. I think it is exactly the message that our country has been hungry for,” Jarrett said. “Yes, I think a single speech could change somebody’s life for the better or for the worse, depending on what the message might be.”
Axelrod and others said Obama’s 2004 speech exploded “myths and caricatures” about race, giving hope to young Black men and women about their potential and making it easier for candidates of color down the road. That included Harris, who, Obama noted on Tuesday, knocked on doors for him in 2008.
“Every generation stands on the last generation’s shoulders,” Axelrod said. “Even though Harris is of the same generation as Obama politically, he blazed a trail and it will be easier for her. Not easy, but easier for her.”
On Tuesday, despite touching on the nation’s divisions in his speech, Obama’s trademark themes prevailed.
“Despite what our politics might suggest, I think most Americans understand that democracy isn’t just a bunch of abstract principles and dusty laws in some books somewhere,” he said. “It’s the values we live by. It’s the way we treat each other. … That sense of mutual respect has to be part of our message.”
