Michelle Obama sticks to Trump-hating playbook

The Democrats hope to convince voters that Donald Trump’s flaws could harm them in the coronavirus crisis.

Michelle Obama during her address to the Democratic National Convention. Picture: AFP

Michelle Obama was the headline act at the first night of the Democratic National Convention and she didn’t disappoint the partisan audience of Donald Trump haters.

In a speech that was pre-recorded before Kamala Harris was chosen as vice-presidential candidate, she launched a stinging personal attack on the character of the President — all, you understand, in the interests of restoring civility to American debate.

Never in US history has a ­former first lady spoken about a serving president in these terms.

Mr Trump, she said, was “in over his head”.

She reeled off his faults and opined that “you cannot fake your way” through the presidency.

Mr Trump, in her view, lacked the basic personal qualities to be president, and gave the US instead “chaos, division and a total and utter lack of empathy”.

“He simply cannot be who we need him to be,” she said.

And as a final ironic tribute, she used one of Mr Trump’s favourite formulations: “It is what it is.”

The Democrats’ first night ran in two halves, the first a bit clunky, the second more professional.

Mrs Obama, with her best-­selling memoir and motivational speeches, has morphed from a presidential spouse to being a top-line celebrity in her own right.

Democrats are hopeful that her celebrity status can imbue their familiar denunciations of Mr Trump’s character with greater moral authority, a bit like a reverse of the effect when Oprah Winfrey endorsed Barack Obama in his first presidential campaign.

But it’s a sad day for US politics nonetheless. Political spouses, whether men or women, generally avoid the sharpest partisan attacks and politicians generally argue that their families should be off limits from attack in return. But the new US is a mud wrestle where everyone gets dirty all the time.

Kristin Urquiza

Obama’s high-voltage speech might be problematic for Biden in another way — it was more intense, and more involving, than anything the former vice-president is likely to produce.

At the Democrats’ convention four years ago, Mrs Obama and Bill Clinton delivered classic performances on behalf of Hillary Clinton. But it didn’t get her the votes. Instead, it overshadowed her and threw into stark contrast her own clunky speaking efforts.

Beyond Mrs Obama, the other star of the convention was a civilian. The whole thing was a bit like an Ellen DeGeneres show without the studio audience.

The guest who Zoomed in from home — and who probably had the biggest impact, and perhaps did the most harm to Mr Trump — was one Kristin Urquiza. Her dad had been a Trump voter, so when he heard the President say almost all COVID-19 infections were harmless, and people with no pre-existing medical condition would probably be fine, he went to a ­karaoke bar with his friends and had a good time. He caught COVID-19 and died five days later.

“His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that he paid with his life,” his daughter said.

Ouch!

The daughter embodied the holy grail for the Democrats, and one that has eluded them up ­until now — getting voters to believe that Mr Trump’s character ­issues impose a real cost on them.

The convention generally was a weird bit of television. Actress Eva Longoria was the MC and delivered trite little political homilies in between introducing speakers.

No platitude will go unspoken in the Democrats’ battle against Mr Trump. There were odd musical interludes. One I found completely indecipherable. It figured a beach and seemed to be something about feeling sad in London. I guess a lot of Democrats have felt sad in London with Mr Trump in the White House.

The first hour was pretty clunky, with some technology-induced pauses, dead air time, false starts and bits and pieces repeated. But it got better and, as a TV production, overall it wasn’t too bad. It hit the regular Democrat themes — Mr Trump is a beast, he’s trying to kill the postal service to stop us from voting, Mr Trump is a racist, Black Lives Matter, Mr Trump is incompetent, COVID-19 is his fault, the planet is going to hell — and that’s Mr Trump’s fault too.

Although quite a few politicians figured among the speakers, there was nothing resembling ­either a political program or even a coherent political critique.

The only one who really sounded like a politician — and I mean that in a wholly positive way — was Bernie Sanders. Mind you, he set the rhetorical bar up to “double bull crap from Mars” as I am told some teenagers are wont to say.

Naturally, everyone agreed that this election was the most important election of their lifetimes, or ever. Mr Sanders said “our nation is at stake, our democracy is at stake, the planet is at stake”.

Not only was Mr Trump destroying the economy, the health care system and democracy, he was also destroy the planet!

That’s a lot for a lazy redhead.

But wait, there’s more.

Mr Trump was also leading America “to authoritarianism”.

In the past, Mr Sanders had a soft spot for some authoritarians — Cuba, the Soviet Union.

But it’s hard to see how Mr Trump is exercising authoritarianism when at the mid-terms the ­Republicans lost the House of Representatives, lost state governors and lost senators — and about 60 per cent of the American media, plus 100 per cent of Hollywood, spend their whole time in paroxysms of denunciation defaming Mr Trump.

Let me be clear. Mr Trump certainly deserves a lot of the criticism he gets. But those are electoral ­results I don’t see in any other ­authoritarian system. The Soviet Union, where Mr Sanders took one of his honeymoons, seldom saw the Communist Party lose a mid-term election.

There was also no real program on offer by the Democrats at their convention. One of the most effective segments had a number of Republicans, most notably former Ohio governor John Kasich, explaining why they couldn’t vote for Mr Trump this time. Instead, they would vote for the moderate, inclusive, consultative Joe Biden.

Oops. The very next stanza was provided by Mr Sanders, who rightly boasted that his (far-left) agenda was now the Democratic Party’s mainstream.

Much of the night was like Mrs Obama’s attack — a tirade of abuse against Mr Trump, focusing not on his policies but his character. And again, some of it surely is justified.

But the Democrats have been running against Mr Trump’s character since the day he was nominated to be the ­Republican candidate in 2016.

Now they think COVID transforms his character weaknesses into real harms in people’s lives, and that’s why the character attack might work this time around.