I jumped up and down when I heard Michelle Obama utter one amazing word

“Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” asked Michelle Obama, powerfully self-assured on the stage of the Democratic National Convention this week, as the crowd roared louder for her than they had for anyone else. “A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the contagious power of hope.” A hope not just of victory but of vanquishing “the demons of fear, division and hate that have consumed us”.

The former first lady spoke forcefully, too, of her mother, who instilled values of “hard work and humility and decency” in her, and set her “moral compass high”.

Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks to Democrats in Chicago on Tuesday. Credit: Bloomberg

With this speech – and that of her husband, which followed – a kind of framing that had been dormant re-emerged in American politics. A framing that draws on the sway of grace. (Bear with me here.) While reminding people Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are human and will make mistakes, Michelle Obama said she was confident they would lead with compassion, inclusion and “grace”.

The reason I jumped up and down when I heard that actual word mentioned – grace – is because I have spent the past year travelling around this wide brown land talking about grace, the topic of my most recent book, and I have been repeatedly struck by the number of people who have asked me, repeatedly, puzzled, sometimes suspicious: “What is it actually?”

The questioner often implies it’s arcane and sentimental and weird, not about nurses sponging patients, a mother watching a newborn curl a finger around her own, volunteers ladling out food in a soup kitchen, blood donors faithfully bussing to their local donation centres every two weeks to sit and be drained because someone in the world, someone they have never met and never will, someone who could be a cheat or a liar, or someone who eats with their mouth open and clips their toenails on the train because there is a human being who, somewhere, needs help to walk, or stand, or live a little longer.

Grace is cutting slack to or caring for those who may not deserve it.

And then, this week, Michelle Obama stood up in front of millions globally, articulated a case for grace, and electrified the audience in Chicago. Other speakers, too, stressed that they saw Trump’s followers not as enemies but as fellow Americans, wrestling focus from the hate of social media to the care of local communities. (It must be noted, though, that they did slam Trump, personally and repeatedly.)

Take Tim Walz, the vice presidential nominee. He said: “That family down the road – they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they are your neighbours. You look out for them, and they look out for you.”

Oprah Winfrey, clad in suffragette purple, spoke in similar ways. “We are not so different from our neighbours,” she said. “When a house is on fire, we do not ask about the homeowner’s race or religion, we do not wonder who their partner is or how they voted.”

I don’t see grace here as partisan. To see it as partisan defeats the very point. I was struck, too, by how much of the Republican convention tried to draw on some of the unifying elements of faith and families of everyday Americans. Republican leaders such as John McCain and George Bush Snr have often espoused gracious virtues and values. It’s about values, not bias, and it’s about calming hate, seeking commonalities not stoking division. It’s about what author Marilynne Robinson called “that reservoir of goodness, beyond and of another kind, that we are able to do to each other in the ordinary cause of things”. Both ordinary and extraordinary.

And someone who has corresponded at length with Robinson on the topic of grace is Barack Obama, who knew what he was up against when he followed his wife’s speech. But he continued to argue for mutual respect, pointing to how daft the expectations across the political spectrum have become, that we seem “so quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue. We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out-yell the other side. And after a while, regular folks just tune out, or they don’t bother to vote.”

We tune out of the news, too. The ugliness gets too much.

Obama continued: “After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognise that the world is moving fast, that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. While I recognise this may sound a little patronising if you disagree with him, he continued: “Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.”

That word again.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Trust me, I am not getting dewy-eyed here. This rhetoric is refreshing, but I am fully aware of the shortcomings of Obama’s administration on a host of matters, including the cushioning of Wall Street, failure to fix the housing market, attacks on the media, the mess in Syria, reliance on drone warfare, the fraying of race relations, the inability to wrest Congress into tightening gun control laws.

But for years now, I’ve been trawling different corners of the globe in an attempt to find evidence of grace – of the unassuming, undemanding and often quiet insistence on seeing the humanity in other people, especially enemies, of giving people the benefit of the doubt, a second chance, a shot at redemption, even when it is undeserved. Grace is often considered a mysterious concept, and it’s often absent from public life, but I have found it everywhere: in hospitals, schools, community football clubs, and maternity wards.

Sometimes, it seems talk of grace can feel, as Obama said, “pretty naive right now”. But isn’t it the stuff of life?

Grace is not fluffy or saccharine, it’s not kittens and rainbows. It’s hard work. What’s apparent is that many current leaders seem to think there is only one way to respond to people’s exhaustion and fatigue with the political process, thinking they should just whip up enthusiasm with outrage and fear, offering vengeance and retribution against “them”. They assume it’s too much of a risk to go another way – to call to what Abraham Lincoln described as “the better angels of our nature”, to what Paul Keating called the “golden threads” in our community.

There are varying ways to respond to political apathy and disaffection – to promise to destroy your enemies, to mock, vilify and disrespect others, to indulge suspicions and confected theories, or to invite people to remember the values they share, the importance of building each other up, of recognising that people can have different political views but still have decency and big hearts, still volunteer alongside you at the local surf club, coach a community football team, stand side by side in labs conducting experiments that just might lead to a breakthrough in curing cancer, foster a dozen kids crying out for love. Still human, in other words. Just like you.

Julia Baird is a regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.