“Georgia deserves better,” Obama said.
With midterm elections just over a week away, Obama, 61, has stepped into the spotlight on the political stage with rallies to gin up interest in marquee midterm races in battleground states.
A day after appearing in Georgia with Sen. Raphael G. Warnock, who is in a tight race with Walker, and Stacey Abrams, who is trailing in her rematch with Gov. Brian Kemp, Obama headlined rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin.
The former president is regarded as the Democratic Party’s top communicator to base voters, more in demand than President Biden, who has not been the sought-after surrogate in the top races amid a dismal approval rating. The president spent one of the busiest campaign weekends of the cycle at his home in Delaware, where he attended his granddaughter’s field hockey game and, separately, cast his ballot.
Democratic strategists say Obama is the sole party leader able to draw major base-motivating crowds without simultaneously angering the other side.
Obama took the stage on Saturday in Detroit, where he continued to use his signature withering humor, comparing Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon to a fictional plumber spewing conspiracy theories about “lizard people.”
And in Wisconsin, Obama called out some of the GOP television ads that portray state Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, as someone who is “different.”
“Mandela, get ready to dig up that birth certificate,” Obama quipped, a reference to the conspiracy theory pushed by former president Donald Trump that Obama was not really born in the United States.
But he also argued that democracy is on the ballot and offered a pitch for his party as being more serious about solutions to the issues that voters are concerned about, including abortion rights, inflation and crime.
Obama, who left office in 2017, is raising his profile at a complicated time, with polls showing Democrats losing momentum in the midterms. And political tensions rose significantly over the past few days with increased anxiety after the violent attack against Paul Pelosi by an assailant who was looking for his wife, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In Georgia, Obama walked onstage just hours after the attack. “I want to take a moment just to say a prayer for a friend of mine, Mr. Paul Pelosi,” Obama said.
He also talked about the attack in Michigan on Saturday. “One thing that we can feel, we know, if our rhetoric about each other gets that mean … that creates a dangerous climate,” Obama said.
But even as he spoke of civility in Michigan, Obama was heckled, prompting some in the crowd to chant “O-BA-MA.” The former president struggled for about two minutes to calm the crowd. “Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Obama said. “Hold up. Hold up. Hold up. Hold up.”
Later, Obama acknowledged that the political environment has gotten more difficult. Being on the campaign trail, he said, “feels a little harder than it used to — not just because I’m older and grayer,” Obama said. “It feels like that basic foundation of the democracy is at risk. … Things won’t be okay on their own.”
“Obama has the ability to talk at the same time to base Dems the party needs to mobilize and suburban swing voters they need to persuade in these closing days,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist in the White House.
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