After many months of silence, the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, has gradually returned to the political stage to speak up against the politics of Donald Trump. On Thursday, Sept. 13, he will be in Ohio to endorse Richard Cordray, the state’s Democratic candidate for governor.
Illinois, California, and now Ohio. Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, is again on the campaign trail to mobilize Democratic voters ahead of the midterm elections which will take place on Nov. 6. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs, as are 33 Senate seats and 36 gubernatorial seats. While the outcome of these elections remains uncertain, Republicans fear that a so-called blue wave (a large-scale Democratic victory) will prevent them from maintaining their narrow majority in Congress.
The issue is important, and Obama has decided to return to the political stage to support his fellow Democrats. This Thursday, Sept. 13, he will be in Cleveland, Ohio, to endorse Richard Cordray, the state’s Democratic candidate for governor, who is running against Republican Mike DeWine.
A Republican Party Deemed Too Restrained
Ohio is typically a swing state, where political leanings move from red (Republican) to blue (Democratic) depending on the election. Extremely crucial, it is the state that tilted the 2004 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush and the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump, along with Florida, another major swing state.
On Friday, Sept. 7, Obama spoke about this in Illinois, the state in which he was senator from 1997 to 2004. For the first time since leaving the White House, the former president voiced criticism about his successor’s leadership style.
“What happened to the Republican party?” he asked, in reference to the prevailing indifference within the party of Trump. He denounced elected officials who, according to him, lack guts and only care minimally about the president’s woes.
Obama’s speech took place after excerpts were released in The Washington Post from a book by Bob Woodward, who described a president circumvented by his administration, and an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, in which a member of the White House administration, still unidentified, described the existence of a “rebellion” committed to thwarting Trump’s bad decisions.
A Call to the Ballot Boxes
Obama then called on citizens to vote in order to escape this “political darkness.” In a more sober message that he shared in California on Saturday, Sept. 8, without directly naming Trump, Obama once again made reference to the “politics of fear,” which he attributes to Trump.
“This is a consequential moment in our history… we have a chance to restore some sanity in our politics,” he added in his endorsement of local Democratic candidates. [https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/08/politics/obama-california-campaign-rally/index.html]
Michelle Obama, for her part, is committed to fighting nonparticipation. At the end of the month, she will be in Las Vegas and Miami to organize voter registration events for a nonpartisan, non-profit organization called “When We All Vote,” which she co-chairs. The objective is to motivate Americans to get out and vote in November.
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