Obama offers closing message as political tensions rise in U.S.

Former president Barack Obama kicked off his return to the campaign trail by taking on Georgia football icon and Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker. “Herschel Walker was a heck of a football player,” Obama told the crowd at the Gateway Center Arena, adjacent to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. But that would make him no more qualified to be a U.S. senator than to fly an airplane or perform surgery, the former president cracked, drawing laughter and cheers from the more than 7,000 people who waited hours to see him. “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.