Former president Barack Obama headlined his first solo fundraiser for Kamala Harris in Los Angeles on Friday night, bringing in $4 million for her campaign as he framed the election as a struggle against radical forces in America that want to take the country backward.<\/p>\n
The event was part of the increasingly active role that Obama is playing in Harris\u2019s effort as he wields his popularity within the Democratic Party to power grassroots fundraising and to galvanize younger voters to turn out in what could be a margin-of-error race.<\/p>\n
The Harris campaign recently featured clips from his Democratic National Convention speech mocking Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cweird obsession with crowd sizes\u201d in one of its ads to needle the Republican nominee just before his debate with Harris.<\/p>\n
So far this presidential campaign cycle, the events where Obama has been featured and the grassroots fundraising appeals that he has signed have generated at least $76 million, according to his office.<\/p>\n
In the short time that she has been in the presidential race, Harris has opened a wide cash advantage over Trump. Friday night, reports filed with the Federal Election Commission showed that she raised more than four times as much as Trump did in August.<\/p>\n
The private event Friday night was held at the Los Angeles home of James Costos, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain and Andorra under Obama, and his partner, Michael S. Smith, who was White House decorator when Obama was president.<\/p>\n
Before a gathering of more than 65 people, Obama argued that the nation and the world are at \u201ca crossroads\u201d where demographic changes, globalization and the information revolution have \u201cdisrupted the old order\u201d and made \u201cus vulnerable to the appeals of fear and anger and tribe,\u201d according to excerpts of his remarks provided by his office.<\/p>\n
Obama described Harris\u2019s campaign as an effort to guard against those destructive forces and usher in a future that would create an economy \u201cwhere everybody has enough\u201d and Americans don\u2019t see the changes occurring in society as a zero-sum game where \u201cif somebody gains, somebody must lose.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what my election was about back in 2008 \u2026 and we\u2019ve now gone through 16 years of continuing struggle to move in a direction in which it\u2019s not radical,\u201d Obama said.<\/p>\n
He told attendees that Harris, who has been a friend for two decades, \u201ccan make us proud on the world stage about what America stands for, as opposed to embarrassing us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re still going to have free markets and we\u2019re still going to have our liberties, and Americans are still going to be doing the weird things that we do. But we can make sure that it\u2019s a little bit gentler, a little bit kinder, a little bit more generous, a little bit less unequal, a little bit more inclusive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obama and Harris met when he was running for Senate in Illinois. She became one of the earliest supporters of his 2008 bid for president \u2014 traveling to Iowa to knock doors for him at a moment when many of the Democratic Party\u2019s power brokers had lined up behind Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n
Obama served as a sounding board for Harris when she became vice president. He also actively raised money for President Joe Biden, his former vice president, when he was still in the race. That included a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser with George Clooney and Julia Roberts in June and a New York fundraiser with Biden and former president Bill Clinton in March.<\/p>\n
After Biden\u2019s faltering debate performance against Trump, Obama told allies that Biden\u2019s path to victory had diminished and that he needed to seriously consider the viability of his candidacy \u2014 creating some resentment among Biden loyalists.<\/p>\n
Harris and Obama have been in especially close touch over the past two months as she was elevated to the top of the ticket after Biden withdrew from the race. The former president has offered to help with strategic advice, fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts, including a major push with creators on social media this week for National Voter Registration Day. Several of the top advisers on his presidential campaigns are now involved with Harris\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n
Both leaders have faced similar attacks from Trump and the conservative right on their mixed-race heritage. For years, Trump falsely claimed that Obama wasn\u2019t born in the United States as he questioned the former president\u2019s qualifications for the office.<\/p>\n
After Harris became Biden\u2019s running mate in 2020, Trump tried similar tactics by falsely claiming that there were questions about her eligibility as she was poised to become the first Black and Asian American vice president.<\/p>\n
When Trump baselessly questioned the racial identity of Harris \u2014 the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father \u2014 during a forum hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris rebuffed his assertion that she \u201chappened to turn Black\u201d by alluding to his many years perpetuating the \u201cbirther\u201d movement\u2019s lies about Obama. \u201cSame old tired playbook,\u201d she said during a CNN interview. \u201cNext question, please.\u201d<\/p>\n
Attendees of Obama\u2019s fundraiser for Harris in Los Angeles included Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant, a producer and author who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas during Obama\u2019s administration. Others who attended included actress Jennifer Coolidge and comedian Conan O\u2019Brien.<\/p>\n
The former president said Friday that he wished he had a four- or five-point plan to win the election, but \u201ctruthfully, the plan is we\u2019re going to push through it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we win \u2014 when we win \u2014 it won\u2019t solve all the crazy that\u2019s out there,\u201d he said. \u201cBut each time we win, it\u2019s solidifying this new future. It is ushering in these new possibilities. Eventually, that will become the new normal and the new reality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Former president Barack Obama headlined his first solo fundraiser for Kamala Harris in Los Angeles on Friday night, bringing in $4 million for her campaign as he framed the election as a struggle against radical forces in America that want to take the country backward. The event was part of the increasingly active role that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9930,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}