Marking an impassioned return to the campaign trail, former President Barack Obama made a plea Thursday night to Virginia voters to vote for Democratic candidates in the state’s first elections to be held since last year’s presidential contest.
“We need you to take this seriously, because our democracy is at stake, and it’s at stake right here in Virginia,” Obama told a crowd of 7,500 people at the Richmond Coliseum. “You can’t sit this one out.”
As Obama spoke, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam — the Democratic nominee for governor in the commonwealth — sat on a barstool next to the 56-year-old former two-term president, basking in the glow of the former president’s political star power.
On the presumption that many Virginian’s in the room or watching on TV might be tuning in to the off-year election for the first time, Obama spent a considerable portion of his half-hour speech detailing Northam’s résumé as an Army physician and a pediatric neurologist.
Virginia’s lieutenant governor is locked in a tight race with Republican Ed Gillespie, a longtime political operative who went from high-powered lobbyist to chairman of the Republican National Committee to White House adviser under George W. Bush.
Obama did not mention President Trump by name in his remarks, but numerous times offered broad critiques of the current state of American politics that were clearly an indictment of the current White House occupant.
“Folks don’t feel good right now about what they see. They don’t feel as if our public life reflects our best,” Obama said. “Instead of our politics reflecting our values, we’ve got politics infecting our communities.”
He also said that “our politics just seems so divided and so angry and so nasty,” adding that the nation’s challenge is to “recapture” a more generous and civic spirit, in what was a reminiscence of the hopeful moment in 2008 that swept him to power. “Yes We Can,” Obama said, revisiting the famous slogan from his presidential campaigns.
By Jon Ward.
Full story at Yahoo News.
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