Barack Obama is jumping into the midterms, with plans to campaign for Democratic candidates in California, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. The former president is targeting states where President Donald Trump's popularity is low, and where Democrats have launched aggressive efforts to flip vulnerable GOP-held seats. Barack Obama is back in campaign mode. The former president will jump into the 2018 midterms this month, beginning with campaign events for candidates in California and Ohio, states where Democrats hope to pick off vulnerable Republicans in their quest to take control of Congress and, in the case of Ohio, state leadership, according to a New York Times report. The tour will begin in California, where Hillary Clinton won seven of the 14 Republican-held House districts in 2016. Democrats are aggressively targeting those seats, a few of which are in Orange County, where Obama will attempt to move fiscally conservative voters who rejected Trump in 2016 onto Democratic voter rolls. He'll join Richard Cordray, Ohio's Democratic nominee for governor and his former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief, on the campaign trail next Thursday. And later this month, Obama will move on to Pennsylvania and Illinois, where he'll support congressional and gubernatorial candidates in states he won both in 2008 and 2012. Despite calls to reengage, Obama has largely stayed out of politics since he left office, headlining the occasional fundraiser and endorsing a list of 81 candidates. His most high-profile public appearances have been limited to non-political events, including a speech honoring Nelson Mandela in South Africa in July and a eulogy at Sen. John McCain's funeral in Washington last weekend. The president will reportedly steer clear of a handful of Trump-supporting red states where his presence could undermine the reelection campaigns of vulnerable Democrats. But aides told The Times that he's figuring out a plan to support candidates in places like Georgia and Florida, where Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, both insurgent black gubernatorial candidates, won primary upsets and are running against Trump-endorsed Republicans. Former first lady Michelle Obama has also jumped into the political fray ahead of the midterm elections, as she plans to travel across the US to encourage people to sign up to vote.<doc-sep>Barack Obama is returning to center stage, big time. What’s more, he comes back more blunt, aggressive, fired-up and arguably populist than ever before. After two years in which he refrained, much to the consternation of his fans, from directly attacking Donald Trump, Obama is now lambasting his successor, his GOP enablers and the “rich and powerful” who run America through them. The Democrats are overjoyed, but Trump might also have good reasons to smile. Obama’s dramatic comeback is slated to play out over the next eight weeks. The former president plans to campaign in close congressional races and to invigorate the Democratic base in advance of the November 6 elections, which he described in his speech at the University of Illinois on Friday as the most important in his lifetime. >> Obama slams Trump: How hard can it be to say 'Nazis are bad'? The greatest danger facing American democracy today, he says, is the cynicism that compels liberal-leaning young voters to stay home on election day rather than go out and vote. If they don’t change their ways, America will fall into the hands of the “racists and demagogues” who run its affairs today. Obama told his enthusiastic listeners that Trump is the symptom rather than the cause of America’s travails, but he nonetheless devoted a large part of his speech to Trump’s destructive ways. He lambasted those who dredge up America’s racist past, who fail to condemn Nazis, who “promise to fight for the little guy even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful” and who “undermine rules and change the rules…in order to entrench their power further.” Republicans, he said, are “bending over backwards”, even though they realize “this is kind of crazy”. They seem “utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make democracy work,” Obama said. For outraged Democrats, Obama’s comeback and his sterner message are a godsend. They answer their longing for a worthy leader and serve the leftwards turn they’ve taken, as a direct result of Trump’s traumatic tenure. Many Obama voters continue to worship the ground he walks on, but even those who were less enthusiastic when he was actually president have turned, with the benefit of hindsight, into ardent admirers, given the unavoidable comparisons with his successor. >> John Kerry: Israeli action on West Bank outposts, Trump's ambassador pick led Obama to not veto UN anti-settlement resolution ■ The Jerusalem embassy flop | Opinion ■ Trump viewed as national security threat by own staff, claims Woodward book << Obama is the only senior figure that can fill the leadership vacuum in the Democratic Party, the only one who can raise the liberal flag on a national level. Hillary Clinton’s incomprehensible loss to Trump in 2016 has damaged her status, perhaps irreparably. And while the campaign to take her place as the Democratic candidate has already started, as could be seen from the grandstanding ploys of Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris during the Brett Kavanaugh Senate hearings last week, Democrats haven’t even started to contemplate the identity of Clinton’s successor. Obama, on the other hand, is a proven winner, the man who led the Democrats to two successive electoral victories, which many believed were impossible. He is ideally suited to drum up his party’s self-confidence that a counterrevolution against Trump on November 6 is within reach. The problem is that the road to a Democratic victory in November, in the House of Representatives, at least - and, according to the most recent projections, in the Senate as well - was being paved before Obama decided to jump once again into stormy political waters. Contrary to the hackneyed maxim “It’s the economy, stupid”, the superior performance of the U.S. economy, which was reaffirmed in the positive employment data published on Friday, has not stopped Trump’s descent in the polls, which accelerated over the past two weeks. When a sitting president has a measly 35% approval rating, the chances of his political rivals to score a sweeping victory in the midterms simply skyrocket. Trump brought this calamity on himself, with no assistance from Obama. His contemptible conduct and subsequent isolation during the weeklong burial ceremony of John McCain launched Trump’s most recent descent; Bob Woodward’s tell-all book, along with the anonymous op-ed by a senior administration official in the New York Times, accelerated the fall. The emerging portrait of chaos in the presidential decision-making process, along with Trump’s increasingly hysterical reactions to his growing distress, left hundreds of Republican candidates who are vying in closely-contested races impossibly stuck between a rock and a hard place: Between primal fear of the GOP base, which compels them to defend Trump no matter what, and concern about moderate GOP defectors, which require them to keep their distance from the president. Obama’s return, on the assumption that his speeches will continue to spew fire and brimstone and to occupy prominent headlines, provides Trump and his followers with a golden opportunity to divert attention away from their scandal-plagued president and to invoke the dormant but far from dissipated animosity towards America’s first black president. Obama’s dramatic reappearance allows his haters to shift from an impossible effort to defend an unstable Commander-in-Chief to an all-out assault on his reviled predecessor and the abhorrent liberal values he represents. If you don’t vote for us Republicans, they will tell their voters, you will wind up with an all-Democrat Congress, with Obama pulling its strings. Obama’s reemergence gives the Republicans a chance, in theory at least, to revive the fear and loathing that, as he said in his speech, facilitated Trump’s victory. The race-based malice towards Obama was the main instigator of the GOP’s radicalization during his eight years in power. The feelings of resentment among middle and lower class white Americans and their willingness to hold Obama and liberals responsible for their predicament allowed many of them to hold their noses as they voted for an inexperienced brute like Trump. Without Obama to kick around any more, Trump was judged by his own conduct and his own merits, with the inevitable result of his collapse in the polls. It’s too early to tell whether Obama’s resurgence will produce more benefits than harm for the Democrats, or vice versa. His presidential aura, proven rhetorical prowess and image as Trump’s polar opposite can certainly help Democrats realize their electoral potential, perhaps on the same scale that enabled the Tea Party’s astounding triumph in 2010. But if Obama’s return also resuscitates the racist demon that sabotaged his presidency, divided America and brought Trump to the White House, he could also spark a similar process, for opposite reasons, among Republicans. If, as a direct consequence, they also come out to vote in droves, the battle on November 6 will be tougher and closer than foreseen today.<doc-sep>ANAHEIM, Calif. — Making his first major campaign foray into the 2018 midterm elections on Saturday, former President Barack Obama urged voters to elect seven Democratic candidates in California, telling the crowd they have a chance to "restore some sanity in our politics." His message, delivered at the Anaheim Convention Center in a traditionally Republican county in Southern California, touched on shared values of opportunity but also had a sense of urgency. "It's a consequential moment in our history," Obama told the crowd. "And the fact is that, if we don’t step up, things can get worse. Where there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we are not participating, we’re not paying attention, when we’re not stepping up — other voices fill the void.” "But the good news is, in two months we have a chance to restore some sanity in our politics," Obama said. "We have the chance to flip the House of Representatives and make sure that there are real checks and balances in Washington." Democrats hope to take control of the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms, and Saturday was the first major campaign event by Obama for Democratic candidates in this election cycle. The former president was stumping for Democrats Josh Harder, TJ Cox, Katie Hill, Gil Cisneros, Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin, all of whom are running in Republican-held districts won by Clinton in 2016. Last month, he endorsed almost 100 Democratic candidates across the country. On Friday, Obama gave a speech at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to urge young people to vote. In that speech, he slammed "crazy stuff" coming out of the Trump White House and blasted President Donald Trump for trying to politicize the Justice Department. Obama also rebuked a brand of politics he said is steeped in fear and division. Obama also recorded a NowThis News video released Saturday. In the social media targeted clip, he said that "basic norms and principles" have been "increasingly violated" and pushed young people to get out and vote. Orange County, a Republican stronghold in Southern California, voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election — the first time it went blue in a presidential race since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Obama on Saturday rejected what he called politics of fear and division, and said that they would fight for the education of all children, pay equity between men and women for the same work, protecting Social Security and Medicaid so people can retire with dignity, and not paying “lip service” to members of the military and getting them the benefits they’ve earned and deserve. "There are people out there right now that are counting on us to make sure they still have health care after this election," Obama said. "That’s on the ballot." "These are some of the men and women, many of them who never imagined running for office,” the former president said of the California candidates. "But what they understood is, the stakes are high in this election." Trump has urged his supporters to vote for Republican candidates to support his agenda, and in a speech in Montana on Thursday, he raised the specter of impeachment by Democrats to rally his base. Outside Saturday’s event there were around 18 pro-Trump demonstrators, with one woman wearing a “Make California Great Again" shirt, borrowing from Trump’s campaign slogan. Another of those demonstrators said in a bullhorn, “the Russian hoax is almost over.” An Anaheim fire official at the scene estimated the standing-room-only crowd at the invite-only event in the convention center ballroom around 800 people. Before Obama spoke, supporters briefly chanted "take it back," a slogan that was also on the podium with a Twitter hashtag. Obama also said that the message would not just be focused on die-hard Democrats. "I want to reach out to some Republicans, who kind of hearken back to the values of a guy named Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. And who say to themselves ... 'I don't recognize what’s going on in Washington right now — that’s not what I believe,'" Obama said. He said that in American history "there’s always been a push and pull between those who want to go forward and those who want to look back, between those who want to divide and those who are seeking to bring people together — between those who promote a politics of hope and those who exploit politics of fear." "All across the country, you can feel the energy. You can feel people saying, 'Oh, enough is enough.'" "All across the country, you can feel the energy. You can feel people saying, 'Oh, enough is enough,'" Obama said, whipping up the crowd. "We're going to kick off our bedroom slippers, we’re putting on our marching shoes," he said. "We are going to go out, and we are going to start taking some clipboards out, and we’re going to start knocking on some doors." Time will tell whether a so-called Democratic "blue wave" happens in the midterms as some Democrats hope. For some of the party faithful at Saturday's event, seeing Obama was an energizing moment. "It's just a huge comfort to hear his voice again," said Maurine Burns, a teacher who lives in the city of Orange. "We needed to see his face." Michael Sean Wright, a 50-year-old filmmaker and Democratic supporter, was more than confident. "Orange County is not theirs anymore," he said, referring to Republicans. "It's ours."<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON — Former President Barack Obama is set to launch a political offensive designed to focus his party’s energies in the midterm elections, breaking from his self-imposed political exile with a message that will draw a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump. Since leaving the White House, Obama has taken pains to remain above the political fray — sometimes to the disappointment of his fellow Democrats who’ve lacked a national voice to rally behind in opposing the new administration. But even as he may not target Trump by name, "no one will come away thinking he held back or held his punches," a source close to the former president told NBC News. Obama will preview the overarching message of the midterm push Friday with a major address in downstate Illinois, less than 100 miles from where he launched his bid for the White House more than a decade ago. The setting itself will send a message, as Obama accepts an award for ethics in government in a region that has been a conservative stronghold. Aides say it will build off the themes of his presidential farewell address, establishing the factors that have contributed to the heightened national polarization and then outlining what can be done to move beyond it. It will urge Americans to embrace activism over apathy and reject "the rising strain of authoritarian politics and policies," as well as highlight ways in which many have already stepped up and engaged in the political process — some for the first time. He was still finalizing his remarks Thursday, aides said. But he wants to talk about "which vision of America is the one that’s going to win out — a big, inclusive vision of America, or a small, fearful vision of America," one aide said. "America has always been a story of progress, but also of backlash to that progress. We’re in one of those moments of backlash. And we didn’t get here overnight," the aide said. "People in power want us to believe that the rest of us are powerless to solve our problems through democracy. And when people stop showing up, like in 2010 and 2014 where fewer people voted, a vacuum forms, and a politics of fear and resentment fills that void." Trump "is a symptom, not the cause of what ails our democracy," the aide added. "He’s just capitalizing on what’s been the Republican strategy for years." Obama will follow his speech Friday with a campaign rally Saturday in southern California, where Democrats are targeting a half-dozen congressional seats that could put them back in the majority for the first time since 2011. Next week he’ll campaign for Ohio gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray, who previously served as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created as part of the Dodd-Frank legislation Obama signed as president. Later this month he’ll campaign again in Illinois and also in Pennsylvania and raise money for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC). During the two midterm elections of his presidency, Obama’s mobilization was limited by a humbling political reality: Most congressional Democrats facing stiff political headwinds wanted to demonstrate independence from their party leader. In 2018, Obama’s deployment is sparing and strategic by his own design. Aides say the few major events are designed to send a larger message to his party about what he thinks their priorities should be. They point to his partnership with the NDRC as one example. Democratic numbers in governor's offices and state legislatures were decimated at the end of Obama’s eight years. The former president took his share of responsibility for the fact that he was not able to transfer his own political success to the party more broadly during the span of his presidency. Obama has already endorsed 81 candidates — many in state legislative races. A second wave of endorsements he will make in the coming weeks will be focused on additional state races that will be pivotal to determining which party oversees the process of redrawing congressional and legislative boundaries. He will also emphasize the importance of redistricting in his remarks in the states where it could have the most impact. Separately, the political organization that sprang from Obama’s first presidential campaign has been at work in key congressional races. Organizing for Action has had volunteer leaders in more than two dozen congressional districts to help build on grassroots efforts.