If there was any doubt that Barack Obama remains the Democratic Party’s ablest campaigner, it was removed last week when the former president swept into Georgia for the final push of US Senator Raphael Warnock’s reelection bid.
As he did during the last stages of the fall midterm election campaign, when he rallied supporters of Democratic Senate candidates with jabs at their Republican rivals, Obama waded into the Georgia runoff campaign in anticipation of Tuesday’s vote to boost Warnock’s already strong turnout operation. The intervention was vital, because the Georgia contest has been a close one. And because it matters.
Regardless of what happens in Tuesday’s voting, Democrats will continue to control the Senate that in the last session was divided 50-50 but tipped in the party’s favor by Vice President Kamala Harris. But a victory in Georgia would give the party a clear 51-49 majority, eliminating power-sharing compromises and reducing the influence of corporate-aligned senators such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Obama, as skilled a political strategist as any former president since Harry Truman, knows what is at stake. And he has gone all in for Warnock, the longtime senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta whose 2021 victory in a Georgia special election runoff—along with a win for Senator Jon Ossoff in a regular runoff on the same day—put Democrats in charge of the Senate.
“I’ve known Rev. Warnock for years. He’s a man of great moral integrity, a leader in the truest sense of the word,” Obama said, in television ads that have aired across the state in the days leading up to the runoff. “In just two years in office, he’s worked to lower health care costs for seniors and bring good jobs to Georgia. And he’s been a clear voice in the fight to defend our democracy and protect the right to vote. There aren’t a lot of people in Washington like Rev. Warnock, and that’s exactly why we need to send him back.”
Then Obama got to the point, reminding potential voters who might be disinclined to show up for a holiday season election, “This is going to be a close race, and we can’t afford to get it wrong.”
While Republicans have kept scandal-plagued former president Donald Trump as far as possible from Georgia, where their party is struggling to elect Trump’s handpicked celebrity candidate, former football star Herschel Walker, Obama came in not just via television and radio ads but in person. As with his campaign stops earlier in the year for candidates such as Pennsylvania Senator-elect John Fetterman, there was nothing cursory about Obama’s stump speech. He came prepared. And, like Truman in the 1950s and 1960s, when the man who had served as the 33rd president became the favored Democratic surrogate in campaigns for Senate seats, Obama’s preparation allowed him to ridicule the Republican.
