Barn-Burner

“Do Something!” Michelle Obama’s Big-Hearted, Urgent, Barn-Burner of a Convention Speech

The former first lady riled with bruising punches and hilarious zingers.

Jamilah King

Former first lady Michelle Obama gave a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday night. In it, she reminded America of her own experiences with in vitro fertilization and took some not-so-subtle jabs at Donald Trump.

For Obama, the night was personal because Chicago is her hometown. Her mother, Marian Robinson, died at 86-years-old in May. And her speech was at United Center, a sports arena that’s less than a mile from her alma mater, Whitney Young Magnet High School, the high achieving haven that was formative in how she came to understand power. In her 2018 book Becoming, she wrote:

My first months at Whitney Young gave me a glimpse of something that had previously been invisible—the apparatus of privilege and connection, what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes that lay suspended overhead, ready to connect some but not all of us to the sky.

The nuanced understanding of power was clearly evident in Tuesday’s speech. Her tone conjured the Black gospel, even drawing a call-and-response from the crowd, calling for them to “do something!” before they returned the chant. At one point, she invoked her popular phrase, “when they go low, we go high.”

“Going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty,” Obama said. “Going high means taking the harder path…going high means standing fierce against hatred.”

Those fighting words were matched by the energy that’s reignited the Democratic Party over the past four weeks. Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the ticket has energized the base, shifting both the vibe and fueling millions of dollars in fundraising. Obama took aim at specific Republican attacks, like IVF. In Becoming, Obama wrote about her own experiences with a bit of humor.

Barack, she wrote, “read all the IVF literature and would talk to me all night about it, but his only actual duty was to show up at the doctor’s office and provide some sperm.”

On the DNC stage, the jokes kept coming, including one that brought down the house. Riffing on Trump’s accusation during the first debate that immigrants were “flooding” across the border to “take Black jobs,” Obama recalled Black creators on TikTok who’ve since turned the act into a meme.

“Who is going to tell him the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs?” she quipped.

After she concluded, CNN’s Anderson Cooper called Obama’s address, the “most effective and powerful speech I’ve ever heard.”