Barack Obama casts Harris as his heir in convention speech

Barack and Michelle Obama closed out the Democratic National Convention’s second night by pitching Kamala Harris as an heir to their political legacy. And they derided Donald Trump as a “racist” egomaniac who’d squandered his own presidency, and needed to be kept out of power.

“This convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible,” the former president said in his closing remarks, an echo to the convention address that launched his national career 20 years ago. Harris’s parents had “crossed oceans because they believed in the promise of America,” evoking the story he’d told Democrats in that same 2004 speech about his Kenyan father coming to a “magical place.”