5 highlights from DNC night 1: Biden can ‘restore the soul of America,’ Cuomo and Sanders declare
Michelle Obama blames Trump for detaining kids in ‘cages’ built, used during Barack Obama's administration
Arguably the most high profile speaker of the first night was former first lady Michelle Obama. Biden served as vice president under her husband, former President Barack Obama, from 2009 to 2017. The 56-year-old Obama did not hold back in offering her criticisms of her husband’s successor.
“Being president doesn't change who you are; it reveals who you are. Well, a presidential election can reveal who we are too,” she said.
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“And four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didn't matter. Maybe they were fed up. Maybe they thought the outcome wouldn't be close. Maybe the barriers felt too steep. Whatever the reason, in the end, those choices sent someone to the Oval Office who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
“In one of the states that determined the outcome, the winning margin averaged out to just two votes per precinct — two votes,” she said. “And we've all been living with the consequences.”
Obama said that when her husband and Biden left office, there was a “record-breaking stretch of job creation,” they had “secured the right to health care for 20 million people,” and were rallying international allies to fight climate change.
“And our leaders had worked hand in hand with scientists to help prevent an Ebola outbreak from becoming a global pandemic,” she added. “Four years later, the state of this nation is very different. More than 150,000 people have died, and our economy is in shambles because of a virus that this president downplayed for too long.”
Obama said that millions have now been left jobless during the virus and “too many” have lost their health care and are struggling to “take care of basic necessities.”
She continued by criticizing the attitude of people around the country, such as those shouting in grocery stores because they are unwilling to wear a mask and those who call the cops on African Americans just because of the color of their skin. She warned of what lesson kids growing up today might learn from what they are seeing nationwide.
“They see our leaders labeling fellow citizens enemies of the state while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists. They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protestors for a photo-op,” she said.
“Sadly, this is the America that is on display for the next generation. A nation that's underperforming not simply on matters of policy but on matters of character. And that's not just disappointing; it's downright infuriating, because I know the goodness and the grace that is out there in households and neighborhoods all across this nation.”
While the Trump administration has been criticized for its policy of family separation when people cross the border illegally, an Associated Press fact check notes that Obama’s “cages” remark picks up on a “distorted point made widely by Democrats.”
“She's right that Trump's now-suspended policy at the U.S.-Mexico border separated thousands of children from their families in ways that had not been done before,” the AP fact check reads. “But what she did not say is that the very same ‘cages’ were built and used in her husband's administration, for the same purpose of holding migrant kids temporarily.”
The policy existed in both the Obama and Bush administrations, with former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson telling both NPR and Fox News that under the Obama administration some children were detained alone. "We had then 34,000 beds for family detention, [but] only 95 of 34,000 [were] equipped to deal with families."
The Obama administration did not release a record of the number of children separated from adults.
