Former president Barack Obama headlined his first solo fundraiser for Kamala Harris in Los Angeles on Friday night, bringing in $4 million for her campaign as he framed the election as a struggle against radical forces in America that want to take the country backward.
The event was part of the increasingly active role that Obama is playing in Harris’s effort as he wields his popularity within the Democratic Party to power grassroots fundraising and to galvanize younger voters to turn out in what could be a margin-of-error race.
The Harris campaign recently featured clips from his Democratic National Convention speech mocking Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” in one of its ads to needle the Republican nominee just before his debate with Harris.
So far this presidential campaign cycle, the events where Obama has been featured and the grassroots fundraising appeals that he has signed have generated at least $76 million, according to his office.
In the short time that she has been in the presidential race, Harris has opened a wide cash advantage over Trump. Friday night, reports filed with the Federal Election Commission showed that she raised more than four times as much as Trump did in August.
The private event Friday night was held at the Los Angeles home of James Costos, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain and Andorra under Obama, and his partner, Michael S. Smith, who was White House decorator when Obama was president.
Before a gathering of more than 65 people, Obama argued that the nation and the world are at “a crossroads” where demographic changes, globalization and the information revolution have “disrupted the old order” and made “us vulnerable to the appeals of fear and anger and tribe,” according to excerpts of his remarks provided by his office.
Obama described Harris’s campaign as an effort to guard against those destructive forces and usher in a future that would create an economy “where everybody has enough” and Americans don’t see the changes occurring in society as a zero-sum game where “if somebody gains, somebody must lose.”
“That’s what my election was about back in 2008 … and we’ve now gone through 16 years of continuing struggle to move in a direction in which it’s not radical,” Obama said.
He told attendees that Harris, who has been a friend for two decades, “can make us proud on the world stage about what America stands for, as opposed to embarrassing us.”
“We’re still going to have free markets and we’re still going to have our liberties, and Americans are still going to be doing the weird things that we do. But we can make sure that it’s a little bit gentler, a little bit kinder, a little bit more generous, a little bit less unequal, a little bit more inclusive.”
Obama and Harris met when he was running for Senate in Illinois. She became one of the earliest supporters of his 2008 bid for president — traveling to Iowa to knock doors for him at a moment when many of the Democratic Party’s power brokers had lined up behind Hillary Clinton.
Obama served as a sounding board for Harris when she became vice president. He also actively raised money for President Joe Biden, his former vice president, when he was still in the race. That included a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser with George Clooney and Julia Roberts in June and a New York fundraiser with Biden and former president Bill Clinton in March.
After Biden’s faltering debate performance against Trump, Obama told allies that Biden’s path to victory had diminished and that he needed to seriously consider the viability of his candidacy — creating some resentment among Biden loyalists.
Harris and Obama have been in especially close touch over the past two months as she was elevated to the top of the ticket after Biden withdrew from the race. The former president has offered to help with strategic advice, fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts, including a major push with creators on social media this week for National Voter Registration Day. Several of the top advisers on his presidential campaigns are now involved with Harris’s campaign.
Both leaders have faced similar attacks from Trump and the conservative right on their mixed-race heritage. For years, Trump falsely claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the United States as he questioned the former president’s qualifications for the office.
After Harris became Biden’s running mate in 2020, Trump tried similar tactics by falsely claiming that there were questions about her eligibility as she was poised to become the first Black and Asian American vice president.
When Trump baselessly questioned the racial identity of Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father — during a forum hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists, Harris rebuffed his assertion that she “happened to turn Black” by alluding to his many years perpetuating the “birther” movement’s lies about Obama. “Same old tired playbook,” she said during a CNN interview. “Next question, please.”
Attendees of Obama’s fundraiser for Harris in Los Angeles included Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant, a producer and author who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas during Obama’s administration. Others who attended included actress Jennifer Coolidge and comedian Conan O’Brien.
The former president said Friday that he wished he had a four- or five-point plan to win the election, but “truthfully, the plan is we’re going to push through it.”
“If we win — when we win — it won’t solve all the crazy that’s out there,” he said. “But each time we win, it’s solidifying this new future. It is ushering in these new possibilities. Eventually, that will become the new normal and the new reality.”