Barack Obama has a way of defusing awkward moments. At a Detroit rally for Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, he admitted that his fellow Democrat has publicly disagreed with parts of the Obama presidency.
"Yeah, Abdul didn't agree with some things we wanted to do – that our administration was doing – when I was president," Obama told the crowd. "You know who else doesn't agree with everything I do? Michelle Obama." The audience laughed. "I'd say about five times a day, she says, 'You knucklehead. Why you do that?'"
The joke was a deft attempt to link the party's past with its present. This year's midterms are driven by anti-incumbent anger, and some candidates have dropped their party labels to present themselves as outsiders taking on Washington. In that climate, you might not expect much appetite for a 65-year-old ex-president. He left office almost ten years ago, and his promise of "hope and change" was only partly fulfilled. Yet Democrats are clearly eager for him.
At an arena in suburban Atlanta this week, the crowd chanted "Yes, we can!" It echoed his 2008 campaign, which now seems to belong to another era.
A calculated gamble
Control of Congress for the rest of Donald Trump's second term will be decided within days. Democrats have sent their best speaker out for a run of sharp closing speeches. America's first Black president has ridiculed Trump's authoritarian streak and criticised his foreign-policy missteps in the Middle East.
"This election is our last, best chance of at least reining him in, reining in some of the foolishness of this administration," he said in Georgia. "It's the circuit-breaker in the system, and we need to flip it."
Party strategists saw this as a deliberate bet. Trump has spent weeks at grievance-heavy rallies in reliably Republican areas. Obama stayed mostly out of view until the last stretch. That let a new crop of Democratic candidates build their own identities before he arrived with a final burst of star power.
David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter, said: "What you're seeing is him coming in to support a new generation of Democratic leaders who have emerged organically, rather than trying to be involved from day one. He still has both a credibility and an ability to drive turnout that, if you're a candidate in a close race, you can absolutely benefit from – especially among young voters and Black voters."
Litt said Obama also has a rare ability to get attention and to rattle his successor. "Obama is good at getting attention, and attention is hard to get these days," he said. "The other thing is he continues to live in Trump's head rent-free. Donald Trump is out there on the stump, and in theory, he should be talking about his accomplishments. Instead he's relitigating his decisions involving ballroom renovations, because he can't help but get triggered by a single sentence from a former president."
The Cheesecake Factory flap
That sentence came at a Cleveland rally. Obama said Trump's gilded renovations had made the White House look like "Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory."
The remark set off a small culture war on the right. The offence wasn't the comparison to a brutal dictator. It was the suggestion that a beloved restaurant chain stood for tasteless excess.
Trump flapped his arms to imitate a lettuce leaf and accused Obama of snobbery. "Every piece of lettuce he eats has to be perfect, and I'm not that choosy," he said. He defended his gold-heavy décor and claimed Obama had left the White House "deteriorated."
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a wealthy former hedge fund manager, staged a photo-op outside a Cheesecake Factory in Washington. He ordered a french-dip cheeseburger, apparently to counter charges of elitism, and urged "the Martha's Vineyard set" to try the chain's multi-page menu.
Obama said the reaction proved his point. "They mobilised a whole-of-government response to a joke, not to inflation, but to a joke," he said in Atlanta. "They don't have solutions to actual problems, so they'd rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory."
Litt saw hypocrisy in the backlash. "This is a party that spent years complaining, 'Oh, you're not allowed to say anything offensive any more,'" he said. "It turns out all these people who would die on the hill of allowing someone to use offensive language suddenly think [the] Cheesecake Factory is a line you just can't cross."
Corbin Trent, a media strategist and former communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dismissed the idea that Obama's joke was condescending toward working people. Speaking from rural east Tennessee, he said: "They thought they were going to do this liberal elite stuff. I live in rural America. You've got this guy, Donald Trump, who presents himself like a mafioso, running our country like a mob – how can he enrich himself? There's no accountability. You're reminded of it every time you go to the grocery store, fill up your gas tank, turn on the TV and see that we're bombing more places."
A complicated legacy
Democrats have also enlisted former vice-president Kamala Harris, and ex-president Bill Clinton has campaigned with David Jolly, a candidate for Florida governor. Still, Obama has been unusually active in presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races since leaving office. In 2024 he backed Harris down the stretch of the presidential race, which Trump won. When Obama opened his presidential centre in Chicago in June, every living former president attended except Trump.
Within the wider Democratic coalition, though, his legacy is mixed. Many younger activists came of age during Bernie Sanders' campaigns and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America. They tend to remember him as much for institutional limits and moderate compromises as for his inspiring speeches.
Norman Solomon, co-founder of the progressive group RootsAction, said: "It's like a great oil painting. If you walk up to it and look real close, it's not going to look so great. If you look too close at Obama's record – the collapse on peacemaking in Palestine, tripling troops in Afghanistan, presiding over the greatest upward transfer of wealth in anybody's lifetime – it does not look so great."
He added: "Then he leaves the White House and jets off to an island owned by a billionaire. That is not solidarity."
Solomon conceded that, given the 2026 crisis, Obama's tactical value is clear. "Almost anybody is going to look great compared to Trump," he said. "In Michigan, where there's been resentment between African American and Arab American communities, it's helpful for Obama to present a wiser outlook on what's at stake."
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