Barack Obama raises $4 million for Harris at L.A. fundraiser

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 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. 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. Advertisement 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.” Advertisement Obama and Harris met when he was running for Senate in Illinois. 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. 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. Advertisement 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. “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. 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.” – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/09/21/obama-harris-trump-fundraiser/