Noticed a lot of DNC speeches mentioning moms? There’s a reason for that

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Michelle Obama paralleled her own story with Vice President Kamala Harris by comparing their mothers on Tuesday night, drawing on a theme that has laced throughout the Democratic National Convention.

Obama told delegates in Chicago that the last time she was in her home city, it was to memorialize her mother, Marian Robinson, who died in late May and “who set my moral compass high and showed me the power of my voice.”

Robinson was also, in Obama’s telling, “glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations, has strengthened the fabric of this nation.”

Obama tied her mother’s values to those of Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who immigrated to the US from India, built a career as a medical researcher while raising her daughters and died in 2009. Harris frequently brings up her mother in speeches.

“She taught Kamala about justice, about our obligation to lift others up, about our responsibility to give more than we take,” Obama said.

She noted that Gopalan frequently told her daughter: “Don’t sit around and complain about things – do something!”

By the end of her speech Tuesday night, Obama had Democrats chanting that refrain: “Do something.”

Speaking next, former President Barack Obama returned to Robinson, the Black mother from the South Side of Chicago, who he said reminded him of his grandmother, “a little old White lady born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” who “helped raise me as a child.”

His point was about the commonality of Americans and the importance of being good people. These women, from such different backgrounds, shared the same outlook, he argued.

“They knew what mattered,” he said. “Things like honesty and integrity, kindness and hard work. They weren’t impressed with braggarts or bullies. They didn’t think putting other people down lifted you up or made you strong.”

Both women “represented an entire generation of working people who, through war and depression, discrimination and limited opportunity, helped build this country,” he said.

The former president then seemed to riff on Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” arguing that rather than specific policies, Americans want a country where people look out for each other, a “restoration of what Lincoln called, on the eve of civil war, ‘our bonds of affection.’ An America that taps what he called ‘the better angels of our nature.’”

The Obamas followed the lead of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with their focus on maternal figures, although Clinton placed strong moms in the context of first getting women the right to vote and ultimately getting a woman elected president.

Speaking Monday night, Clinton told the convention that her mother Dorothy was born in Chicago before women could vote, a right they gained nationwide 104 years ago on August 18. She talked about taking her daughter to see Geraldine Ferraro, the vice presidential candidate who became the first woman on a major party ticket in 1984. And Clinton talked about the honor she felt at being the first woman to accept a major party’s presidential nomination in 2016.

“I wish my mother and Kamala’s mother could see us. They would say, ‘Keep going,’ surely,” Clinton said.

Praise for strong women is not isolated to Democrats this year. The Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance of Ohio said at the Republican National Convention in July that his own rise came only thanks to his Mamaw, “the name we hillbillies gave to our grandmothers.”

Bonnie Blanton Vance was the “guardian angel” who raised him when his mother struggled with addiction. Vance described her as a woman of contradictions, a Christian who “also loved the F word” and who hoarded guns in her house.

“Thanks to that Mamaw, things worked out for me,” Vance said.

But it is some other comments from Vance – made years ago on a cable TV show about Democrats without children, including Harris, who he called “childless cat ladies” – that may be more remembered from this campaign.

Speaking Tuesday night before the Obamas, Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff talked about the role Harris, who his two children call “Momala,” plays in their “big, beautiful, blended family,” which includes his ex-wife.

Democrats have played on the dad jokes of Emhoff and Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. But they have also had to contend with Walz’s misstatement of the fertility treatment his wife Gwen underwent in becoming pregnant with their two children, part of a larger conversation about protecting access to in vitro fertilization, even in states that have outlawed abortion.

Democrats are counting on women voters to swing toward Harris in November and make her the first woman president, so a focus on the role women play in society makes sense and is at the core of the version of freedom being pushed by Democrats.

“We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life – how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry,” Barack Obama said on Tuesday.

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