Freedom From Fear

By Frank Bruni

PHILADELPHIA — A country off the rails or one that makes steady if imperfect progress?

A land of disenchantment or of stubborn, spectacular promise?

The intensifying battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is turning into a contest of those visions. That became clearer than ever on the third night of the Democratic National Convention here, as President Obama answered Trump’s message of fear with a proclamation of hope as rousing and robust as any I’ve heard.

“America is already great,” Obama said — thundered, really. “America is already strong. And I promise you our strength — our greatness — does not depend on Donald Trump. In fact it doesn’t depend on any one person.”

“There’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America has lost,” he added, then flashed back to his Kansas grandparents — whom he’d mentioned in the 2004 convention speech that introduced him to most Americans — and to the virtues of “kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility” that they preached.

“America has changed over the years, but these values that my grandparents taught — they haven’t gone anywhere,” he said. “They’re as strong as ever, still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us.”

And with Trump very much in mind, he made clear: “We don’t fear the future. We shape it. We embrace it.”

It’s hard, frankly, to stop quoting from his remarks because they amounted to one of the most moving, inspiring valentines to this country that I’ve ever heard, brimming with regard for it and gratitude to it.

We’re going to miss this man, America. Whatever his flaws, he’s been more than our president. Time and again, he’s been our national poet.

He made Trump look teeny tiny; he may well make Clinton look small, too, though that clearly wasn’t and isn’t his intent. A high bar has been set for her speech on Thursday night.

His speech reflected a fascinating role reversal this election cycle, with the Republicans — or, at least, the Republican presidential nominee — speaking in stormy terms about America’s failures while the Democrats stress how much sunshine there really is.

At least since Ronald Reagan’s declaration of “morning again in America,” the G.O.P. has tended toward optimism and uplift, but Trump has little interest in cheerleading. So Democrats have grabbed the pom-poms.

Obama even went so far as to claim Reagan’s perspective as the current Democratic one — and to use it to shame Trump.

“Ronald Reagan called America a shining city on a hill,” the president said. “Donald Trump calls it a divided crime scene that only he can fix.”

Earlier in the night, Vice President Joe Biden concluded his rawly, infectiously emotional speech by shouting: “We are America, second to none, and we own the finish line! Don’t forget it! Come on! We’re America!”

Obama, Biden and other Democratic leaders are hardly ignoring America’s heartaches. On Wednesday night as on Tuesday, speakers described and decried the human toll of senseless gun violence, which was also mentioned in a video that preceded Obama’s appearance onstage.

But they paid tribute to the might of the United States military, which Trump has repeatedly questioned, in a rah-rah manner typically associated with Republicans.

And Obama and Biden both answered Trump’s lament about America’s supposedly lost greatness with assertions of its continued potency.

“We have the finest fighting force in the world,” Biden said. “Not only do we have the largest economy in the world, we have the strongest economy in the world. We have the most productive workers in the world.”

Obama focused on our armed forces, too, saying: “Donald Trump calls our military a disaster. Apparently he doesn’t know the men and women who make up the strongest fighting force the world has ever known.”

That was striking, and so were some of the characterizations of Trump.

We live in bitterly partisan times, with acridly partisan talk, but the speakers on Wednesday night weren’t hurling the usual epithets at Trump or saying simply that he was the much inferior candidate, with the wrong estimation of America and the wrong plans for it.

They portrayed him as danger incarnate — not just unprincipled and uninformed but possibly unhinged. Over the past decades, I’ve never heard a major political party’s nominee discussed so cataclysmically.

“Risky, reckless and radical” is what Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, labeled him.

“Let’s elect a sane, competent person,” Bloomberg said, implying that Trump was insane.

For Obama, defeating Trump is personal.

A Trump victory would not only unravel some of his proudest accomplishments but also contradict the story that he’s been telling about America, one of widening hearts and expanding social justice.

Trump has repeatedly attacked Obama in particular, famously questioning whether he was really born in America and, at a news conference on Wednesday morning, calling Obama “the most ignorant president in our history” and “one of the worst presidents in the history of our country.”

One of the longstanding complaints about Obama is that he has not summoned the energy and selflessness to improve the fortunes of the Democratic Party beyond him. Since his 2008 election, the party has lost ground in the House, in the Senate and in statehouses across the country. The Democratic advantage in presidential elections is not matched by Democratic dominance beyond the White House.

There’d be a heaping measure of forgiveness for that if Democrats won the presidency for a third straight term. And it wouldn’t be just any third term. The nation’s first black president would be handing over the reins to the nation’s first woman president, a sequence of milestones in perfect keeping with the Democratic Party’s celebration of a more diverse, inclusive America.

All of that clearly fueled Obama on Wednesday. Any past rivalry between him and Clinton was history. He made an even stronger case for her than the first lady or Bill Clinton had.

But the case he was really making was for America.

Recalling that first convention speech of his in 2004, he said, “I was filled with faith: faith in America, the generous, big-hearted, hopeful country that made my story — that made all of our stories — possible.”

He added that despite war, recession and other challenges that the country subsequently confronted, “I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you that I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.”

“The America I know,” he said, “is full of courage and optimism and ingenuity. The America I know is decent and generous.”

That tack is in some ways inevitable and necessary: It complements the Democrats’ argument that Obama has moved the country forward, improving Americans’ lives, and that keeping the White House under Democratic control, with his handpicked successor, is crucial.

But the way he delivered it, it didn’t seem to be a cold-eyed strategy or a self-serving bid for validation. It came across as a cry from the heart — and an earnest, gorgeous one at that.

Frank Bruni is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.