Several political lifetimes ago, Barack Obama followed Bruce Springsteen onstage at a huge rally beneath the Cleveland skyline and declared, “A rising is coming.”
That promise, riffing off one of the rock icon’s hits, came true days later, when Obama won the 2008 presidential election.
The band was back together Thursday night, in Georgia. The former president, now 63 and still the Democratic Party’s most compelling figure, and the Boss were trying to push Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over the line in the critical swing state.
Springsteen, before strumming “Land of Hope and Dreams,” declared that Harris “is running to be the 47th president of the United States. Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant. He does not understand this country, its history or what it means to be deeply American.”
Obama seized on recent interviews in which John Kelly, the Republican nominee’s former White House chief of staff, described the 45th president as an aspiring dictator and said he’d expressed a desire to be served by generals like those who surrounded Adolf Hitler.
Trump on Thursday denied the report. “I never said that,” he said in Las Vegas.