Former President Barack Obama will return to the Democratic National Convention stage in his hometown of Chicago to deliver the keynote address on Tuesday, 20 years after his convention debut thrust him into the national spotlight.
It’s a tricky moment for one of the party’s most popular figures.
He will use his speech to touch on the historic nature of Kamala Harris’s candidacy – the first female of colour to lead the ticket – as a continuation of his legacy. But he must also pay tribute to his own vice-president and the man responsible for her rise – President Joe Biden.
Mr Obama, 63, and Ms Harris, 59, have moved in overlapping political orbits as early as his days as an Illinois state senator running for the US Senate. The two, both on the rise in their nascent political careers, met at a California fundraiser in 2004.
As an early supporter, Ms Harris would later volunteer for his presidential campaign and help power his first victory in 2008. Buoyed by party enthusiasm for Ms Harris’s campaign, Mr Obama – and his popular wife Michelle Obama – will try to return the favour and help propel her to the Oval Office.
“I think he can excite people about her and about the stakes [of the election] and I think that’s what he intends to do today,” David Plouffe, Mr Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and a now Harris campaign adviser, told Axios.
Here’s a look at key moments in their two-decade relationship.
Ms Harris, then a San Francisco district attorney, was in the crowd of more than 15,000 people as then-junior senator announced his longshot bid for the White House on the steps of the Old State Capitol in the Illinois capital city of Springfield in February 2007. She would go on to knock on doors and raise money for Mr Obama ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2008, later serving as his California campaign co-chair.
Mr Obama lent her some of his national star power two years later when she mounted a statewide bid for attorney general against Republican Steve Cooley, a popular Los Angeles district attorney. She had been affectionately referred to as “the female Barack Obama” by longtime PBS News anchor Gwen Ifill, but remained locked in a tight contest.
Mr Obama, who would endure widespread congressional losses in that election year, made time to appear at a Los Angeles rally in October 2010 in which he referred to Ms Harris as “dear, dear friend of mine”.
“I want everybody to do right by her,” he told the crowd. Ms Harris eked out a victory by less than a percentage point, setting her on a path toward higher office.
