Barack Obama

The 2004 DNC keynote was supposed to be a warm-up act. Obama was a state senator from Chicago, handed the microphone on a Tuesday night when delegates were still finding their seats. The speech ran 17 minutes. His memoir shot back onto the bestseller list the following morning. He won his Senate seat three months later. The next time he gave a speech at the convention, he was accepting the presidential nomination.

He left office with approval in the high 50s and has spent the post-presidency managing that equity carefully. The Netflix deal with Michelle, reportedly worth around $50 million, grew Higher Ground Productions into an operation that produces actual awards-contending work: American Factory won an Oscar. His memoir A Promised Land sold 7.6 million copies by the end of 2020. The Democratic Party treats him as a party elder, which is how he prefers it, until he doesn't: he waited until late July 2024 to endorse Kamala Harris, a delay that said more about his strategic instincts than any speech.

He grew up in Hawaii and spent four years as a child in Jakarta, which is either irrelevant or explains everything depending on who you ask. At Harvard Law School, he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, spending the year playing mediator between warring ideological factions rather than picking a side. In 2012, Ancestry.com found a strong likelihood that his mother, Ann Dunham, was descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man in 17th-century colonial Virginia, adding a layer to the origin story that nobody quite knows what to do with.