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 lateMay 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.”

Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama embrace on stage on Tuesday, August 20, during the DNC in Chicago.

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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 PresidentBarack 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