Michelle Obama is 44 years old. If Barack Obama is elected President, serves for two terms and doesn’t depart the office with a reputation of Jimmy Carter-like proportions, Mrs. Obama, only 52 at that point, will have little trouble stepping into the Senate seat her husband once held and thereafter following in the footsteps of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Judging by what was intended as a puff piece in the New Yorker (summarized and dissected by Jim Geraghty), her whining dyspepsia and self-righteous victimhood will make us look back on the Tin Lady with fond nostalgia.
The four times I heard her give the speech—in a ballroom at the University of South Carolina, from the pulpit of Pee Dee Union, at an art gallery in Charleston, and in the auditorium of St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin—its content was admirably consistent, with few of the politician’s customary tweaks and nods to the demographic predilections, or prejudices, of a particular audience.
Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”
From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”
BTW, Dick Cheney’s father was a soil conservation agent for the Department of Agriculture, not exactly a “trust fund” background.
First Ladies have traditionally gravitated toward happy topics like roadside flower beds, so it comes as a surprise that Obama’s speech is such an unrelenting downer. Obama acknowledged to me that some advisers have lobbied her to take a sunnier tone, with little success. “For me,” she said, “you can talk about policies and plans and experience and all that. We usually get bogged down in that in a Presidential campaign, over the stuff that I think doesn’tmatter. . . . I mean, I guess I could go into Barack’s policies and rattle them off. But that’s what he’s for.” In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a littlegirl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”
How long do we want to have to listen to that? There are other reasons not to vote for Barack Obama, but this one, to my mind, will suffice.
Slick Barry is not even as bad as "Mean Michelle". A scary couple, indeed. Check out his past, people. It's not all hope and change. SlickBarry.com
Posted by: Figueroa Slim | Monday, March 17, 2008 at 09:43 PM