I think the objection is to playing an edited snippet from one speech where she said, "... for the first time ... I'm really proud of my country" and leaving out "really." She, until recently at least, spoke almost completely without notes or even cards. Sometimes for 45 minutes or longer. What she was expressing was a sense of pride and hope that, for her, were a new level of pride. Leaving out "really", removes that dimension from her comment, IMO.
I might agree, if she hadn't made numerous other comments about what a mean place America is, how things have been getting worse and worse through her whole lifetime, about how everybody struggles so hard but "they" keep raising the bar.
This last refrain is a favorite of hers. It's rather difficult to fathom which bar she is talking about. After all, it's not as if median incomes or standards of living have been declining in America, just the opposite. I concluded after hearing a few of her speeches that the "bar" was the societal expectation of what you had to achieve and own to be considered a "success". That bar does keep rising. Fifty years ago, a small house and one car were success. Now you need a huge house, two cars, the right schools, HD TVs, computers, etc, etc.
Michelle Obama comes across as an angry victim, despite (or maybe because of?) her own enormously privileged life. One can clearly hear the echo of Jeremiah Wright in her speeches. The "snippet" defense doesn't work any better for her than it does for Jeremiah Wright, whose further speeches made it clear that all the "snippets" correctly expressed his views, on which he was happy to expound at length. |
