Michelle Obama outlines her alternate reality of hubby Barack
As expected, Tuesday evening's convention speech by Michelle Obama (scroll down for full text and a video) was a well-delivered wifely paean of praise to hubby. He's a wonderful man, loving father, caring president. Free of pretense. Possibly a saint.
Michelle Obama is the obvious candidate to make Barack's case. Wives are reputed to know their husbands better than anyone. And, remember this is politics, and while Michelle's approval rating has sagged like everything about this administration, hers is still about 20 points higher than the Aloof One.
But here's what was different and unexpected -- and so politically clever -- about Michelle Obama's speech. She explained his actions devoid of ideology, self-interest or political party. Barack Obama, left-wing Chicago machine pol, friend to Boss Richard Daley and radical Bill Ayers, doesn't give a whit about politics in her reality. He could be a Salvation Army colonel the way she tells it.
Obama does what he does solely because of his background: Abandoned by his father, raised by a single mother, herself often absent, and then by his grandmother who took a bus to work so hard at a bank all those years and got passed over for promotions by people she'd trained and was paid less than men because of that darned glass ceiling.
But it was all OK, she taught Barack, who was called Barry then, because helping people is more important than worldly wealth.
And Michelle's family had a hard time too, you know, because her father ran a city pump and didn't earn much but like so many of us, he got up every morning and slogged off to work, all just to give his children a better life than he had. Because, as everyone knows, giving to others is more important than taking, especially in Chicago politics.
Judging by the grants and public pay and hospital jobs and hefty book contracts and sales and sweet land deal with a Windy City power broker and the grand house they own in Hyde Park and the hopelessly inept Republican fill-in Obama faced in his only Senate race and the luxury Spain vacations and $600 tennis shoes and the White House quarters and foreign travel Michelle's mother now enjoys at taxpayer expense, things turned out pretty good in this version of the American Dream.
Over the years, Michelle Obama explained:
"We learned about dignity and decency — that how hard you work matters more than how much you make…that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity — that the truth matters…that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules…and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square."
Of course, no public wife is going to relate stories out of school. Ann Romney did not even make up an anecdote about the rainy Saturday afternoon that Mitt tried to sneak a made-up word into a family Scrabble game.
However, to endear Barack to the audience in Charlotte and -- who knows? -- maybe a few thousand swing-state voters somewhere out there, Michelle described being collected for a date by Barack in his rusty old car. Men, aren't they a piece of work sometimes, ladies?
She didn't have time on national TV to get into the scores of unpaid parking tickets Barack had to settle as the Democratic primary campaign began in 2007. Or how the couple missed all those racist, anti-American sermons while allegedly sitting in the pews of Rev. Wright's church. Or how Tony Rezko, now a resident of a rent-free federal institution, happened to buy a slice of land to enlarge the Obama's home lot at a sweet price.
But according to The Barack Obama Story related by Michelle Obama, everything her husband does, like subsidizing student loans at taxpayer expense or creating expensive healthcare that seems free to patients, is always done out of the compassion, caring and sensitivity that Barack learned from his grandma and Michelle learned from her parents.
Which perhaps explains the federal loan guarantees that Obama steered into the now defunct Solyndra company.
Perhaps he cared so much about those thousands of middle-class men and women who could have taken the bus to work every morning to construct their American Dream if that solar-panel company had actually been competitive, which it wasn't, so it died and will cost American taxpayers (not Obama) $545 million.
Although, come to find out, it won't hurt the fortunes of Solyndra's prime owner, a member of the 1%, who happens to be an Obama campaign bundler. But he didn't get an ambassadorship out of it, yet.
The Obama American Dream is the one he mentioned in that Toledo cul-de-sac, remember, way back in 2008 when the Democrat instructed Joe the Plumber about redistributing wealth out of social equity and fairness. Who could argue with that, right? In Obama's American Dream the government builds that, by playing an aggressive role to help those with less money using the resources of those with more.
That's why Michelle Obama's 2,912 words made such a great speech for this election season. It was designed to humanize her husband and free him from the bindings of ideology. But it actually clarified this race as clearly as a Brita water filter.
The American Dream she describes is built by government officials, much different from the ones we heard about last week in Tampa. The Republican American Dream stories recounted there were built on individual risk, pluck and hard work.
And Romney's major point was getting the government out of the way of millions of creative Americans with imagination and drive to allow them freedom under the Constitution for the individual pursuit of happiness, not to guarantee its success |
