Michelle Obama
The Associated Press

Michelle Obama keeps drawing criticism.

Featured Topic | Posted 21 weeks 2 days ago

Is Michelle Obama hurting Barack Obama's campaign?

Michelle Obama thinks the American Dream is out of reach for most of us. "The truth is most Americans don't want much," she said this week in North Carolina. "Folks don't want the whole pie. Most Americans feel blessed to thrive a little bit — but that's out of reach for them." Critics suggest that Michelle Obama has an unduly negative view of America. Does she? And are her statements hurting her husband's campaign for president?

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Ben likes: We are all victims now

Victor Davis Hanson/The Corner

Unfortunately, I doubt there are too many Americans who are sympathetic to the dilemma that when a couple earns $1 million per year, their appetites and expenses likewise adjust. Is that the always elevating "bar" -- private school tuitions for kids? Elite summer camp? An extra adjoining parcel to expand the garden? Rev. Wright's justified need for decent housing. All this proverbial "they" rhetoric in the past has worked well among Chicago neighborhood audiences, and perhaps even among head-nodding white elites. But the Obama campaign should really put it under wraps, since the whiny Ivy-Leaguer with a six-figure income will not play well in the general election in Bakersfield.

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Joel likes: The other Obama

Lauren Collins/The New Yorker

It’s not that Obama doesn’t know the anodyne, wifely things to say (essentially, nothing). She is, after all, a “community and external affairs” professional. But her pride visibly chafes at being asked to subsume her personality, to make herself seem duller and less independent than she is, even in the service of getting her husband elected President of the United States.

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!”

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.

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2008 Republican National Convention

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