The “New Obama”: Michelle Keeps Hope Alive
Posted by John Cassidy
The climax of the first night of the Democratic National Convention was billed as an opportunity for Americans to meet the new Obama—a Hispanic Obama, Julián Castro, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of San Antonio—and for the First Lady, Michelle Obama, to say some nice words about the old Obama, the rapidly graying one who is running roughly even in the polls with a stuffed shirt called Mitt Romney.
It didn’t work out like that. Castro, after a slow start, got off some choice shots at the Mittster, and generally gave a good account of himself, but the First Lady, in a bravura performance, completely overshadowed him. Combining personal testimonials (“I love my husband even more than I did four years ago”) with behind-the-scenes details from the White House (the President “strategizing over middle-school friendships” with his daughters) and Reaganesque rhetoric (“never forget that doing the impossible is the history of this nation”), she threw off the cloak of domesticity that she has been wearing for the past three and a half years and emerged as a major figure in her own right. By the end of her speech, Twitter was full of speculation about her running for President someday, though Jodi Kantor, who wrote a book about the Obamas, said that it would never happen: if Michelle ran for office, Kantor said, she would eat her book.
There’s nothing like a story-starved press pack to get ahead of itself. For now, let us simply state the obvious: Michelle Obama gave a speech that her husband, the speechifier, would have been proud of. After a night of enthusiastic but predictable denunciations of Romney’s Swiss bank accounts and laudations for Obama’s decision to save the auto industry, end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and pass universal health care, she lit up the Time Warner Cable Arena, home to the Charlotte Bobcats. When she left the stage, many people in the audience were calling for an encore, and so, surely, were her husband and daughters, who were watching her on television from the White House.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/09/the-new-obama-michelle-keeps-hope-alive.html
