Beacon Street Journal

Why is it that every time Michelle Obama gives her distressing stump speech on the campaign trail the picture that emerges is one of a hectoring, angry, bitter woman, with a gigantic chip on her shoulder? Last Friday in North Carolina, she treated supporters to more of her familiar gospel of despair. Yuval Levin of NRO highlights the characteristically negative view of the nation from America’s Unhappiest Millionaire:

It is an hour-long talk to supporters who just want something to cheer about, and who get some opportunities at the outset, but then find themselves treated to a profoundly and relentlessly negative vision of American life.

She first offers, as she often does in her appearances, a kind of victim’s history of the 2008 Democratic primary race. In Mrs. Obama’s telling, the Obama campaign becomes not an extraordinary mix of strategy and skill, but a sad reflection on the unfairness of American life. The bar, we are told, is always being raised just as her husband is about to reach it. They said he couldn’t win because he didn’t have an organization. Then he built an organization, so they said he couldn’t win because he didn’t have money. He raised money, so they said he couldn’t win because he couldn’t win caucuses. He won caucuses, so they said he couldn’t win because he couldn’t win primaries.

In the tone and substance of the story is the implication that the fact that this race isn’t over is evidence of a profound injustice done to her husband. “The bar is constantly changing for this man,” she tells us. Of course, the only relevant bar in an election is whether you win a majority, and Sen. Obama has yet to win a majority of Democratic delegates. If he did, the race would be over. The bar’s not moving.

But this tale of woe is really only an introduction to a larger and more sweeping list of bars getting raised just as hard working people are reaching for them. “So the bar has been shifting and moving in this race,” she says, “but the irony is, the sad irony is, that’s exactly what is happening to most Americans in this country.”

In Michelle Obama’s America, everybody’s suffering, no one has time to make any friends, no one earns enough to eke out a living anymore, and the bar of success is always being moved just out of reach. “Folks are struggling like never before,” she says, and in a nation struggling like never before, society cannot stand the strain.

She is the despondent Yin to Barack’s Yang; he talks of Hope, she never sees anything but Despair. America is a “sick” nation whose citizens souls are broken. The remedy? Why naturally, electing Barack Obama President. And Barack’s cure?

Barack will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

Good Heavens! If Obama gets elected, it sounds like Michelle is going to send those of us who are “uninformed” or who may fervently wish to remain uninvolved, to a Liberal Gulag for re-education.

Christopher Hitchens suggests that in part, based on a reading of her Princeton thesis, it very well may have been Michelle’s decision to remain as parishioners in Wright’s Trininty United Church. Her persistent ode to melancholy on the campaign trail doe seems more consistent with Jeremiah Wright’s view of America. Hitchens inquires: are we going to be getting two for the price of one again?