Be Proud of America, Michelle Obama

In order for Barack Obama to get voters to buy his themes of change and hope, he has to sell them on the notion that the country is currently an utter mess.

Obama says that he wants Americans to have a brighter "Yes we can" sort of future, but in the process he's not accentuating the positives of the present. According to him, everything sucks. Americans are hungry for change and he promises to deliver. Blah, blah, blah.

Michelle Obama has done her part to depict America as a hellhole and Americans as lost and broken.

Yesterday, in both Madison and Milwaukee, Michelle Obama told crowds that they're miserable.

In spite of her incredible success, Michelle says that it took until now for her to be proud of her country. This is the first time in her adult life that she feels that way.

Amazing.

From Jonathan V. Last, of The Weekly Standard:

Roughly 600 people gathered at the Capitol Theater in Madison's downtown Overture Center yesterday to listen to Michelle Obama make a pitch for her husband's presidential bid. They were treated to a revealing glimpse into the mind of the candidate's wife.

By now one passage from her speech has received much attention. She said:

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction. And just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment I've seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic, common issues and it's made me proud.
It was an extraordinary declaration for a 44-year-old woman. She expanded on it a bit later, claiming that "Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, through Republican and Democratic administrations. It hasn't gotten much better."

..In many ways, Michelle Obama's stump speech is reminiscent of her husband's. She dwells at length on the issue of change and frequently talks in the idiom of political self-help. She worried that "We spend more time thinking about what can't be done, what can't change, what won't work. And the problem with that is that it cuts us off from one another in our own communities. It's cut us off from the rest of the world. And the sad part about it is we're passing on all these fears, this cynicism--we're passing it on to the next generation." "Everything," she explained, "begins and ends with a little bit of hope and a whole lot of dreaming."

Mrs. Obama's remarks were also light on policy--which is understandable. After all, she's not the one standing for office. But she showed something like contempt for even the idea of actual policy talk. "I know voters like a plan," she said. "What's the details, tell me about your policies. Plans are important, I agree. . . . But a lot of this stuff isn't rocket science."

Instead, she voiced deeper concerns: "Barack knows that at some level there's a hole in our souls," she said. This was a variation on her normal line that "Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

Obama is going to fix our broken souls?

So, he's our savior, the ticket to our salvation.

Obama is quite a guy! He's a spiritual healer.

Last concludes:

Instead of seeing America as a place which afforded her the opportunity to create a blessed life, Mrs. Obama seems to view it as a place where some "people" are always trying to hold her back. Whoever these "people" are, we should be glad they haven't been successful. Michelle Obama's progress is--despite her telling of it--an inspirational story that should make us proud of America, not frustrated by, and scornful of, it. It says something about her view of this nation, and of her husband and herself, that she seems to find it so difficult--their own experience notwithstanding--to feel gratitude for and pride in her country.

That's very well said.

Victor Davis Hanson arrives at a similar conclusion about 44-year-old Michelle Obama finally feeling proud of America for the first time in her adult life:

I wrote not long ago that Michelle Obama is a loose cannon, and I fear that her latest is not her last. I would have thought that two Ivy-League degrees, a joint income of about a million dollars, exclusive private schools for the kids, and a nice home in the suburbs were not so bad and might suggest that hope had made a comeback well before Barack's presidential run.

It's such a stunning statement by Michelle Obama. It took her 44 years to be proud of her country. Never before as an adult has she experienced that.

When Michelle Obama was speaking in Milwaukee yesterday, she didn't touch on how her husband will bring hope to the hopeless but she did say that he will.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

At Milwaukee's Pabst Theater, Michelle Obama said her husband is prepared to address the challenges facing low-income and middle-class Americans.

"There is more that unites us than divides us," she told the crowd of several hundred. "But when you're struggling every day, it's easy to be cynical. It's easy to believe that nothing can change."

Audience members nodded and shouted their approval as she described families struggling to cover the costs of child care, health insurance and college tuition.

"Barack understands that what we're lacking in this nation are will and hope," she said. "Our souls are broken."

I agree that there's more that unites us than divides us.

I completely disgree that what "we're lacking in this nation are will and hope."

That doesn't speak to me at all.

Generations of my family have had the will and hope to achieve and make the most of the opportunities being an American brings.

We weren't a family of privilege. Each succeeding generation worked to make a better life.

My husband and I have both relied on strong will and hope to achieve what we have. If there's a lack of will and hope in the nation, some of it can be traced to the entitlement mentality and a failure to work hard to realize one's dreams.

Our souls aren't broken. Generally speaking, I don't see Americans as broken and miserable.

Many, many Americans are people of faith. While we may suffer and have crosses to bear, our souls are NOT broken.

From here, it looks like Michelle and Barack Obama have so much to be proud of in their lives, thanks to a great country that has offered them tremendous opportunities. With hard work, they've achieved great things.

No, I don't see things the way Michelle Obama does.

Didn't she feel pride in how bravefully firefighters, police officers, and citizen heroes responded on 9/11 and during those agonizingly painful weeks after?

I know I did.

Doesn't she feel pride in the achievements of the U.S. military?

I know I do.

There must have been some moment in her adult life that made her swell up with pride in her country, before her husband hit the campaign trail.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and winning the Cold War were pride-inducing.

People in the nation do have will and hope. Those things aren't lacking, like she says. Barack Obama didn't introduce will and hope to the country. As Americans, even in our darkest moments, we've never completely lost our will nor have we been without hope.

If you're looking for will and hope, you have to look inside yourself. You don't need a candidate or the government to give them to you.