What Michelle Obama's Critics Missed
If Michelle Obama's critics actually paid attention to her recent commencement speech, they would hear a lot of advice that conservatives like to hear -- when it is not coming from Michelle Obama.
Rest assured, you can enjoy the first lady's speech to graduates at historically black Tuskegee University without being a white-hating racist, although you would not know it from the complaints of her right-wing radio critics.
What upsets them most is the brief section of her speech that made news: her first-hand descriptions of how it felt to be bombarded during a cutthroat presidential campaign by media depictions of her that did not remotely resemble the self that she knew.
"One said I exhibited 'a little bit of uppity-ism,' " she recalled. "Another noted that I was one of my husband's 'cronies of color.' Cable news once charmingly referred to me as 'Obama's Baby Mama.' "
And her husband? "Even today," she said to her highly receptive audience, "there are still folks questioning his citizenship." Oh, yeah. That.
Rush Limbaugh, a leading lion of right-wing radio resentment, growled on Monday's show that the first lady was "doubling down" on "playing the race card," has "a giant chip on (her) shoulder" that's "getting worse" and may only have thought she's been treated poorly because people "didn't fawn enough" over her.
Fellow conservative radio host Laura Ingraham that same day mocked the first lady as "angry" and delivering "a litany of victimization."
Glenn Beck similarly fumed: "White people in droves went out to vote for you. You were somehow invisible so much that you became the president and first lady of the United States of America? Tell me about the troubles that you have seen!"
Right. Blacks have a black president now, so they should stop complaining. I hear that argument a lot from conservatives. What I find ironic is how seldom I hear it come from people who actually voted for Obama.
That's politics. Having grown up in Chicago, a city whose politics -- in the immortal words of Finley Peter Dunne -- "ain't beanbag," one might presume that Mrs. Obama knew what she was getting into. Still, when hit with a surprise like the New Yorker cover cartoon version of her with a huge afro and machine gun, it "knocked me back a bit," she recalled. "It made me wonder, just how are people seeing me?"
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