I think it's a big story, although the old-line media's a little behind the curve. Here's the Los Angeles Times' story on the Michelle Obama's bleak view of the United States:
Unwittingly, Michelle Obama became the story...this week, telling an audience in Wisconsin on Monday that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country."
It may have been nothing more than a little hyperbole in a season that has seen plenty. But as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has narrowed to Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the spotlight is shining much brighter now on Michelle Obama, a 44-year-old hospital administrator.
While Clinton's husband, the former president, has been in hot water regularly for his verbal jabs at Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, whose tongue can be as barbed as Bill Clinton's, has received less scrutiny. With her husband's increasing success, that has changed. And with so much at stake, even minor gaffes are being blown into full-fledged campaign issues.
On Wednesday, according to the Associated Press, she clarified her Monday remarks in an interview with a Rhode Island TV station. "What I was clearly talking about was that I'm proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process," she said. "For the first time in my lifetime, I'm seeing people rolling up their sleeves in a way that I haven't seen and really trying to figure this out -- and that's the source of pride that I was talking about."
Still, her comment was in keeping with the generally bleak view of the country that is the heart of her stump speech, a departure from the usual chauvinism of the campaign trail....Like her husband, Michelle Obama is a masterful public speaker who can easily talk for an hour without notes. But unlike her husband, she tends to dwell on the negative. America, in her telling, is a place where "regular folks," meaning the working class, can't get ahead because, as she said at Ohio State University, "folks set the bar, and then you work hard and you reach the bar -- sometimes you surpass the bar -- and then they move the bar!"
Americans, she says, have become "cynical" and "mean" and have "broken souls." For regular folks, life is bad and getting worse.
People can't raise a family on one salary anymore, she says. They can't afford to get sick even if they have insurance because of deductibles, premiums and the high cost of medication. They can't confidently send their kids to neighborhood public schools because so many of them are so bad. Young people can't afford to attend college to become teachers or nurses or journalists because those jobs don't pay enough to repay college loans.
"We don't need a world full of corporate attorneys and hedge-fund managers," she told a crowd in a Baptist church in Cheraw, S.C., last month. "But see, that's the only way you can pay back your educational debt!
"The life that I am talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. And this is through Republican and Democratic administrations. It doesn't matter who was in the White House. . . . So if you want to pretend there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I wanna meet you!"
Her rhetoric is jarring given that the Obamas themselves are a stunning embodiment of the American dream. Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, the men's basketball coach at Brown University, attended Princeton University. Barack and Michelle Obama both earned law degrees from Harvard, another of the nation's most prestigious schools, and are facing the possibility of raising their two daughters in the White House.
The couple's combined salaries were more than $430,000 in 2006, according to their tax return. In addition, Barack Obama earned $551,000 in book royalties. The family lives in a $1.6-million home in Chicago.
Well, the country club liberals are back, by the look of that income!
And to think, Barack Obama, for all his success and considerable income, is the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate.
The Obamas personify the American Dream, as do many others on the radical left who relentlessly attack this great nation.
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