Michelle Obama “really proud” of America for the first time in her adult life

As it turned out, the quote of Michelle Obama’s at the Boston.com blog that was linked by Kathryn Lopez at the Corner was different from the full quote, having a different meaning than I had originally seen in it, so I have revised this entry.

Here is the video of Michelle Obama speaking and here is the major part of what she says:

What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something—for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really 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. [And I feel priviledged to be part of even witnessing this, travelling around states all around this country, and seeing that more unites us than divides us …]

In this fuller version of the statement, I do not see the “Obama as avatar of racial unity” theme that I thought I had discerned in it when I saw the earlier version of the quote and that Michelle has given voice to previously. Also, as can be seen in the video, she is not speaking in her accustomed angry and aggrieved tone. But her message is no less sinister. Obama is still the symbol of national unification, but instead of his racial (or race-transcending) qualities being the basis of the unity, it’s his leftism, his “issues.” Obama represents an American people unified around leftism. And this is what makes America a good and hopeful country again, a country deserving of Michelle’s pride.

In a sense, this is not really a new idea. It is a standard leftist theme. Leftists hate non-leftist America. They are deeply patriotic toward leftist America. As long as a hated Republican is in the White house, Democrats feel divided from the country and unhappy and disappointed and not proud. But as soon as a Democrat is in the White House, they will feel happy and in harmony with America and therefore America will no longer feel divided—to them.

So, it’s not clear to me at the moment whether the theme is national unification around a vast nanny state, or national unification around the experience of having a nifty guy in the White House. Is the Obama movement sinister, or merely silly?

Certainly there is a lot of silliness in it, as can be seen from Stanley Crouch’s idiotic column in today’s New York Daily News:

Out of one, many rise to the challenge of believing again Monday, February 18th 2008, 4:00 AM

One of Michelle Obama’s favorite points is that for too long we have been manipulated by the fear that has been imposed on us about almost everything. “Be not afraid” is a watchword that rises through her speeches and seems to exit into the air from a hot spring of ideas and feeling bubbling beneath her hair.

That combination of ideas and feeling touches something more than a little important in the charred heart of the American populace because it is grounded in a far from naive optimism. It is the optimism that any scrapper has to have when entering a fight. That optimism is as old as the republic itself and is, again, providing a sensational skin graft that always must be performed when the heart of the country has been charred by the lies and corruption that fuel the latest version of an incapacitating cynicism we know quite well.

Opponents want to dismiss that optimism as “false hope” because they think—or pretend to think—that Barack Obama represents no more than a charismatic political slogan that has even less value than one of the worthless products brilliantly hawked around the clock throughout our media.

But Barack Obama is actually a bluesman from Chicago whose big stage is not in a nightclub or a concert hall but the huge national podium on which politics are argued. Obama knows that the blues always present the unvarnished problem and provide a solution through the rhythms and tones of engagement. It is, as the writer Albert Murray has observed, a music of confrontation, and it is presented in what amounts to a purification ritual.

Americans have longed for the purification ritual that they feel in Obama’s campaign because it faces what they feel is wrong with this country. An important part of this purification ritual is the presentation of an American history that is common to us all.

When Obama links the 13 Colonies fighting the Revolutionary War to the abolition movement against slavery, and that to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and that to women getting the vote and unions being able to represent workers, and that to defeating Hitler and European fascism during World War II, and that fight to the Civil Rights struggle in which black and white people, some young, some not, brought this country much closer to its democratic destiny, Americans feel both purified and closer to each other.

That is what no presidential candidate has been able to do in many, many years: make people FEEL that e pluribus unum is not only alive and well, but is the foundation of the strategy that will get us out of our messes.

Americans are beginning to believe in the country as a whole again. Americans have longed for this feeling throughout all of the sellouts to the Christian right, to the remaining reptilian rednecks of the bigoted South, to the big-money special interests and their lobbyists and to the general incompetence and lack of integrity that have left the greasy fingerprints of self-interest and the squalor of greed on our national policies.

That is why Obama has created a movement no one knew was possible and that our pundits still fail to understand because they reduce it to something neither he nor his followers are interested in: race.

Our nation has talked that talk for a long time, but now is the time to finally put up or shut up. Barack Obama will not shut up because he is in the business of acting as though e pluribus unum is the foundation upon which all necessary change must be built. His supporters agree with him.

We are all joined at the American heart and the superficial cacophony of its beat disguises a central pulse of irrepressible vitality. Barack Obama and his supporters have built a movement because they can hear the brightness of that heartbeat and intend to get everyone else to hear it as well.

crouch.stanley@gmail.com

- end of Crouch article; end of initial entry -

Paul K. writes:

I’m glad that link was useful, but I don’t think your initial reaction was off, regardless of whether it was supported by that particular clip. Michelle Obama often displays her resentful attitude. The New York Times had an admiring piece on her on Valentine’s Day, which included this:

Talking about how long it took her and Mr. Obama, 47, to pay off their student loans (they did so only in the last couple of years), she told a church audience in Cheraw, S.C., “I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund.” They cackled. She continued: “Then I heard Dick Cheney was supposed to be a relative! Thought we might be in for something here.”

What is that supposed to mean? Despite her own job which pays $212,000, along with the high income of her husband, she doesn’t feel sufficiently rewarded?

The Obamas are high achievers, and both of them have profited from affirmative action, yet she frequently suggests that the problems of blacks are due to society’s attempts to thwart their success rather than any inadequacies of their own:

She often describes her life to audiences in terms of beating the culture of low expectations that confronted “a little black girl” from the South Side.

“I wasn’t supposed to have my own successful career,” Mrs. Obama said in Atlanta. “They said my achievement must have been the result of racial preferences. And I am certainly not supposed to be standing here, maybe to become the next first lady of the United States.”

Asked about the role of first lady, Mrs. Obama said she saw it as a full-time job. But, she hastened to add, she reserved the right to change her mind if she gets there.”<<

Vanity Fair quoted this statement, which seems resentful toward her husband and men in general:

Mrs. Obama has a long history of speaking out about the ways in which men’s choices-particularly their professional ambitions-often leave their wives to pick up the slack, even when they have their own careers. “What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “And for women, me is fourth, and that’s not healthy.”

For all her shortcomings, at least Hillary has enough discretion to keep her personal issues to herself.

William W. writes:

I think you’re quite correct in much of what you say about Barack Obama. There is a great deal of silliness surrounding him. Each time I see his exuberant supporters holding up those “Change We Can Believe In” signs, I’m struck by two thoughts: 1. Much of the actual policies proposed by Mr. Obama are not directional changes at all. He doesn’t propose to alter the central collectivistic tendencies of modern Americans at all, but rather to accelerate it toward increasing influence of the collective upon the individual. This will initially take the form of “merely” increased taxation, increased governmental regulation of healthcare delivery, and some social justice “statements,” such as an immediate executive order removing homosexual behavior from the list of prohibited behaviors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I don’t know where it will all lead, or how bad it will get. 2. The very tenor of the words “Change We Can Believe In” carries a religious tone, and strikes a spiritual chord. I think that it is reflective of the atheistic foundation of much of leftist thought. They festoon their political positions with the same kind of verbiage that traditional Christians would reserve for transcendent topics, or for God Himself. Some years ago Charles Colson was speaking to a crowd and he said (paraphrased) this: “Where is the hope? Where is the peace? I meet so many who are demoralized by the decay that they see around them. The hope that we have is not in who governs us, or in what laws are passed, or in what great things that we do as a nation. That hope, that each one of us has, lies in the power of God working through the lives of people. In this lies our hope for our country, and in this lies our hope in life.”

And this brings me to my final point. I too am disheartened by much of what my countrymen have begun to accept in our public life. I’m often brought low when I see the absolute rejection of the Bible and of God, and see the wheels of politics spinning so wildly out of control as masses of people search for what they believe will bring some higher meaning into their lives. But this should not discourage us, because hope, if indeed it is transcendent, and reflective of the divine, glorious and unchanging character of God, cannot depend on what is happening around us. So let’s all stay involved, and try to come to grips with these vast intellectual challenges that the modern world is bringing us as traditionalists, as Christians. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that our victory, in the purest sense of the word, is assured, and our success lies not in effecting some permanent change to our civilization (how could we?), but rather in daily standing for what we know to be true, and in doing our best to be God’s hands to heal a hurting world.

LA replies:

What a fine statement. Thank you for that.

Jacob M. writes:

A year or so ago, replying to a comment of mine, you wrote that to the left, traditional America “doesn’t exist.” The phrase stuck in my head because at the time, I thought it was too harsh. Now, in Stanley Crouch’s column, I’m seeing what you meant.

It’s bizarre. According to Crouch, there are these people called “Americans” who see Obama’s campaign as combating what they feel is wrong with this country, who feel “purified” when Obama links the Revolutionary War to women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, who have lost their belief in America due to “sellouts to the Christian right, to the remaining reptilian rednecks of the bigoted South.” But what about people who are members of the Christian Right, or the, uh, reptilian rednecks? What about the substantial segment of the American populace whose heart has been charred, not by the lack of socialized medicine or of a sufficiently multicultural society, but by the threat that their children will grow up in a world every other couple on the block will be a pair of “married” homosexuals, courtesy of unelected judges? Apparently, we’re not Americans!

I’ve never seen this view articulated so clearly before. Only leftists “count;” everyone else is a non-person.

Jacob M. continues:

Thinking about this more, I find all this “purification” language quite ominous. Crouch (and many other Obama supporters) say that Obama is going to purify America. What is he going to purify it of? Traditional Americans. They are saying that Obama’s great achievement as President will be to eliminate us once and for all.

To continue with the Obama-as-Messiah theme, perhaps in the Bible used by Obama’s church, Malachi 3:2ff reads like this:

But who may abide the day of his election? And who shall stand when he is inaugurated? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap: And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of America, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the PRESIDENT an offering in tolerance. Then shall the offering of America and Washington be pleasant unto the PRESIDENT, as in the days of old, and as in the civil rights movement. And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the conservatives, and against the traditionalists, and against Evangelicals, and against those that oppress the non-whites, the women, and the homosexuals, and that turn aside the undocumented immigrant from his right, and fear not me, saith the PRESIDENT of hosts.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 18, 2008 07:04 PM | Send