Only Michelle Obama could give that speech
It’s hard to believe, especially after watching her deliver the most powerful speech of this campaign season on Thursday, that there was once a time when Michelle Obama was considered a potential political liability.
When her husband first ran for president, she was seen as perhaps a little too real, a little too feisty. She was caricatured as an angry black woman for saying that she was proud of her country for the first time in her adulthood. The New Yorker printed a cover that featured her in an Afro, with an AK-47 slung on her back, fist-bumping Barack in the Oval Office.
So she pulled back. When the Obama family moved into the White House, she was very clear about the fact that her role would be “Mom in Chief,” as she put it. Sasha and Malia were both still quite young at the time, so her focus on parenting was understandable. But it was also a way of heading off the criticism that had engulfed Hillary Clinton when she sought to turn the role of first lady into more of a substantive policy position. With her close friend Valerie Jarrett installed as a senior adviser to the president, Obama was also able to delegate the unofficial and sometimes contentious first-spouse job of fiercely protecting the president’s image.
Michelle Obama’s choices dismayed many on the left, who worried she was muzzling her ferocious intellect and ability to appease conservative critics. When she did select issues for her own personal portfolio, they were deceptively anodyne — supporting girls, promoting healthy eating and exercise, helping military families. (And even then, political opponents often managed to find fault, accusing Obama of trying to create a nanny state that dictated personal choices.)
But if her progressive allies worried that she would fade into the woodwork, she did the opposite. When we remember her eight years in the White House, we may recall her three Democratic convention speeches, each powerful for a different reason. But we’ll also picture her dancing on “The Tonight Show,” belting out Beyoncé with James Corden, rapping her way through music videos, and showing up in cameos on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. She and her staff brilliantly used pop culture and social media to turn the first lady into a pop star.
At the same time, she became America’s actual Mom in Chief and an invaluable asset for her husband’s presidency. Seemingly everyone in the world wanted a Michelle Obama hug — from London schoolgirls to the entire U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team. Melissa Harris-Perry wrote an essay in early 2009 arguing that Obama’s focus on home and family was actually a radical role that could subvert stereotypes about African-American women.
That essay now looks remarkably prescient. One Vine video and Hula-Hoop at a time, she has built up eight years of goodwill, even striking up a bipartisan friendship with former President George W. Bush. It was that goodwill that allowed her to give that speech Thursday, unprecedented in American politics. She has been an effective surrogate for Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail — effortlessly throwing shade at Donald Trump, usually without even mentioning his name. But this was different.
Obama’s speech in New Hampshire was raw and personal, her voice shaking throughout as she recounted, almost in disbelief, the comments of Trump and his defenders over the past week. “The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman,” she said. “It is cruel.”
For most of the time she spoke, the crowd was silent, rapt. That’s an unfamiliar scene on the campaign trail, but it matched the seriousness of Michelle Obama’s subject. What became clear only in hindsight was that she was talking about women in a way we may have never heard before, not from a national figure. Her speech wasn’t about public policies that affect women or equality, certainly not the condescending pabulum about “honoring our mothers and daughters” on which most politicians rely.
Instead she evoked the experience of being a woman, the terror “that too many women have felt when someone has grabbed them or forced himself on them and they’ve said ‘no’ but he didn’t listen.” She spoke about how the blithe dismissal of abusive speech and sexually predatory acts might affect our daughters and our sons, and she called the “it’s just locker-room talk” excuse an “insult to decent men everywhere.”
She was Grizzly Mama in Chief, furious on our behalf. “I know it’s a campaign, but this isn’t about politics. It’s about basic human decency,” she said. “It’s about right and wrong. We simply cannot endure this, or expose our children to this any longer — not for another minute, and let alone for four years. …. This has got to stop right now.”
If Trump wasn’t shamed by that point, she landed her final blow, as only a mom can. “Even a 6-year-old knows better,” she told the crowd. “A 6-year-old knows that this is not how adults behave. This is not how decent human beings behave. And this is certainly not how someone who wants to be president of the United States behaves.”
It was a speech Hillary Clinton could not have given, just as it’s been difficult for Barack Obama to speak too freely or pointedly on race during his presidency. In the maddening calculation our society seems to make, trailblazers are supposed to be silent, grateful recipients of historical recognition. Any suggestion that their ascension is anything other than proof of a newly equitable reality is unacceptable.
They were also words that Michelle Obama was uniquely qualified to deliver. If the speech was unprecedented, so is the disrespect and abuse she has endured as first lady about her body, often from men who are, shall we say, festively plump themselves. Right-wing outlets have circulated cartoons of her drawn as a monkey or as a man. They have mocked her healthy, fit form — a sitting congressman once felt free to tell constituents she has “a big butt.” On Fox News, a discussion about her might turn into an argument about whether she needs to lose weight.
Rush Limbaugh — Rush Limbaugh! — has criticized her, saying: “I’m trying to say that our first lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date every six months or what have you.”
Michelle Obama is one of the most powerful speakers of this era because she is human. She has opened up the White House to be the people’s house, and it may never be the same. But with that bracing humanity comes vulnerability. It means hearing the hateful things said about her and her family, and being hurt. It means worrying that her daughters’ celebrity and unique status won’t protect them if a partner or powerful man wants to prey on them.
Even if you’ve already watched her speech, take another look at the video. Don’t fast-forward, but watch Obama before she prepares to speak. She stands back from the microphone for a few moments, rolls up her sleeves, and quickly exhales to steady herself. She knows what she’s about to do. It’s not easy being the Mom in Chief.
This is a column in an ongoing series looking at the role of gender in the 2016 presidential election.
