The next first lady
I was fortunate enough to attend a rally with Michelle Obama at Haverford College on Tuesday. She’s practically my new favorite person.
As eloquent as Barack is, she too is a very good speaker, though in a different way. She seemed really down-to-earth, sometimes even lapsing into an accent (what does the South Side of Chicago sound like?). She had very good control over the crowd, talking through our clapping to get us to be quiet so that she could move on with her speech.
She opened with a very funny summary of the campaign so far, catching up those of us who didn’t know by saying that she’s “married to this guy who’s running for president.” She went through all of the things that people said were really important—fundraising, the Iowa caucus, New Hampshire, Super Tuesday—until Barack was successful at them, after which they were devalued. One of her recurring images was the bar of American standards that everyone’s trying to reach that keeps moving once they think that they get to it.
She moved on to the more serious matter of education, (appropriately) sentimentally bringing in her hopes for her two daughters. She told of her and her brother’s education in the local public schools in the South Side of Chicago and how they both went to Princeton. She said that she tells this story because she wants everyone who “see[s her] to know what an investment in public education looks like.” Everybody clapped. She lamented that the dream jobs that people want to go into don’t even earn enough money to pay for the college degree required to go into those jobs. The focus on college tuition had to be because she was speaking at a college, and she went on to say that she and Barack had just recently finished paying off their college loans and asked, “When’s the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who hasn’t paid off his [college] loans yet?” (She’s really very funny.)
She talked about the experience that Barack has from having traveled to so many countries while he was growing up (including a funny bit about his childhood, being raised by a teenaged, white, single mom in Kansas in the 1960s, saying that his mother was definitely a dreamer—another part of her speech was that American kids should be able to have the biggest dreams imaginable without being told “no”) and his seven-way race for state senate which he won.
Like much of Obama’s campaign, her speech was mainly pro-Obama (as opposed to anti-Clinton*), and ended in a positive direction. She asked us to “imagine a president of the United States of America who understands and respects other cultures” and, in talking about her and Barack’s upbringings, said, “We learned things like truth and honesty actually matter.” Her final note was that America is not where it needs to be yet, but that Obama would be a great step in pushing it in the right direction.
Throughout the speech, she kept asking “Am I telling you something that you don’t know?” and suggesting “Maybe I’m out of touch” when talking about working class people. I hadn’t quite gotten the effectiveness of this rhetoric until I realized its connection with the Obama elitism complaint, but it always got applause from the audience. The biggest round of applause and cheering, besides for when she entered and left, came when she called out to us as Pennsylvanians.
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Barack Obama is having an open rally downtown tomorrow night, and I’ll be damned if I don’t try to get in and see him. I’ll certainly post if I do.
On Radio Times this morning, the guest speaker said the cliché that this is an election of firsts—the first African American leading candidate, the first female leading candidate,… and the first time someone as old as John McCain is running. So, not just Colbert, but more serious news programs as well can’t find anything unique about McCain besides his age? Ha!
*Are the lawn signs everywhere “Hillary,” or is that just in Pennsylvania? Can the Democrats really endorse a candidate whose last name they’re afraid to put on their advertising because of its Republican-unification nature?