She doesn’t know the words, and she won’t learn the music

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I thought that Michelle Obama had become less prominent on the campaign trail, but on Friday she spoke at a rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana. C-SPAN broadcst the speech last night. It seemed to go on forever, but the seeming length was proportional to the pain inflicted by listening to it.

By contrast with Barack Obama, Michelle Obama doesn’t know the words and won’t learn the music of American politics. She therefore does not wear well. While she preaches the gospel according to Barack, she wears resentment and bitterness on her sleeve. In her Fort Wayne speech she expanded on the condescending political sociology that Barack Obama preached at his closed-door fundraiser with the San Francisco Democrats.

Given the modesty of her and her husband’s family backgrounds, Mrs. Obama denied that she or her husband could be elitists. Yet her political sociology is the mother’s milk of those such as the San Francisco Democrats to whom Barack Obama preached. Apparently Mrs. Obama believes that only those born to wealth are capable of looking down their noses at their fellow citizens. In her case the proposition is self-refuting.

Barack wasn’t born with “silver spoons” in his mouth, she said. And nobody knows the trouble they’ve seen. The burden of paying for her undergraduate education at Princeton and her law school education at Harvard remains a motif of her stump speech. No one is granted a chance to ask her if she thought about attending the University of Illinois, or if she’s grateful for any of the financial assistance that facilitated her and her husband’s attendance at the finest institutions of higher learning in the United States.

Mrs. Obama omitted her admonition to the Los Angeles disciples of Barack from her current iteration of the gospel she preached in Indiana:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

As long as Senator Obama won’t require us to listen to the missus, I might be willing to settle for the compulsory mental readjustments.

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