Pulling Punches

Mincing Up Michelle
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 11, 2008

The mean people in the punditry class are attacking a powerful outspoken female figure and Maureen Dowd is rushing to her defense. Not Hillary, silly. Michelle.

It’s good news for Obama that Hillary’s out of the race. But it’s also bad news. Now Republicans can turn their full attention to demonizing Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of “Kill the witch.”

The fire and brimstone images are in direct contrast to the Saint Barack language she usually uses. Dowd is defending the distaff Obama, but when Dowd comes to your rescue, she brings gasoline to the bucket brigade. She provides a link to an anti-Obama site.

There are creepy Web sites, like TheObamaFile.com, dedicated to painting Michelle as a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman, the disgruntled, lecturing “Mrs. Grievance” depicted on the cover of National Review.

On that site and others around the Internet, the seamy rumors still slither that there’s a tape of Michelle denouncing “whitey,” a rumor that Barack Obama disdained last week as “scurrilous.”

"Still slither is as close to a decent Alliteration Alert® as we are going to get today. That mythical tape (and if it does exist, it is now stored next to Dubya’s Air National Guard records and the Ark of the Covenant) is described on that site as such:

For about 30 minutes, Michelle Obama launched into a rant about the evils of America, and how America is to blame for the problems of Africa. Michelle personally blamed President Clinton for the deaths of millions of Africans and said America is responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis and other ethnic groups. She then launched into an attack on "whitey", and talked about solutions to black on black crime in the realm of diverting those actions onto white America.

I’m sure the anti-Obama wingnuts are thanking Michelle for the link. Dowd continues to map out the whisper strategy they will use on Michelle:

In their narrative of how Hillary lost in The Times on Sunday, Jim Rutenberg and Peter Baker said that Mark Penn argued that Hillary should subtly stress Obama’s “lack of American roots.”

That’s a good preview of how Republicans will attack Michelle, suggesting that she does not share American values, mining a subtext of race.

But Michelle is as all-American as Oprah. A success story that mirrors other successful politicians and their wives. We have had Ivy League educated power couples before. Some even were radical protesters in their campus days, but Maureen gets in a little dig:

She’s a devoted daughter, wife and mother who has lived the American dream, from the humble South Side of Chicago to Harvard Law School. Hey, isn’t it totally unAmerican to complain that being a black woman in the ’80s at a class-conscious, white-bread college, Princeton, was somewhat uncomfortable?

Maureen also brings up a Faux News incident:

E.D. Hill, the Fox anchor who said that the celebrated fist pump between Michelle and her husband the night he snagged the nomination could be called a “terrorist fist jab,” apologized Tuesday.

To prove that she is still hep to the various non-traditional handshakes of today’s youngsters, she slips in some lingo to burnish her bonafides.

The dap or pound, as it’s also called, was a natural and beguiling moment…

From the Wikipedia article on dap greetings (and who could doubt Wiki's credentials), there is this tidbit:

Daps are also used by underground terror cells as greetings or calls to action.

Hmm… Maybe that Hill fellow gal has a point. Or perhaps he she just has a Wikipedia editing account.

With Hillary out of the way, expect a lot more anti-feminist ire aimed at the urbane but often off-message Michelle. And be sure that Maureen will be there to discern what it means. Right now Dowd is pulling her punches as the Obamas enjoy their post-primary honeymoon, but the time will come when the gloves come off.