That is what all potential first ladies can do for their husbands. They personalize and give that peek behind the curtain to their intimate relationship.
I never saw why the fact that a wife loves her husband should be considered in the calculus of whether or not to vote for the guy. If Nancy Reagan gave a speech about what a good man she believed her husband to me and what a fine leader he'd make, would that have convinced anyone to support him who wasn't already supporting him?
But she may have done what she needed to raise her own favorability ratings. Since people started hearing some of the things she'd said in earlier speeches, her favorability ratings had ticked down.
The question becomes whether or not people buy her version of her understanding of the American dream as portrayed last night or whether they doubt her sincerity in light of other things she's said. Byron York contrasts her theme last night with what she has said in previous speeches.
In Denver, Mrs. Obama said, “My piece of the American Dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me.” Those forebears, she explained, were “driven by the same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself for work — the same conviction that drives the men and women I’ve met all across this country…That’s why I love this country.”Her version last night was of a place where, if you worked hard, you could take care of your family and raise a good family. It's a place where she and her husband are working hard to achieve that dream. However, previously, she had focused on how hard it was for people to get ahead no matter how hard they tried.
In Charlotte, Mrs. Obama said, “We’re still living in a time and in a nation where the bar is set, right?…You start working hard and sacrificing and you think you’re getting close to that bar, you’re working and you’re struggling, and then what happens? They raise the bar…keep it just out of reach.”
Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”I guess she could bridge the gap between these two versions of America by saying that it used to be possible to achieve your dreams in America, but no longer in Bush's America. But then she is in the position of arguing that it was more possible for a black man of her father's generation in 1960s to work hard and support his family than today. And that story just doesn't fly. Her only hope is that people forget about what she previously had said about her vision of America and instead focus on her more uplifting message from last night.
From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”
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