I don't know. I have mixed feelings about this. I like Michelle Obama. I have a great deal of sympathy for where she seems to be coming from in her life. ie how her experiences have formed her. I think it a great pity that the letter I saw somewhere from the mother of Michelle's room mate at Princeton where that mother said she thought of asking to have her daughter's room changed because she didn't want her sharing with a black girl hasn't had widespread publicity.

But on the other hand, she's the wife of someone who wants to be President. She's had lousy judgment. Apparently his campaign has always been on tenterhooks worrying about what she might come out with next.

She should have known what sort of image she needed to portray to the world and she really should have thought that through & should have known that this `first time I'm proud of my country` was not part of it. She should have known that calling America a `mean` country would be fine coming from an activist with no major public office aspirations, but was sheer lunacy coming from the wife of a Democratic nominee.

For example, the `mean` country might go down very well with people who have suffered through lack of health insurance, but it most certainly wouldn't play well to the very white people that Obama was trying to appeal to when he said in his big race speech that he understood how many folk felt about about affirmative action; contrast Obama's words with Michelle's `mean` comment:
Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time."

I think the attacks are legitimate given that she's been out on the campaign trail - (just as I think it was pathetic that the Clintons thought it ok to use Chelsea as a campaigner and then deny access to the press.)

If you don't want your wife to be attacked then you need to have someone train her in how to campaign or not use her on the trail.

It's a great pity that the ways in which apparently she has been very powerful on the trail and won people over haven't had the same portrayal on cable and the networks, but them's the breaks.

But you can't have someone campaigning and then claim they should have some privileged immunity to appraisal and critique.

(BTW I was so struck by the difference between Cindy McCain and Laura Bush. Mrs McCain coming in instantly to try to capitalise on Michelle's corker, whereas Laura Bush was so damned classy, defending Michelle.)

I have to respectfully disagree with part (but certainly not all) of your comment, Fran.

I think Michelle has taken her lumps and explained when necessary for statements she's made. The kind of 'slime' that Dowd and Sen. Durbin were referencing goes way beyond critiquing or disagreeing with things she's actually said.

And some of us don't find serious fault with what she said, even those things that the 'gotcha' opponents and press decided to jump on.

I'm a great deal older than Michelle and watching the events this year, the interviews with people, of all sorts and ages, in Iowa and NH, I thought so many times that this was something that has been missing in our national story for decades -- really, since 1968, when hope was chopped off so brutally. "It" being the sense that there was another player on the field - the people. Everyday, ordinary people standing together and saying we want things to be different and better, and we're going to go to work to make it happen even if the powers-that-be don't want these changes. Desegregation, civil rights, available birth control, right to choice, the end of the war. Certainly some brave individuals took the lead but the *push* was from ordinary people who said, in effect, 'it's our country, we get a voice in what it does.' Ordinary people (like the very young MLK was when he helped organize the bus boycot) stood up and actually shaped - changed - the way things turned out. Michelle Obama was 4 years old in 1968. She, in fact, hasn't ever seen it in her adult life.

And that's what she said: “People in this country are ready for change and hungry for a different kind of politics .... for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback ... not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.”

Yes, it would have been better if she put "really" in front of proud, but this is not an outlandish, unpatriotic statement. It's someone who IS feeling, for the first time, the thing that from the very beginning has made America so unique. Every few decades, at least, we remember that we were formed and that we're goverened from the bottom up, not the top down.

Look, the "gotcha" people are going to make hash of something any candidate or spouse says, no matter what she says. What they did to Betty Ford when she said she wouldn't essentially "disown" her daughter if she found out she was pregnant was pitiful. I'm pleased Michelle is trying to say *something* not just empty, scripted platitudes.

I can't find the full context of the "mean" statement, but this is part of it "“We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day. Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime." How does that not resonate with the people you are talking about, the "working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race" -- or anything else, I'd add?

Of course if someone comes running down the hill saying "Michelle Obama says she's never been proud of Ameria and thinks it's a mean country" a lot of folks are going to be taken aback and turned off. But the moral here isn't that Michelle doesn't know how to campaign -- it's that anyone can be Swiftboated. It's up to the voters whether they are going to fall for it ..... again.

Right.

It all seems moot right now - I've just come from Huffington where I saw the ad a GOP 527 has published attacking Obama's religion - suggesting he's a muslim Manchurian candidate...

It's execrable.

They're also showing a screen from Fox where apparently they had Michelle Malkin on this morning defending attacks against Michelle Obama, and on the bottom of the screen they had
``Obama's Baby Mama`

as the caption at the bottom of the screen.

I imagine Murdoch's about to intervene in that station.

The real issue is that MSM and the right use the "fear" of a strong professional black woman as code to mask racist opinions about Black women. I find it so interesting that Michelle is often judged unfairly by women (both Black and white)? the power of a self made black woman is something America is not comfortable or used to seeing. Typically them image of a friendly non opinionated type (Oprah, Condie Rice, etc.) is judged differently than one who speaks and connects with passion. What the right and MSM are playing up on the fears that passion means anger. I really believe that if another candidates wife had said the same thing, I doubt that it would have gotten this much attention. Something to think about...