Why Michelle may be best president America never had
WHEN Michelle Obama took the microphone on the campaign trail to declare “When they go low, we go high” she lit up the 2016 US presidential race.
It’s just a shame she wasn’t running in it.
But her barnstorming speech showed positivity was the only way to fight Donald Trump’s race to the bottom, groping every female and blowing every dog whistle he could find on his way.
She ended up more popular than Hillary Clinton, the candidate she was backing.
Yet her new memoir indicates Michelle may never try to win the White House for herself.
“I’ve never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last 10 years has done little to change that,” she said. “I continue to be put off by the nastiness.” Which is a shame, because the nastiness infecting politics could well be put off by her.
The world has missed more than just a president who won’t have to repeatedly buy off Playboy bunnies.
In the book, Michelle revealed a
miscarriage, her IVF battles to have daughters Sasha and Malia, and how her “body buzzed with fury” at Trump’s pussy-grabbing tape. She said she’d “never forgive” his insane assertions that husband Barack was born in Kenya, putting their children’s lives in danger from terrorists certain he was a secret Muslim.
And like every modern woman, she struggled with her marriage, particularly the fact that “‘wife’ can feel like a loaded word”.
She wrote: “If you grew up in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms... They stayed at home, fussed over the children, and had dinner ready on the stove.”
Instead she grew up idolising TV stars like Mary Tyler Moore, whose character “had a job, a really snappy wardrobe, and great hair”.
After marriage, she had to get her head around the fact that being a wife was more than just being an attractive servant – it’s about building a partnership, something most couples don’t realise until they need one.
When she writes all that, she’s not just selling a book - she’s using her platform to elevate the rest of us alongside her. The current Oval Office incumbent is no more capable of that than he is of standing at a war memorial in the rain.
Anger at Trump is all well and good, but it only elevates his appeal as an outsider. To defeat an old man’s hate, you need hope. It’s Michelle’s thoughtfulness and positivity - her drive to make the job of First Lady meaningful rather than decorative, her marriage a union rather than a deal - which makes her perhaps the best president America never had.
She will never forgive Trump for asserting Barack was born in Kenya