Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama

This has me gobsmacked. Remember how Bush and McCain were having trouble getting more donors than protesters to show up at their recent Arizona shindigs? Michelle Obama didn't have that problem:

While the staffs of the president and of Arizona's sitting senator scrambled to find smaller gathering spaces, Michelle Obama, stumping in Phoenix, McCain's hometown, filled a large banquet room just around the corner from where the Republicans originally planned their event-- many of the Obama donors driving through the Bush-McCain protests on their way to hear the Democratic candidate's wife speak.

This just amazes me. The wife of the Democratic front-runner outdraws, handily, both the Republican front-runner himself and the guy he wants to replace in the White House -- and does so on the Republican front-runner's home turf.

So who all came to see Michelle Obama?

In Phoenix, Michelle Obama drew a crowd unusually diverse for a high-dollar downtown political fundraiser; there were people of every race, class, age, gender, and ethnicity. The fact that there were more women than men was no surprise. Michelle Obama is well liked and admired by women. Voters unsure of Barack, often have a fondness for her. When I told a long-time Republican friend that I would be attending a fundraiser headlined by Michelle Obama, she said, "Tell her my vote for Barack in November is really for her."

Wow. You'd never know this from most MSM coverage of Michelle Obama; the last time I remember seeing her getting major coverage in the news, it was because of something truthful she said that the RNC told their press minions to promote as a gaffe. Yet in reality, she's remarkably gaffe-free; in spite of Rahm Emanuel's fears about Democrats going on The Colbert Report, she shows that someone with at least a decent complement of brains can easily chat with the feared exponent of truthiness and come away smelling like a rose.

There was a grim moment at the event. The rally, which had been very much a high-energy one, was nearly stopped in its tracks when an anxious member of the audience, trying and failing to hold back sobs, asked Michelle about the possibility of harm coming to her husband, a possibility that was brought to center stage again last week with the RFK hoo-ha:

She paused, allowing the clearly distraught supporter to pull herself together. Maybe it was 30 seconds before Obama spoke, stretched out into imaginary minutes. Finally, she said firmly, "I'm ok. Really. I am ok. And if I'm ok, you should be ok.

"You know, we talked about this as a family."

She held the microphone with one hand, the other curved inward over her heart as she talked. Her tenor and body language was clear. Michelle Obama was talking as a mother. She was introspective and intimate, looking the questioner in the eyes as if they are the only two in the room.

"We talked about this as a family."

The room remained still and quiet. Imagine having that talk with your children. Then, she paused, gathering herself, pulling herself up, seeming to grow even taller, Michelle, the campaigning wife returns. She says,

"I've talked about this before. Barack is probably safer now than he was before. Kids are dying in the street in our community. They get shot walking to class, sitting in school, taking the bus home. They are dying in the street.... Send us good vibes. Pray for us. Think positive thoughts. But most of all, be vigilant. Be vigilant about stopping this kind of talk.
It's not funny. You don't have to like Barack to dislike that kind of talk. Be vigilant about stopping that kind of talk."

Then she reminded the crowd what we are fighting for, and why it is important to forge ahead without fear. "Fear is the reason this country is where it is today. Fear is a useless emotion. Don't ever make decisions based on fear. Make decisions based on hope and possibility. Make decisions based on what should happen, not what shouldn't. Don't ever make decisions based on fear."

The whole Republican/conservative power structure is built on manipulating our fears -- fears of brown people, fears of Jewish people, fears of gays, fears of women, fears of anyone who doesn't fit the narrow template the Republicans call 'normal' -- so that we don't notice when they take more money from our pockets and give it to their rich buddies, or strip away more of the rights that are our birthright in the Constitution or even the Magna Carta.

It's been that way for a long time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And he said it for the same reasons Michelle Obama said what she said in Phoenix the other day.

The Republicans know that they're losing. That's why they're amping up the fear factor. But the tens of thousands who throng to hear the Obamas speak, and the tens of millions of new voters registered in the past year, are rejecting fear as a useless emotion. Michelle Obama wouldn't be outdrawing the McCain-Bush tag team if that wasn't the case.