I like Michelle Obama

I was just sorting through my mail and the half a dozen appeals from the Democrats and Obama's campaigns that my small donations have prompted. (I may sound cranky about this, but it's only thanks to the business of sorting, not the business of soliciting. I'm glad that my party is going to the mattresses over this election and hope we will be doing so until the 11th hour! Into the 12th hour even.)

I read the Michelle Obama letter, and I will here shamefacedly admit that I did not watch the speeches during the Democratic National Convention this year. So I was not aware until reading this letter (or potentially had forgotten) that her father had Multiple Sclerosis. This letter talks about Election Day and canvassing:

"When I was a kid, my dad volunteered as a precinct captain for the Democratic Party in our neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Some of my earliest memories are of tagging along as he went door to door during the campaign season. He registered people to vote. if our neighbors needed absentee ballows, he arranged it. He helped them figure out how they'd get to the voting booth on Election Day. It wasn't always easy. Dad was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in his early thirties. But even as it got harder for him to walk, he never let up because he believed in the value of each person's voice in the political process. In you, I see the same commitment and determination that my father showed me on those fall afternoons on the South Side of Chicago."

I'm a soft touch and was very affected by that personal appeal even though
A) I'm part of the base for them; they've appealed to me long ago
B) I'm so frustrated by the insistence in contemporary American politics on sentimentalism and "personal" anecdotes. (See Joan Didion's scathing article "Election by Sound Bite" and her discussion of the misleading and reductive emphasis on candidates' "stories.") It's all politics, deliberately presented as theatre, and the need for pseudo emotional transparency bugs me.

That being said, emotional appeals can be tremendously effective. Which is why they are so central in this election year--appealing to base emotions or to noble ones.

And my empathy for Michelle Obama reminded me of my admiration for her, especially in this cool, calm, and collected interview on the Daily Show. I improvise in the classroom all the time, attempting to make jokes, sometimes blurting things I regret (or at least doubt the wisdom of) later. I would definitely not have been able to sit there with Jon Stewart and resist the desire to try to seem funny, no matter how flat my punchlines might fall. (McCain fails to resist this impulse all the time, much to his detriment.) After the shitstorm she faced about her truthful and even moving words that this is the first time she's been proud of her country, Michelle Obama has learned even further restraint and verbal judiciousness the hard way. But this has not diminished her eloquence, poise, and erudition.

That is one thing I am so proud of in the Obama campaign: that all the accusations of professorial rhetoric (perish the thought!) and "eloquence" as a crime (McCain's sneers throughout Tuesday's debate) have fallen at the feet of Barack and Michelle's determination to run this campaign with dignity, intelligence, and complex thought.

Anyway, this whole post is just to praise Michelle Obama and also to link to this New York Times profile of her from back in June.