In her speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Michelle Obama talked of “the luxury of whining … cheating others … chang[ing] the rules so we always get ahead.”
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her peculiar veep pick, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), want voters to see the convention as a festival of openheartedness, the apotheosis of “joy” and national unity. But it was anything but that.
Michelle Obama referred to “the contagious power of hope” and strongly implied that she and her husband, former President Barack Obama, were restoring this “wonderful, magical” quality to our national politics. But both Obamas — he with much more skill than she — itch to suggest that they and their ilk are superior to others, and to scratch that itch they frequently stoop to expressions of contempt.
When Michelle Obama referred to “whining … cheating … and changing the rules,” she was not talking about the Democrats’ policy of student loan forgiveness, but she might as well have been. Harris and her ostensible boss, President Joe Biden, with enthusiastic support from a party that boasts of standing up for the little guy, gifted hundreds of billions of dollars to a favored class of people who borrowed the money and dumped responsibility for these debts on those who didn’t even go to college.
The unidentified targets of Michelle Obama’s sneering were those whom she claimed enjoy “the affirmative action of generational wealth.” That’s a fancy way of talking about the supposed rich. Her flight of rhetoric was therefore nothing more than bog-standard class demagoguery. The people she wanted her audience and voters to disdain were those who do nothing more heinous than save and pass on the fruits of their labor to their children.
Using the pronoun “we” to put herself among ordinary people, Michelle Obama rhapsodized about conscientious effort, saying, “If we see a mountain in front of us, we do not expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We go to work.”
But isn’t affirmative action, which she and every other Democrat fight to preserve, an escalator to the top? Giving special treatment to people not for what they achieve but for who they are — for their race, their class, or their gender — is all about whisking favored people to summits attainable only by hard work if you are not a member of a privileged caste.
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The Democrats told themselves heartwarming stories of their own virtues and lack of pretense. But the rhetoric from the podium was a torrent of deception about “the same old con,” “racist lies,” “banning our books,” “demonizing children,” and other invented horrors attributed to their political opponents.
The convention has not been about unity but has been gleefully divisive, a trait that is epitomized by the Obamas despite their gleaming patina of good-natured sophistication. They talk, as Michelle Obama did explicitly, of their desire to “vanquish the demons of fear, division, and hate,” but they bring those demons out to play with almost every word they utter.