No first lady since Jackie Kennedy captured Americans’ attention more than Michelle Obama, and no first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt so embraced her own role as a political figure.
Obama, a prominent executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center before moving to the White House, has now addressed four consecutive Democratic national conventions, where she grounded her husband’s campaign in American aspirationalism and where she sounded sober warnings about the darker corners of political fear.
In 2008, she said her daughters would tell their own children “how this time, in this great country — where a girl from the South Side of Chicago can go to college and law school, and the son of a single mother from Hawaii can go all the way to the White House — we committed ourselves to building the world as it should be.”
“I have seen firsthand that being president doesn’t change who you are — it reveals who you are,” she said in 2012.
“Our motto is, when they go low, we go high,” she said in 2016.
In 2020, she leveled perhaps the most direct criticism of a president that any first lady has ever delivered: “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”
Some speakers at the coronavirus-shortened convention struggled to land an appropriate tone in the absence of a cheering crowd. Obama used the moment to her fullest advantage.
— Brett Samuels
photo: Greg Nash