Michelle Obama Is The Most Powerful Person In Politics Who Hates Politics
“If you make me miss Michelle, that’s grounds for breaking up,” a young woman said into her phone Wednesday night in Brooklyn. She was crossing the street to get to the Barclays Center, where former first lady Michelle Obama was speaking. While most authors struggle to corral their mother’s friends into a bookstore, Obama is a month into a six-month-long worldwide stadium book tour. The events are political rallies masquerading as pop culture phenomena. The talk brought out vendors selling bootlegged T-shirts with her face on them and “Black Is Beautiful” pins. Women, many of them dressed to the nines, some still in workwear, streamed into the stadium.
To these attendees, Obama’s life story and public image have merited all that enthusiasm, and they aren’t alone in thinking so. Her memoir, “Becoming,” is massively successful, having already sold 3 million copies. It has also provided Obama with a vehicle for her Trump-era cause: appealing to the better angels of the Democratic base. The book itself, meanwhile, digs into her life pre-politics with surprising candor and introspection.
“When they go low, we go high,” Obama said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office. It’s a speech and phrase that have been invoked many times by Democrats during the Trump presidency, sometimes to refute the premise of the quote. Earlier this year, Eric Holder, who served as her husband’s first attorney general, memorably said, “When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.” Hillary Clinton said of Republicans, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”
Michelle Obama is not beyond a Trump dig, of course. (“Bye, Felicia” is what she says she was thinking when she was waving goodbye at the end of President Trump’s inauguration day.) But the former first lady wants things to be more civil from the Democratic side. “We call it empathy — being able to step into someone else’s shoes,” Obama told the Brooklyn crowd, urging them to keep an open mind in the current political climate.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/michelle-obama-is-the-most-powerful-person-in-politics-who-hates-politics/
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