Obama's Wife

In a recent speech Mrs. Obama said that for the first time in her adult life she is proud of her country because her husband was winning. She later repeated it and then tried to explain that of course she loved her country.

Columnist Peggy Noonan asks, "Are the Obama's snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone in their Ivy League universities school them in why they should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? Are they in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?"

Noonan asks,"Why is this actually not a distraction but a real issue. Because Americans have common sense (most of them) and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests who will be? If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will? So many Americans fear that they are losing their country and the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach our our young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax and federal tax the are paying a lot of money to lose the place they love.

And if you feel like you are losing the place you love, you really don't want a couple in the White House whose rope of the affectation to this country seems to be lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Obama at the moment, so America is good.

It appears hard for young African-Americans of Mrs. Obama's generation, having been drilled in America's sad racial history, having been told about it every day of their lives, to fully apprehend the struggles of others. Does she know that people look at her and think, "Man, she's got everything, intelligent, strong tall and beautiful, Princeton, Harvard, black at a time when America was trying to make up for it's sins and be helpful, and from a working class family with two functioning parents who made sure she got to school?

That's the great divide in modern America, whether or not you had a functioning family as she apparently came from the privileged part of that divide. A lot of white working class Americans didn't come up with those things. Some of them were raised by a TV and a microwave and love our country, every day.

Does Mrs. Obama know this? I don't know. If she does, love and show gratitude for the place that tries to give everyone an equal shot would seem in order."

To all who have bought into the charisma of this couple; Democrats, Independents and Republicans, please listen carefully to what they are saying. People want change and so do I but we better be carefully studying whether this is the change we are looking for.