FOR more than a year now, the US political world has expended trillions of person-hours of effort and ploughed billions of words of analysis into assessing whether the United States is ready to elect a black man as president. Countless further words will be written on this same subject before Nov. 4 — and beyond, whether Barack Obama wins or loses. Yet Michelle Obama only had to step up to the speaker’s rostrum in Denver to make it clear, before she even opened her mouth, that there is, and was always going to be, a second question in play in this election, nearly but not quite as important as the first: Is America ready to elect a black first lady too?
This isn’t a trivial question. To all but a small audience of political specialists, Michelle Obama is also a total unknown as a person. So she had two tasks to perform in this speech: first to breakdown all the racial stereotypes that still cling to a post like that of first lady and, second, to introduce herself to the electorate in her own right. Any fair judge must surely say that she did the second with fantastic assurance and allure. I also think she cracked it pretty brilliantly with the first question, but it would be naïve not to accept that this will not be easy. To many foreigners, the extent to which the American election process focuses on the candidate’s partner is somehow suspect, proof perhaps of the whole system’s lack of seriousness, in some contexts another snobbish hook on which anti-Americans can hang their coats. Even to many Americans themselves, the idea that the candidate’s wife has to take a public audition along with her husband certainly is peculiar too. But the presidential audition is nowadays irredeemably a family affair. The wife, the kids, the brothers and sisters, the parents — they all have a role. One can wish it otherwise — but wishing it different won’t make it so.
And by these criteria, Michelle Obama did a hugely skilful job. She had to persuade the doubters that she wasn’t, as the stereotype has it, another angry black woman. But she did this in a highly principled way, stressing that the struggles of the past were coming to fruition in the Obama candidacy — the pride was unmissable and rightly so — but presenting them in the hegemonic rhetoric of the American dream. That’s where the current of history meets the new tide of hope, is how she put it, in fluent Obamese, before adding the key line that “That is why I love this country.” That brought the house to its feet. At that moment one knew she had done as well as she possibly could have hoped. It was mission accomplished. Job done — for now.
