By Joe Saunders August 21, 2024 at 7:37am
If her speech to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night proved anything, it’s that Michelle Obama is still going low.
The former first lady put the politics of racial division front and center in her address to the Democratic delegates at Chicago’s United Center and her attacks on former President Donald Trump.
And she even suggested in a sly twist on a Trump quote that the American presidency these days is a “black job.”
Check it out here:
Michelle Obama: Who is going to tell him the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs? pic.twitter.com/wHrYPwUhfm
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 21, 2024
“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” Obama told the crowd.
“See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happened to be black.”
As the trained-seals crowd cheered, Obama tried to quiet them.
Did the Obamas hurt race relations in the U.S.?
“Wait,” she said. “I want to know. I want to know — who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘black’ jobs?”
As a piece of intellectual dishonesty, the whole statement was brazen.
Pretending opposition to the Obama agenda was based on race is an easy way out for progressives who can’t admit that tens of millions of Americans don’t want the government running their lives.
It wasn’t Donald Trump who made conservative Americans fear and fight the leftist goals of President Barack Obama and his wife. It was the Obamas themselves who did that. Trump has simply become the champion of those Americans.
Michelle Obama knows that. Just like her husband knows it. Whatever their many faults, the Obamas are not stupid people.
But playing into identity politics is the Obama way — and pushing their obsession with race has been their path to power.
That was behind Obama’s sly suggestion about the “black job” in the White House.
The reference was to the grotesquely unfair treatment Trump received during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists when he was obliquely criticized for a comment he made during the June 27 presidential debate that illegal immigration is destroying “black jobs.”
Every normal American knows what he meant — service jobs, low-skilled jobs that don’t require college education, the kind of jobs illegal immigrants can take away from American citizens — black and white. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show black Americans are by no means limited to those occupations, but no one who heard the comment could have failed to understand Trump’s point.
When ABC’s Rachel Scott asked Trump at the NABJ interview, “What exactly is a ‘black job,’ sir,” she knew what he meant, too.
The intent was not to elicit a legitimate response to a legitimate question about the impact of the Biden-Harris illegal immigration invasion on lower-income Americans — including black Americans. It wasn’t even to elucidate for Trump and her audience what the numbers show.
It was to score cheap political points.
And that’s where Michelle Obama’s speech came in, too.
Claiming the American presidency “might be one of those ‘black’ jobs” served the dual purpose of putting down Trump and pushing Vice President Kamala Harris as suitable for the Oval Office on the grounds that her skin contains more melanin than Trump’s.
The facts that Harris is devoid of her own political accomplishments, that she has been part of an administration that has been disastrous — at home and abroad — and that the prospect of Harris in the White House for four more years is appalling for the country’s future are far more important than the color of her skin, or the color of Trump’s skin, or the color of the skin of the Americans who will be voting.
But colorblind, logical thinking doesn’t suit the Obama-Democratic mindset.
Back at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama claimed that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is that “when they go low, we go high.”
It wasn’t true then. It’s not true now.
The fusillade of insults Obama launched against Trump on Tuesday — as baseless as her jibe about his supposedly “narrow” worldview and shot about the presidency being a “black job” for the “black” Kamala Harris — showed that when it comes to going low, few are as proficient as the former first lady, even if she dresses it up in high-sounding rhetoric.
If her speech did nothing else, it proved that.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
