Category: spouses

Hillary has spoken and it is good.

Senator Clinton’s speech Tuesday night to assembled Democrats and watchers around the nation and the world was superb. The historian Michael Beschloss said it was the best he’d heard her give.

Like a lot of Democrats, I was holding my breath.

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Who makes you most comfortable, Barack or Michelle Obama?

Michelle Obama made her case on Monday night with her smart, warm and sometimes humorous speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver. Observing her mother, Marian Robinson, watching proudly from the audience moved me for tears, because Michelle made it clear that she became who she is through the support and sacrifice of her family. Just in case we thought she was a happy accident, we also heard from her only brother, Craig, whom she followed to Princeton and authorized to vet her boyfriend, Barack, on the basketball court. If there’s a better advertisement for the middle class black family, I’ve yet to see it.

But there’s the rub. Many Americans don’t know any middle class African Americans. Despite decades of civil rights legislation, it’s still possible to live in an all-white enclave from which you can project whatever ideas you have about race onto the people with brown, black, yellow and red skin around you. And those isolated white people bubbled into my consciousness after the first night of the 2008 Democratic Convention.

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