One January (2008) afternoon
at the University of South Carolina’s Children’s Center, in Columbia, Michelle Obama scrunched her five-eleven
frame into a small white wooden rocking chair. The state’s Democratic primary, which her husband, Barack, needed badly
to win, was in forty-eight hours. Obama picked up a picture book, flared her nostrils, and began sniffing noisily, in the
manner of a bear foraging in the woods for dinner.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!” she read
to a group of preschoolers. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/10/080310fa_fact_collins?currentPage=1
Earlier on the day that Obama
visited the nursery school, she addressed a congregation at the Pee Dee Union Baptist Church, in Cheraw, a hamlet of about
six thousand known as “The Prettiest Town in Dixie.” The church’s makeshift gravel parking lot, next to
the Pee Dee Ice and Fuel Company and bounded by train tracks, was full. After an invocation by the Reverend Jerry Corbett
and an introduction by the mayor of Cheraw, Obama came to the pulpit. “You all got up bright and early just for me?”
she asked the mostly elderly, almost all-black crowd. “Yes!” they roared. Obama continued, “On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Wright, I bring greetings.”
Michelle Obama begins with a broad assessment
of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country
that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths,
and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as
heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it,
I’m young. Forty-four!”
From these bleak generalities, Obama moves
into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now
there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself
attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”),
pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t
be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you
needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,”
Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting
for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something.
Give us something here!”
.
. 
