The Democratic Party tenders another weird first, and it is the candidate's wife as campaign associate and chief spokesman. Michelle Obama is thought to have most recently disparaged Hillary Clinton, herself a target of Elizabeth Edwards, who has made oblique comments about the other two — and all this when only one of the three women is running for president.
Exchanges are in a leftist dialect and symptomatic of the anxiety that favored class membership still produces among Democrats. One reads that Edwards regretted that "We can't make John black and we can't make him a woman," presumably because her husband's character and policies will be tertiary to caucus voters; and elsewhere maintained "sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's issues," as if men make inferior obstetricians or family counselors, or that the 19th Amendment passed for state legislators' fear of returning home and being sent straight to the doghouse.
Midway through this month, Michelle Obama was convulsed with the political current. "We're still playing around with the question: Is he black enough?" Well, OK, that standard is, as Obama put it, "nonsense," but the physical attribute is on the left a cultural and metaphysical affiliation, ones with which the Illinois senator has openly aligned. Being invoiced as the black patron of a taxi driver? Barack explained to Paula Zahn that "there's nothing wrong with that, and I'm not ashamed of that." Chatting with Robin Roberts in May, Mrs. Obama did so as a member of "the black community." But if the Obamas are financially and professionally exemplary, and of broad heritage, while most black Americans aren't, what do they share with the rest of that "community" but skin color? In its modern usage, the word "racist" tends to mean "bad," rather than "applying race as a primary determinant of traits or capacities" — and a crucial metric of individual worth is lost.
So last week, Michelle Obama leveled a charge aimed at nobody in particular, though process of elimination left only the Clintons. Back to malfeasance in the Lincoln Bedroom and Oval Office? Could be, with several months to go. Democrats are entwined with politics of artifice, in their own little world, and it bemuses to watch, which is natural to tragedy.