What’s so scary about Michelle Obama?

I can’t remember a time when the First Lady was such an open target for her husband’s political enemies, or the criticisms being so personal.

Leaving Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton out of the equation for convenience’s sake—they were atypical by almost any definition of the job description—the First Lady’s gig is to show up, look happy and resolute and stand by her man. She’s really more the First Arm-Candy than anything else, even though recent administrations have tried to obfuscate that fact by allowing POTUS’s wife to pick a charitable cause and quietly champion it when she wasn’t required to be next to her better half, smiling and waving.

I believe Nancy Reagan had “Just Say No” to drugs, which as naïve as that effort was (“Just Say No To Bad Weather” had just as much chance at succeeding), it had a lot more meat on its bones than most First Ladies’ sanctioned mandates that followed.

Since then, First Ladies have been assigned considerably less controversial, more achievable goals to pursue.

According to The White House’s official site, the side-work seems to have unofficially begun under Jackie Kennedy, who charged herself with “making the White House a museum of American history and decorative arts,” while keeping her main focus on standing by that ol’ rascal of hers.

Did anyone complain? No! The nation loved her for it. She may have been an Elite, but her husband sure didn’t treat her like one, if you believed the tabloids. Red-Meat America ate that shit up.

Next came Lady Bird Johnson. She “created a First Lady’s Committee for a More Beautiful Capital, then expanded her program to include the entire nation.”

Did anybody say “boo?” No.

Next up, Pat Nixon, who was elevated by her husband to the “unique diplomatic standing of Personal Representative of the President” to Africa and South America.

Nobody said shit. Although to be fair, Mrs. Nixon’s husband had a way of grabbing all the headlines for himself.

Betty Ford was a bad-ass. First she found herself the public face of breast cancer as a survivor herself, then she became a tireless supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. Then she went on to make her name synonymous with rehab for the rich and famous. Maybe we should throw her out for messing up the curve, too.

Rosalynn Carter was a return to form. She “took a strong interest in programs to aid mental health, the community, and the elderly. From 1977 to 1978, she served as the Honorary Chairperson of the President’s Commission on Mental Health.”

Hew and cry over that honorarium? None that the Google and I could find.

Barbara Bush promoted literacy. Nobody really knew who W was yet, so she was never hit with charges of hypocrisy, or over-compensation.

Also, because she was promoting literacy! No reasonable person can argue with “kids oughtta read better, it’ll leave them better prepared for life as adults.”

Any more than any reasonable person can argue that childhood obesity is a bad thing. It’s about as uncontroversial an avocation as can be imagined. Really fat kids grow up to be really fat adults who get sick a lot, stay sick for a long time then die early and in debt.

That is still a bad thing, right?

Look at the issue from a tight-fisted, fiscally conservative, traditionally Republican point of view. All those subsistence-level, morbidly obese non-taxpayers are getting some form of government-funded assistance with the chronic health and unemployment problems they are dealing with due to a lifetime of poor diet and exercise habits. If we improved those habits as kids, they would grow up healthier, and much less of a financial burden on their fellow Americans.

So with The Left all busy being the damned child-huggers they are, and the Right pleased with the revenue projections a healthier America would produce, this issue has got to be bullet-proof, right?

Wrong! Because said bullet-proof issue has the misfortune of being championed by Michelle Obama, the wife of the least popular Black man ever elected President.

The latest iteration of this ongoing, made-up controversy is opposition to the First Lady’s recent promotion of breast-feeding. Far-out Far-Righter Rep. Michelle Bachmann recently took the First Lady to task for her support on a popular right-wing radio show.

Here is the key paragraph from the link above: “The Minnesota Republican [Bachmann] said Obama’s efforts to promote breast-feeding and the IRS’s announcement that nursing supplies that aide in the practice can be deducted from tax returns amounts to a ‘new definition [of] the nanny state.’”

That doesn’t even pass The Right’s convoluted logic test, again assuming The Right to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Mrs. Obama is promoting a program with targeted tax cuts, and Republicans are railing against it?

Plus, what the hell exactly is a “nanny state?” Apparently according to Ms Bachmann’s definition, it’s a state that gives a damn about its citizens. Which Ms Bachmann, being the canny legislator that she is, would never say in so many words, “Vote for me, I don’t give a shit about you as a human being.”

This Nanny-State feint fails to pass the smell test on so many levels, one has to wonder, what is actually going on here?

Do you suppose it springs from the same malodorous well as the obsession with the First Lady’s posterior? Google reveals there are even websites devoted solely to this subject. One writes on its home page that their “ode to the First Lady’s booty reflects a preoccupation with her posterior. Thank god the election’s over so we can start objectifying the first black First Lady. It’s ok now, right guys?”

Shit, man. Objectifying people for their race or gender is always fucking timeless. Without it, the state of racism and sexism in this country would be in mighty sad shape.

Come to think of it, about the only thing that separates Mrs. Obama’s low-profile role in her husband’s administration from that of her immediate predecessors is the color of her, and the President’s, skin.

The only other President in my lifetime who has garnered such animosity simply by existing—as opposed to reaction to their policies while in office—is Bill Clinton, who was at the time proclaimed by many to be the country’s first Whigger president.

The Right was apoplectic about everything he did. Shit he didn’t do, that pissed them off, too. I mean, when Bush Jr., was promoted to the presidency by the Supreme Court, the Left wasn’t exactly dancing in the streets, but the real vitriol didn’t start in earnest until after the Iraq War’s inevitability became apparent.

And even then, we didn’t go after his wife. After all, she was out promoting something supremely benign (“the Helping America’s Youth initiative”). It was her husband we had the beef with, and most of us had the decency to leave the wife and kids out of it.

But Clinton was, and Obama has been granted no such honeymoon. It seems the Beltway Boys can’t figure out how Those People have invaded their hallowed halls, and can’t spend enough hours a day scheming to discredit, and ideally disgorge, them. Even for purported offenses as insignificant as an ill-advised, unprofitable land deal in Arkansas, a series of extra-marital hummers, or endorsing the idea that America’s kids should be healthy.

It’s my theory that it’s Clinton’s and Obama’s “Otherness” that is the source of much of the otherwise puzzling personal animus directed toward them and their wives. Barack Obama is so Other that a whole new political party formed to oppose him, the Tea Party, which is now struggling with the fiscal conservatives for the shriveled, blackened soul of the Republican party.

What, besides Race, makes Barack Obama so Other from previous presidents that would cause such a push-back? Ivy League education? Check. Looks good in a suit? Check. Delivers a great stump speech, rallies the base? Check. Can participate in Civil War re-enactments as a member of the Army of the Confederacy?

There it is!

The common denominator between the First Lady’s ass, the people who don’t believe Obama was born in America and the speculation that he’s trying to lead America into some kind of third-world Socialist hellscape is they’re all thinly-veiled allusions to Race.

It’s always been about Race. The right-wing will spend the next two-to-six years dressing up their prejudice as this thing or that thing, but pay attention. Their logic won’t add up. Which is fine for them, because with the choir they are preaching to, it doesn’t have to add up. It just has to buttress the unspoken fears they already harbor about the President.

It’s sad to think that 150 years after the bloodiest war in our country’s history, a bungled effort at Reconstruction, the civil rights battles of the 1960’s and the election of the nation’s first Black president, Race is still the itchy scab that we as a country just can’t stop picking at.

I can practically guarantee that long after gay marriage is commonplace and spliffs the size of Popeye’s forearm are smoked openly on city streets, Race will continue to eat away at the moral righteousness we as Americans aspire to lay claim to.