Closing the first night of the Democratic Party's convention in North Carolina, the self-declared “Mom-in-chief” offered disappointed voters "up close and personal" insights to argue that Barack Obama was “still the same man” and could yet fulfil his promises.
First lady Michelle Obama speaks at the podium during a soundcheck at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, North Carolina Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Claiming “Barack knows the American dream because he’s lived it”, she repeatedly highlighted the couple's humble upbringings, which differ sharply from those enjoyed by Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, and his wife, Ann.
“Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions,” Mrs Obama told thousands of supporters inside a basketball stadium in Charlotte. Instead, she said, they offered “unconditional love” and worked to give their children “the chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.”
She briefly praised Mr Obama for his policy achievements – for pushing through his controversial overhaul of the US health care system, for having "brought our economy from the brink of collapse" and for passing legislation to ensure parity in pay for women and protect the rights of minorities.
However, she returned repeatedly to Mr Obama's personal values, which she said continued to inform his decision-making in the Oval Office. "In the end, for Barack, these issues aren’t political," she said, amid intense frustration with Mr Obama's performance. "They’re personal".
While she never referred to the President's opponent by name, the implicit contrast with Mr Romney – a quarter-billionaire raised by wealthy parents and has been styled by Democrats as a ruthless capitalist – was clear throughout Mrs Obama's address.
She launched a thinly-veiled attack on Mr Romney's claim to have the necessary experience for the White House thanks to his success at Bain Capital, the private equity firm where he crunched numbers to make a $250 million (£160 million) fortune.
"I’ve seen how the issues that come across a President’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer," she said.
And she appeared to swipe at Mr Romney with a claim that his plans would make it more difficult for young Americans to replicate his success in the workplace.
Mr Obama "believes that when you’ve worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you," she said.
Amid an ongoing unemployment crisis that has left 23 million Americans jobless or seeking more work, she stressed that the President had been “raised by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills”. Mr Romney's father, George, a former Michigan governor, made millions as the head of American Motors.
Mrs Obama, whose speech prompted repeated chants of "four more years!", also stressed how much it had meant for her late father Fraser, a pump operator at a municipal water plant in Chicago, to send her and her brother, Craig, to America's best universities.
“For my dad, that’s what it meant to be a man,” she said. “Like so many of us, that was the measure of his success in life – being able to earn a decent living that allowed him to support his family”.
Mr Romney has repeatedly equated his own “success” with the money he made as chief executive of Bain Capital. By contrast, “for Barack, success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives,” Mrs Obama said.
She pointed out that having being accepted to university, she struggled to pay the fees. “Nearly all of our tuition came from student loans and grants,” Mrs Obama said. “But my dad still had to pay a tiny portion of that tuition himself.”
Mrs Romney said in a 1994 interview that she and her husband paid their way through university using profits from stockholdings given to Mr Romney by his father, which they would “sell off a little at a time”.
Mrs Obama told students and young graduates fearing tougher loan terms under a Romney presidency that she and her husband had endured their struggle. "When we were first married, our combined monthly student loan bills were actually higher than our mortgage," she said. "We were so young, so in love, and so in debt". Both Obamas have said they only finished repaying their student debts in their 40s.
And speaking after the Republicans spent their own party gathering last week attacking her husband for telling small-business owners that they owed some of their success to America's taxpayer-funded infrastructure, and "they didn't build that", Mrs Obama also defended his tribute to community.
Growing up, they "learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean," she said. "And we were taught to value everyone’s contribution".
Mrs Obama attempted to pile more pressure on Mr Romney due to his weak poll ratings among women. The Republican candidate trails the President among female voters by roughly eight percentage points on average – preventing him from holding a national lead.
Pointing to the experience of Mr Obama’s grandmother, who "like so many women ... hit a glass ceiling" after joining a bank as a secretary, she hailed her husband's passage of the Lilly Lebetter Act, which demands equal pay for women.
He also believes that women are "capable of making our own decisions about our bodies", she said, attempting to intensify fears about Mr Romney's pledge to outlaw all abortions except in cases of rape or incest – an exception that his vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan has in the past rejected.
Returning to the man who, unlike Mr Romey, "started his career by turning down high paying jobs", she claimed that "Barack knows what it means when a family struggles" thanks to the letters he received from voters, which he read "hunched over his desk".
After recalling the early days of their relationship, when Mr Obama drove a car with a hole in the floor and wore shoes that were too small, she pushed back against claims that America had fallen out of love, saying: "I love my husband even more than I did four years ago – even more than I did 23 years ago, when we first met."
None the less, with Mr Obama facing the toughest re-election battle in decades amid attacks from Republicans that he has led "the weakest recovery since the Great Depression", Mrs Obama seemed to concede that her husband had not lived up to the promise of fundamental "change" in his first term in office.
"He reminds me that we are playing a long game here," she said, "and that change is hard, and change is slow, and it never happens all at once." However, she claimed: "Eventually we get there – we always do."
No comments:
Post a Comment
thanks.