Michelle Obama Is No Barbie Doll

The First Lady, who has been promoting healthy diets for Americans, has misspoken herself into, of all things, a grease pit of controversy and even worse just before Super Bowl Sunday in Texas, where barbecue is sacred.

In her memo to supporters announcing next year's Democratic convention in Charlotte, Mrs. Obama praises the city's many virtues, adding "And of course great barbecue." This prompts the local North Carolina newspaper to respond "Charlotte=great barbecue? Who knew?"

For Northerners, this is tantamount to citing Jersey City for French cuisine, and the timing couldn't be worse.

As football worshippers arrive at a de-iced Arlington Stadium, they will be only a three-hour drive (a Lone Star hop, skip and jump) from Snow's in Lexington, which Texas Monthly cites as the best in the state--and therefore the world (the UK's Guardian lists the place in "The 50 best things to eat in the world, and where to eat them")--prompting the New Yorker's guru of grease Calvin Trillin to visit and ratify the choice.

The only problem for football fans is that the establishment, run by a former rodeo clown and a lady named Tootsie, is open only from 8 to noon on Saturdays, creating slight timing and digestive problems that could only be solved by staying up and drinking all Friday night.

The prospect of all this might well turn the First Lady into a total vegetarian. In telling supporters about the Charlotte convention, Mrs. Obama noted that "the table we sit at together ought to be big enough for everyone."

But sitting there at breakfast time sopping up fat with packaged white bread is not likely to be what she had in mind.

Michelle Obama's First 100 Days

She is something new in the White House. Take it from someone who has met and known First Ladies over five decades, from Mamie Eisenhower on.

Michelle Obama is the first product of a women's movement sensibility, if not its ethos. Like her husband, she is not rooted in how things were before the 1960s, and her amazing popularity reflects that change.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, she has not pushed openly into policy but, unlike Laura Bush, she has not stayed in the shadows as the traditional supportive but invisible wife.

"First Lady in Control of Building Her Image" headlines the New York Times, noting, "The image that Mrs. Obama is projecting, however, fails to fully reflect the multifaceted first lady. A Harvard-trained lawyer and former hospital vice president, she is also a tough-minded professional who cares deeply about influencing public policy and sometimes promotes legislation at her events. Her top aides, for example, are often immersed in policy discussions in the West Wing that are not publicized by the White House."

What this misses is that Michelle Obama is the first woman secure enough to present herself as a full-time wife and mother, as a partner who has temporarily put aside her professional self, at first to help her husband campaign and now govern the country.

The public is responding to this authenticity underlying her promotion of gardening, child-rearing and other domestic concerns, sensing how far she has gone beyond First Ladies who traditionally exercised power through pillow talk.

Unlike the Clintons who touted a two-for-one presidency, the Obamas are offering a couple working together under a 21st century definition of gender equality, taking different roles in apparent comfort with them and each other.

Going to Seed With Michelle Obama

The gardening industry is growing as Americans across the country follow the First Lady's example of raising vegetables, fruit and herbs.

At yesterday's White House planting, Mrs. Obama told her fifth-grade helpers of international interest in their efforts on her trip abroad.

“Every single person from Prince Charles on down was excited because we are planting a garden,” she said as they dug in seeds and seedlings for spinach, chard, collards, kale, shallots, peas, broccoli, fennel, rhubarb, onions and half a dozen kinds of lettuce. Some of them reportedly came from the Monticello gardens of Thomas Jefferson, who would pass out seeds to White House visitors.

If this keeps up, Michelle Obama's passion for edible plants may become her hallmark in the same way that Lady Bird Johnson will always be remembered for spreading wildflowers across the national landscape.

Her efforts not only encourage good nutrition and thrift in hard economic times but spur the movement for grassless lawns that is encouraging Americans to stop wasting water, spraying an ingredient of Agent Orange and burning up fuel with power mowers to make their yards look like golf courses.

As a city-reared kid like Mrs. Obama, I can testify to the pleasures of bringing in your own food for dinner, up to and including the thrill of picking the last brussels sprouts from New England stalks on Thanksgiving day.

Michelle and the Queen

After his first foreign trip as President, JFK said, "I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris--and I have enjoyed it!" Barack Obama may be feeling that way in London this week as the Gallup Poll shows the First Lady's favorable ratings eclipsing his own.

The British press, as always on the lookout to criticize crude Americans, half-heartedly tried to stir a flap about Michelle Obama "hugging" the Queen, but apparently Her Majesty hugged first, so there is no sequel to George W. Bush's faux pas in winking at the royal eminence.

Journalistic shenanigans aside, for someone who lived through the Kennedy era, there is both joy at seeing an African-American couple standing for the country at Buckingham Palace and a sadness at their towering over the now shrunken royal couple, especially Prince Philip who was always a tall, dignified figure half a step between the Queen.

Time and Change work both ways.

The Accessible Obamas

The First Couple is out in the real world this week, the President sympathizing with people who have lost their jobs in California and scheduled to schmooze with Jay Leno tonight, while the First Lady is hugging DC school kids and encouraging them to dream big.

The Obamas are easily the most accessible people ever to occupy the White House, and an aged skeptic keeps waiting for the inevitable backlash that will brand their attempts to connect with voters as cosmetic and manipulative.

When Lynda Bird Johnson was working for me during the Johnson Administration, a coworker watching her at an office meeting complained, "Who does she think she is, pretending to be just like other people?"

In the era of connectivity, the White House's societal role is being redefined, and the balance between the President as an authority figure and a source of empathy in hard times is being recalibrated.

So far, as the polls show, Obama is holding on to voters' trust without pretending to perfection, as he did yesterday in deflecting blame from his advisers for the AIG bonuses. But real trials are ahead.

If the economy keeps stumbling, the public's need for a stern father figure rather than a smart, good-hearted big brother will be put to the test, and the "I feel your pain" cliché may collide with "Nice guys finish last."

At least that's what the shiftless Republican relatives are counting on.

Dissing Michelle Obama

No First Lady since Jacqueline Kennedy has caught the American imagination so quickly that, after only six weeks, there are early signs of media backlash.

In his Los Angeles Times blog today, Andrew Malcolm reports on the First Lady's stint serving food at a DC soup kitchen for the homeless but raises a question about the photo op that shows a man on line taking her picture with a cellphone:

"If this unidentified meal recipient is too poor to buy his own food, how does he afford a cellphone? And if he is homeless, where do they send the cellphone bills?"

This mild debunking of Mrs. Obama's activities pales in comparison to a British snit over this week's White House visit of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A London Times columnist complains that, while Mrs. Brown brought thoughtful gifts for the Obama girls, the First Lady presented the Brown boys with "dismissive" models of Marine One (“Mum and Dad went to see the President, and all we got was this lousy plastic helicopter”).

Worse yet, a Telegraph columnist rails at Mrs. Obama under the headline, " Was 'Lady Macbeth' behind Barack Obama's snub of Gordon Brown?", making the loony case that the First Lady still resents the British for their part in the slave trade.

Fleet Street bilge aside, the American public still seems fascinated and affectionate. Even CNN's resident curmudgeon Jack Cafferty admits, "I think I am developing a crush on America's First Lady...

"Watch her when she visits a local school and you see the warmth and affection she instantly triggers in people. Kids are pretty much totally honest with very good BS-detectors. If they sense you're a phony, forget it. But around the First Lady, they want to hug her and laugh with her and tell her stories."

Even so, in the voracious 24/7 appetite for news, the kind of super-celebrity Mrs. Obama is becoming will inevitably draw her share of sniping from media mongers who can't think of anything else to say...and perhaps comments like this from bloggers in the same situation.

Michelle Obama's List and Mine

E-mail from the First Lady-Elect:

"While many of us will spend the holidays counting our blessings and sharing dinner with loved ones, millions of people around the country won't be so fortunate. Donating to your local food bank will help provide a holiday meal to people in your community who can't afford one.

"Talking with the families of deployed troops was one of the most rewarding experiences I had during the campaign. Giving to Operation USO Care Package is a great way to send members of our military stationed around the world a reminder that someone back home is thinking of them.

"This is a time to celebrate our blessings, the new year, and a new era for our country. But it's also a time to come together on behalf of those who need our help.

"Do what you can to help today by locating your local food bank and giving your support:

http://feedingamerica.org/default.aspx

"Or send a care package to an American in uniform:

http://my.barackobama.com/carepackage"

P.S., a few suggestions of mine:

Kids Against Hunger

Salvation Army

American Friends Service Committee

Doctors Without Borders

A Happy and Healthy Holiday to All!

Obama View From Barbara Walters

In the face of change, the timeless Barbara Walters scores another "get" with an exclusive interview with the Obamas, in which the new President talks about moral responsibility and the First Lady reveals that her daughters will be making their own beds in the White House.

Detroit automakers, Barack Obama tells her, are "a little tone deaf to what's happening in America right now...a problem for the captains of industry, generally. When people are pulling down hundred-million-dollar bonuses on Wall Street, and taking enormous risks with other people's money...they're not seeing what's going on out there, and one of the things I hope my presidency helps to usher in is a return to an ethic of responsibility."

In the interview, there are echoes of JFK's Inaugural Address ("Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country"):

"(T)here's got to be a point where you say, 'You know what, I have enough, and now I'm in this position of responsibility, let me make sure that I'm doing right by people, and, and acting in a way that is responsible.' And that's true, by the way, for members of Congress, that's true for the president, that's true for Cabinet members, that's true for parents. I want all of us to start thinking a little bit more, not just about what's good for me...but what's good for our children, what's good for our country. The more we do that, the better off we're going to be."

It's good to see Walters, in her eightieth year, still out-hustling the competition after more than half a century, starting with her first job doing publicity for Redbook when I was editor.

Later, when the president's daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, went to work at McCalls, there were almost daily calls to get me to arrange an exclusive interview. Barbara didn't get that one, but there are few she has missed since then.

It's good to see that not everything changes.

Michelle Obama's Transition

In the White House, she will be both a working wife and a stay-at-home mom, trying to give her daughters as normal a childhood as they can have living with the eyes of the world always on them.

Even their new pet won't have a dog's life. In a 1963 interview, JFK told me with bemusement, "We got more letters about the puppies born here than the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty."

Michelle Obama has always been "a working mom," her friend Valerie Jarrett said on Meet the Press Sunday. "She knows how hard it is to manage being a mom, a spouse, have a professional job...Her first priority as she comes to Washington and moves into the White House are those two darling girls, making sure that they are OK, getting them in school, getting them comfortable. Her mom, Mary Robinson, is coming with them, and so she'll have her hands full."

Beyond that, according to Jarrett, "her interests will be work-life balance, volunteerism, military spouses. And she'll go from there. But having a seat at, at the table and being a co-president is not something that she's interested in doing."

In the light of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama's decision to stay out of policy-making will no doubt draw a lot of attention, even more than did leaving her job to spend full-time on her husband's campaign.

As she pursues her "work-life balance" in the White House, the new First Lady will need all her abundant equanimity to keep family life as private as possible. In yesterday's visit, she got some advice from Laura Bush, who managed to do it very well in a time of turmoil.

Undecided as Code

Somewhere in the higher-than-usual percentage of undecided voters in the late stages of an almost two-year campaign are those who can't or won't vote for an African-American candidate.

The good news for Barack Obama is that, as his lead in the national polls grows toward double digits, it may, as gamblers say, "cover the spread."

Michelle Obama recently dismissed the Bradley Effect by pointing to the primary vote that gave her husband the nomination, but that overlooks the late surge by Hillary Clinton among white voters in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Rep. John Murtha, in his usual blunt way, recently pointed out that race matters.

A critical question about such voters may be, How deep does their "indecision" go? Is it virulent enough to make them choose McCain or just skip voting entirely? Since many of them are among those most worried about the sinking economy, the answer may be a test of self-interest against deeply held prejudice.

In any case, on Election Night, we will learn something about how far America has come on the subject of race since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Obama Blitz

If an Obama Administration is anything like the campaign, Americans may have an efficient government again.

Behind the candidate's charisma, a leave-little-to-chance operation has been working hard to put him into the White House--recruiting supporters not only to give money (a record $150 million from 632,000 new donors in September) but travel to swing states and knock on doors, make phone calls, hold debate parties and write personalized post cards to undecided voters.

E-mails, often with videos, arrive by the dozens every week--from both Obamas and Bidens, and campaign managers at every level--to encourage backers to leave no rocks unturned, including those from which the William Ayers robocalls are coming.

"Barack will be the underdog," says a message from Michelle Obama, "until he's in the White House, so keep working, keep talking to your friends and neighbors, and together we can change the world."

"My wife Jill is an extraordinary woman," Joe Biden writes. "Jill's passion has always been education, and even during the campaign she's been teaching class during the week and joining me on the trail on the weekends. But this week, she also found some time to go to campaign headquarters and call voters in crucial battleground states...Can you do the same?"

If Obama doesn't win, it will certainly not be for lack of trying.

Michelle Obama/Sarah Palin: Cool/Hot

Last night's debate showed a contrast between two men of different generations, speaking styles and body language. Tonight the TV screens offered disparity of another gender, between Michelle Obama with Larry King and Jon Stewart, and Sarah Palin out on the stump with John McCain.

Comparing these 21st century women calls up the distinction Marshall McLuhan made in the early days of TV between cool and hot personalities, citing the differences between JFK and Nixon.

Palin's hotness is not erotic but, in McLuhanese, an aggressive style that works on the listener to get a pre-determined reaction that leaves no room for ambivalence or ambiguity, eliciting primal responses such as "Kill him" to her attacks on Barack Obama.

Little wonder that conservative David Brooks calls her "a cancer on the Republican Party" out of a populist tradition with prejudices that "scorn ideas entirely."

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, is the essence of cool, shrugging off McCain's calling her husband "that one" as part of the political game and just smiling when Jon Stewart tried to get a rise out of her about Palin.

Cool media and personalities, McLuhan asserted, are inclusive, inviting watchers into their world instead of manipulating them to their own purposes. If the Obamas get to the White House, they could turn out to be the coolest couple since JFK and Jackie.

Connecting the Democratic Dots

The convention tonight spanned half a century from the possible Last Hurrah from a generation of privileged Kennedys who devoted themselves to the public good to the First Act of a new family with roots in poverty and prejudice aspiring to the same goal.

In their speeches, Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama embodied common values that bridge differences of race, wealth and social advantages.

"We are told," Kennedy said, "that Barack Obama believes too much in an America of high principle and bold endeavor, but when John Kennedy called for going to the moon, he didn't say it's too far to get there. We shouldn't even try.

"Our people answered his call and rose to the challenge, and today an American flag still marks the surface of the moon...This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I've seen it. I've lived it. And we can do it again."

Michelle Obama talked about her children's future: "I think about how one day, they'll have families of their own. And one day, they--and your sons and daughters--will tell their own children about what we did together in this election.

"They'll tell them how this time, we listened to our hopes, instead of our fears. How this time, how this time, we decided to stop doubting and to start dreaming. How this time, in this great country--where a girl from the South Side of Chicago can go to college and law school, and the son of a single mother from Hawaii can go all the way to the White House--that we committed ourselves, we committed ourselves to building the world as it should be."

The Kennedys and the Obamas started out from different places in life, but this election has brought them together and, if tonight's speeches are any indication, they will connect with Americans of all backgrounds who want something better than what we have had so far in the 21st century.

Kennedy Nostalgia

When Caroline Kennedy was a little girl in the White House, JFK would get around her mother's objections to publicity for the children by waiting until Jacqueline Kennedy was out of town before letting photographers take pictures of her.

On Meet the Press today, there was evidence of both parents' influence as a poised, self-confident Caroline Kennedy championed Barack Obama while deftly fending off Tom Brokaw's questions about her part in the VP vetting and any possible role in a new administration.

If the Obamas make it to the White House, the new First Lady could take a leaf from the Kennedy playbook in keeping her children grounded in reality amid the enormous amount of attention they will be getting.

Tomorrow night at the convention, JFK nostalgia will be in full flower as Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg leads a tribute to the 46-year career of her uncle Ted. For those of the generations who watched her growing up through years of violent loss, her presence will evoke painful memories and at the same time provide consolation.

A Look Into Obama's Mind

In unearthing the syllabus and assignments for his seminar in "Current Issues in Racism and the Law" during 12 years of teaching at the University of Chicago, the New York Times offers a preview of how Barack Obama's mind might work in the Oval Office.

For that complex and controversial subject, Obama improvised his own textbook, with key cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois and Malcolm X as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.

Amid the historical horrors of slavery and lynchings, students recall, Obama made room for discussing the values and culture that Americans of all races grow up sharing, citing his wife, Michelle, a black woman, who loved “The Brady Bunch” so much that she could identify every episode by its opening scenes.

But perhaps most to the point of how a President Obama would conduct his administration's approach to problem solving may be found in his instructions to students for preparing their term papers:

"What I want to see is that you are fully engaged with an issue, and that you've broken some sweat trying to figure out the problem in all it wonderful complexity.

"More specifically, I'll be looking for: a focused, tightly crafted argument, and analytic rigor in working through the legal or policy problems raised by your argument; a thorough examination of the diversity of opinion that exists on the issue or theme; a willingness, after having looked at the various facets of the topic, to take a stand and offer concrete proposals or approaches to the problem."

That sounds like the essence of what he would telling the people he picks to help him run the country. It certainly would be a change from what we have now.

Michelle Obama Channels Betty Ford

But in the era of gender and racial correctness, not quite...

On "The View" today, according to the Times' Jodi Kantor, "She got to explain her 'proud' comment at length, in a friendly setting; she talked about her husband and children in approachable terms; she stressed her humble roots (she just said her mother has a slight gambling habit, and has won $17,000 with what sound like quarter slots). That said, it looks like Mrs. Obama is having the appearance of fun, rather than actual fun. This is not the loosest I’ve seen her, and she is surely watching every word."

No wonder. "Unlike her husband, who wrote in his memoir that he had learned at a young age to smile and charm and disarm whites of the notion that he might be a bristly black militant," Maureen Dowd observes, "Michelle has not always hidden her jangly opinions so well."

Over three decades ago, Americans fell in love with an outspoken First Lady, who didn't hesitate to talk about birth control, her addiction to alcohol or anything else she was asked. But Betty Ford came to the White House without running an election campaign gauntlet--behaving naturally unlike others who could pass for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

Michelle Obama has a lot of that outspokenness in her, but in this election year, a rare combination of racism and sexism will be waiting to twist everything she says. It will take a delicate balance to channel her inner Betty Ford while preventing haters from picturing her, in Dowd's words, as "a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman."

It might help to keep in mind that Mrs. Ford deflected criticism by keeping her sense of humor. Telling a reporter that the media was asking all kinds of personal questions, except how often she slept with her husband, she volunteered to answer that, too.

"As often as I can," Betty Ford said.

Obama-McCain Family Values

In warning Republicans to "lay off my wife" in their ads, Barack Obama yesterday was challenging John McCain to call off the dogs who are nipping at Michelle Obama just as they attacked Cindy McCain to give George W. Bush the nomination in 2000.

Opponents, Obama said on Good Morning America, "can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record. I've been in public life for 20 years," then added that if "they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful. Because that I find unacceptable."

The subtext of Obama's warning could be a reminder that, as late as last summer, Mrs. McCain was speaking out against such tactics, as the New York Times reported in an interview with her: "Ugly accusations about her family, she insisted, will not be tolerated this time. 'If that were to even bubble its head up again,' she said, "we’d knock that flat.'”

In 2000, the Rove smear machine attacked with slanders and push polls about everything from Mrs. McCain's one-time addiction to pain killers to rumors that their adopted daughter from Bangladesh was a black child McCain had fathered.

Eventually, Bridget, now 16, learned about that in a Google search of her name and went to her mother in tears. “She wanted to know why President Bush hated her,” Mrs. McCain said. “And I had to explain to her...how nasty campaigns can be.”

Now the question for the Republican candidate is: Can he control those same groups who also did the Swiftboat ads against John Kerry in 2004, which McCain publicly denounced?

On GMA, Obama praised his wife's patriotism and said that for Republicans "to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her I think is just low class...especially for people who purport to be promoters of family values."

McCain no doubt agrees, but will the man who claims to be strong enough to protect Americans from their enemies abroad be able to shield them from the sleazebags who make those commercials?

The LBJing of Hillary Clinton

Now that the question is coming front and center, Barack Obama may want to turn to his backer Ted Sorensen for advice about putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket with him, as John F. Kennedy did with his chief rival for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson.

Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, reports today that she "is probably going to fight to be the vice presidential nominee on an Obama-for-president ticket."

After a bitter campaign, it won't be easy. Obama supporters, notably his wife Michelle, are reportedly opposed, but as Sorensen notes in his new memoirs, so was JFK's brother Robert. Yet Kennedy offered Johnson a place on the ticket, mostly to help win Texas and other Southern states in what would turn out to be a close election.

Moreover, Sorensen could also enlighten Obama about the virtues of converting a former enemy into an ally or at least neutralizing possible opposition. If Johnson remained as Senate Majority Leader, JFK told him in 1960, he "would be just impossible...Lyndon would screw me all the time."

Unpalatable as the idea may be to Obama's most fervent supporters--ironically, even Ted Kennedy has publicly opposed it--this could be another time when the Democratic Party needs unity more than a balanced ticket.

True believers in both camps will offer fervent arguments about why it wouldn't work but, in a year when so much is at stake, neatness may not count.

Michelle Obama's Pride

Those who were perplexed, annoyed and/or enraged by Mrs. Obama's statement that "for the first time in my adult life I'm proud of America" may want to take a look at HBO's contribution tonight to Black History Month, a documentary about Joe Louis.

Called, without irony, "a credit to his race," the heavyweight champion was exalted in 1938 for beating the exemplar of Nazi Germany, Max Schmeling, but never accepted as a true American. Decades later, when playing golf in San Diego, he found excrement in the first hole.

As a white child growing up in the Harlem ghetto, I saw how little of the pride that Michelle Obama now feels was within reach of its black residents. Movie placards in store windows would read "Gone With the Wind with Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen," followed in smaller type by "Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh."

In World War II, I was greeted by glares for sitting in the back of a bus in Charleston, South Carolina, and only my uniform spared me from more physical reactions by white riders.

In the 1950s, it took a Supreme Court desegregation decision to let children who looked like Michelle Obama go to school with those who didn't and, in the years afterward, they were beaten in the streets for marching with Martin Luther King for the audacity of wanting to exercise their right to vote.

In 1985, in her senior thesis, the future Mrs. Obama wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong...it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

Now millions of Americans of all races are voting to make Barack Obama their president. His wife's pride is understandable, and those who attack her manner of expressing it would do well to recall its origins and examine their own motives.

Obama, Up Close and Very Personal

It started in 1994 when Bill Clinton went on MTV and answered a question about his underwear, “Boxers or briefs?” With only the slightest pause, the President of the United States answered, “Usually briefs.”

Now, in a Glamour Magazine interview, Michelle Obama is taking Presidential personalizing to a new level. Talking about her daughters, she told Tonya Lewis Lee, who is married to filmmaker Spike Lee:

“We have this ritual in the morning. They come in my bed, and Dad isn’t there--because he’s too snore-y and stinky, they don’t want to ever get into bed with him. But we cuddle up and we talk about everything from what is a period to the big topic of when we get a dog: what kind?”

Mrs. Obama has talked this way before, about her husband’s not picking up his socks or putting the butter back in the refrigerator, and she offers a philosophical reason for it:

“Barack is very much human. So let’s not deify him, because what we do is we deify, and then we’re ready to chop it down. People have notions of what a wife’s role should be in this process, and it’s been a traditional one of blind adoration. My model is a little different--I think most real marriages are.”

When Richard Nixon was running for President, reporters would talk about a life-sized inflatable Pat Nixon doll that was brought out to stare adoringly during every speech, but only half-inflated for whistle stops.

They won’t be making jokes like that about Michelle Obama.