The Michelle Obama speech

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Gone are the days of “When they go low, we go high.” That was Michelle Obama’s mantra during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 cage fight with Donald Trump. I wanted to believe it so much I had coffee mugs made with that saying on them. I don’t have them any more.

I’m trying to figure out what slogan I’d put on a coffee mug from Obama’s incendiary, incandescent Saturday night speech in Kalamazoo. I’m leaning toward “Take our lives seriously.” It was a 38-minute feminist manifesto, excoriating Trump but also the men who either support him or aren’t sure they’ll vote for our first Black female president. “A vote for him is a vote against us,” she declared. Obama laid out everything women suffer under while trying to just live our lives, from crippling double standards to menstrual cramps, the expectation of perfection, and sexual abuse. The pain and threat posed by even a “normal” pregnancy.

Oh, and menopause. I’ve attended hundreds of political speeches about women’s health over the years, but I’ve never heard menopause talked about from the stage. (We might whisper about it backstage.) But of all the stages of women’s health, menopause could be the most shrouded in mystery, even shame, and one of the most debilitating.

“ Every month, far too many of us experience excruciating cramps and days of nausea,” she said. “As we struggle through menopause, crippling hot flashes, and depression, too many women my age are unaware of what’s happening to our bodies,” she added. (Obama opened up about her own menopause experience to People magazine in November 2022.)

“I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this, because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth,” she said. “Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work.”

9Young girls might not know what to expect from puberty. Women “my age,” she noted, don’t know what to expect from menopause. Now, they face the erosion of their healthcare options, she said, in the wake of Dobbs the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling that set the stage for bans across the country.

Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all,” Obama said, to a bit of laughter. “And in those terrifying moments when something goes wrong—which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country—let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us. In those moments, all we have to rely on is our medical system, in those dark moments, all we have to rely on is our faith in a higher power and the experience of doctors to get us the care we need in a timely manner.”

Obama described the hideous new reality in so many states around the country, in which pregnant women can’t get the emergency care—which may include abortion care—that they need. “If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” she told the men in the room. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something. If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”

She went on.

“Please, please, do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us, because a vote for him is a vote against us, against ourselves, against our worth. To think that the men that we love can be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world.”

Leaving the realm of women’s health, Obama also talked angrily about the media and voters’ double standards Harris faces.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn. I hope that you’ll forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior. His obvious mental decline. His history as a convicted felon. A known slumlord. A predator found liable for sexual abuse. All of this while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do, y’all.”

“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” Obama said. “But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”

At all of those times in my own life I was able to reach out to girlfriends and cousins and aunts to get support. But we didn’t want to whine. I was told by a friend not to ask for time off during my (brief) period of morning sickness when I was pregnant. If we propagate these notions of women as sickly or frail, whether during menstruation, pregnancy, or menopause, “they” will hold it against us, we feared. Indeed, protective labor laws that had been passed decades earlier to recognize the special challenges women face served to limit women’s hours, wages, and mobility in the work force. They have been dismantled over the last 50 years, but in terms of not talking about these burdens, maybe we overcorrected.

Michelle Obama threw down the gauntlet to male voters in a speech on Saturday, leaving some people calling for the one-time First Lady to make her own presidential run.

The emphatic words made waves on social media, and some users were so inspired that they thought that Obama herself should be the one on the ballot.

“If Harris doesn’t win, Michelle Obama needs to run in 2028,” wrote X user @AlwaysTTNJ.

User @JoeFedorowicz agreed, and thought she would have an easy time of it, writing, “Michelle Obama would cruise if she ever decided to run.”

It isn’t the first time that Democrats have called for the former First Lady to take aim at the nation’s highest office. Before Kamala Harris emerged as the pick to replace President Joe Biden after his disastrous debate performance sank his re-election chances, the rumor mill churned around Obama.

Surely to the dismay of those yearning for her in the White House, though, Obama has been outspoken, for years, about never running for public office, especially the presidency.

Her past reluctance made fodder for social media jokes after her rousing speech, however.

“If Trump wins let’s all collectively blame Michelle Obama for putting her own lack of desire to run for POTUS over stopping fascism,” wrote X user @NateBlanchett, “because every time I hear her speak, I am reminded there is no way she wouldn’t have won both the nomination and the general election.”

“A vote for him is a vote against us,” Michelle Obama told men on behalf of all women.

Any man who won’t vote for Kamala doesn’t really love his wife, mother and daughters. Kamala urged women to abuse their relationships to tell your “brother or your son or boyfriend” that not voting for Kamala was a personal betrayal for them. “To the women listening, we have every right to demand that the men in our lives do better by us to make these choices.”

With the clock ticking on the election, the Kamala campaign decided to go all in on hating men.

The assault began with Barack Obama telling black men in Pittsburgh that they were sexists if they were hesitant about voting for Kamala and then closed with Michelle Obama telling men that if they didn’t vote for Kamala, they were not only sexists, but actually killing women.

She told “fed-up” male voters who wanted to sit out the election that “your rage does not exist in a vacuum. If we don’t win this election, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage.”

“I am asking y’all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously,” Michelle Obama demanded, claiming that male politicians were preparing to kill women. “Are you, as men, prepared to look into the eyes of the women and children you love and tell them that you supported this assault?” The ‘assault’ was voting for any candidate other than Kamala Harris.

Michelle Obama falsely claimed that limiting abortion would prevent women from being treated for “hot flashes, lumps and pap smears” and leave them to die on operating tables. Then she argued that women must tell men, “we are more than baby-making vessels.” Instead women are to be baby-killing vessels: assuming that women exist at all according to Democrat ‘biologists’.

The extraordinarily hostile rant clearly aimed at portions of the party’s own base has been widely taken as a sign that the Kamala campaign is simply writing off men entirely. Democrat strategists have sneered that Trump is creating a “men’s party”, if so they’re belatedly trying to create a women’s party based not on the reality of women, but on ideological hostility to men.

Men, as depicted by Michelle, are thoughtless at best and predators at worst, uncaring of the feelings of women and prone to getting them killed because they’re too filled with “rage”.

Michelle accused men who won’t vote for Kamala as not valuing and even intimidating women.

“If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter,” Michelle Obama condescendingly told them. “You get to use your judgment and cast your vote for yourself and the women in your life. Remember, women standing up for what is best for us can make the difference in this election.”

Who is the “us”? Michelle Obama presumed that women could only possibly vote for Democrats and that men who didn’t join them hated women. But white women still lean Republican while minority women lean Democrat.

Michelle Obama reduced the entire election to abortion. There’s one big problem.

9 out of 10 registered voters prioritize the economy as their top issue. Abortion comes in 9th place after gun control. The vast majority of voters who care about it are already Democrats.

The problem is that the Kamala campaign can’t run on the economy, it can’t run on her record and it can’t run on promises of change, but it can run on calling men sexist pigs.

Michelle Obama doubled down on depicting skepticism about Kamala as sexism.

“By every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready,” Michelle Obama insisted.. “The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?”

Kamala, despite having been brought in at the last minute and having failed to answer even basic policy questions, was not the problem: Americans were the problem for not being ready to appreciate her majestic awesomeness and expecting her to actually work to win them over

Michelle declared that she was “angry” and “frustrated” at voters who didn’t hate Trump as much as she did while “asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.” Having any expectations of Kamala was sexist. It showed that the skeptical voters were the ones who weren’t good enough for her.

The party’s official closing argument to undecided voters was that the onus was on them.

Worse still, Michelle was reprising Kamala’s own closing argument in the 2020 primaries just before she dropped out. “Is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?” Kamala Harris had demanded.

America, or at least Iowa Democrats, had not proven to be good enough for Kamala. Will America, especially its men, prove to be good enough for Kamala this time around?

Bringing in Michelle Obama, Beyonce and Kamala for the trifecta of entitlement isn’t a winning election argument, it’s a break-up song posing as a political rally. Winning candidates confidently assert that America is ready for them. Losing candidates spitefully question whether they need to break up with the voters before the voters decide to break up with them.

Michelle Obama falsely claimed that limiting abortion would prevent women from being treated for “hot flashes, lumps and pap smears”.