by Rod D. Martin
February 19, 2008

And these people want to run America?

Mrs. Obama: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m proud of my country.”

You just gotta shake your head at this kind of thing, almost like when Hillary Clinton several years ago, describing her feelings after the death of her father, told a crowd that “for the first time in my life, I realized there was something bigger out there than me.”

Do baby boomer liberals realize that most Americans find their self-absorption disgusting?

But more to the point in the case of Michelle Obama: shouldn’t it seriously worry us that someone who’s lived out the end of centuries-long institutional racism in America — through degrees from Harvard and Princeton, the utter transformation of our society, and now the likely nomination of her husband for President of the United States — has spent her entire adult life ashamed of her country? Why has she been ashamed? And just what has she been ashamed of?

Of course, in writing these things, I fall into the same trap as most commentators: the trap of assuming Obama is talking about race.

And she isn’t.

Michelle Obama is ashamed of America for the same reason that the entire liberal “progressive” crowd is ashamed: America is not a socialist workers’ paradise firmly under the control of global institutions like those now clamping down in Europe. America is still populated by supposedly-unenlightened religious people. America still hasn’t bought into the idea that nation-states are Neanderthal. And America is still strong enough to both defend and expand the ideals of the American — not the French, not the Russian — Revolution.

In short, Michelle Obama is a Blame-America-First socialist in the same mold as George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis and the Clintons. She’s just younger, prettier, and a lot more hypocritical.

So yes, we should be worried. Obamamania continues to sweep the land. And it may be doing so on a wave of calls for “change”, but the change beneath the rhetoric is as “back to the future” as it gets.

And today, Michelle Obama let us all see behind the curtain.