Michelle Obama defends husband's record
Posted: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 4:20 PM by Mark Murray
From NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan
GREENVILLE, SC -- At a luncheon here at the swanky Lazy Goat Restaurant, Michelle Obama introduced the crowd to her husband, providing a robust defense of the attacks made against him.
"You don't measure character when everybody is looking, you measure it by what people do in the shadows when no one is watching. And the thing that I want everybody in this country to understand about Barack is he was doing a lot of the work in the shadows. So this inexperience that folks are talking about comes from the fact that you don't know this man, you don't know what he's done because he hasn't been out there selling himself," she said.
Running through his record in Illinois, Mrs. Obama said that no one wants to talk about the work her husband did in the "shadows" in the state Senate there. "It's much easier to focus on a few present votes rather than focusing on all the hard work that Barack has done for regular people. Work than no other front-runner in this race can claim," she said.
She claimed that she and her husband were unfazed by the attacks against them because they had faced them before. "You know what they said about Barack in Illinois: They said he was too young; they said he was too inexperienced; they said that hey couldn't raise the money; they said that he couldn't build a political organization to outmatch the might of an Illinois family political dynasty. Does this sound familiar? They said he was too black. They said he wasn't black enough. They said there was no way that white folks from downstate would vote for a guy named Barack Obama. So you will have to forgive us if we are not made when we hear this because we've heard it all before," she told the crowd.
Her only shot at the rival Democratic candidates came on the Iraq war. "Right there, that's exhibit A. Because every single person who's a front-runner in this race, with all their years of experience, look at the facts, because they said we need to fight. Being mean and tough meant more than the truth… And no one else in this race who is a front-runner did it other than Barack," she said.
Mrs. Obama, her speech, and the event in total were what one would expect from seeing political spouse. It appears unlikely that the campaign will use her to go against Senator Clinton in the way former President Clinton has gone after her husband.
Perhaps fearful that she might be thrown a question by the reporters that surrounded her after the event, her staff ushered all the cameras and reporters into a holding room in the restaurant and promised that she would come and take questions after greeting voters. Instead, they ushered her out quickly and told reporters they had run out of time.
Indeed, the event did start late because Mrs. Obama's plane couldn't land due to fog. But to keep her on schedule, the campaign had cancelled her middle event. Trying to approach her anyway, Michelle Obama stared straight ahead and gave a terse "no" when asked if she would be willing to take some questions.
Her goal, it appeared, was simply to sell her husband -- and she did it remarkably well, speaking with more passion and poise and personal appeal on the stump than the candidate sometimes exhibits. Women at the event hugged her, and told her that they were proud of her. An African-American woman who had said she didn't know if she would vote for a Republican or a Democrat decided on the spot after hearing Obama that she would vote for her though she had never heard Obama himself.
Mrs. Obama will spend the next four days campaigning throughout South Carolina. This is her eighth campaign trip to the state.
