In the last four months I’ve seen Michelle Obama speak close to a dozen times. From her early days out in South Carolina just after she’d joined the campaign full time till this past week in Kentucky, her message has evolved. Back in Columbia she talked a lot about her own experiences, how she had to fight for her seat at the table. “You know every time somebody told me, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ I pushed past the their doubts and I took my seat at the table,” she told a group of students at Benedict College in Columbia in January. “And I saw who was at the table, people who felt so much more entitled to be in those seats, people who were supposed to be so much more better than I. Every single time I got to that table I thought, ‘Please, there is no magic.’”
Now she puts everyone in the same boat: “All these people, all over the country of all races and genders and shapes and political persuasions are saying, ‘Enough.’ It is our turn as a nation to reclaim our seats at the table,” Michelle told a crowd of 300 volunteers in Lexington, Kentucky Monday. “We’re right on the precipice of something phenomenal, it’s right there, we’re right on the cusp of this new America.”
Her speeches are still grounded where Obama’s soar, but her message is markedly much lighter and hopeful. Here’s a link to the dead tree story on Michelle Obama I did with the inestimable Nancy Gibbs on her evolution.