She didn’t quite put it this way, but the takeaway was that reelecting Trump would mean certain death.

Michelle Obama is uniquely suited to make this case.

“I am one of a handful of people living today who have seen firsthand the immense weight and awesome power of the presidency,” she said early in her speech, as if she was reaching through the screen and grabbing viewers by the lapels for the next 15 minutes.

“And let me once again tell you this. The job is hard. It requires clearheaded judgment, a mastery of complex and competing issues, a devotion to facts and history, a moral compass and an ability to listen. And an abiding belief that each of the 330 million lives in this country has meaning and worth. A president’s words have the power to move markets. They can start wars or broker peace. They can summon our better angels or awaken our worst instincts. You simply cannot fake your way through this job.”

This was not the Michelle Obama of hope and change that defined her husband’s rise. Michelle was always the less sentimental half of the Obama team, the one with slightly more pessimistic assumptions about many pockets of America. But it was still jarring, 16 years after her husband declared at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston that there were no blue states and no red states, to hear Michelle Obama plainly say “that my message won’t be heard by some people” because “we live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention.”

This is surely the first time a president’s wife has repudiated her husband’s core observation about American politics as outdated and incorrect.

She of course anticipated that her scorching indictment of Donald Trump would raise questions about her own most famous political principle: “When they go low, we go high.”

Her warning about staying above the fray was reframed as a warning not to “degrade” oneself as Trump has. But it wasn’t about remaining above the fray, as the Obamas have occasionally been accused of over the last few years. “Going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty,” she said.

Foreigners often marvel about the fact that America could elect and reelect the first Black president and then follow that history-making with someone who makes racist appeals to voters. Historians often retort that progress on civil rights in America is often followed by a retrenchment. Michelle and Barack Obama have often served as the yin and yang of this debate. Barack is the optimist from Hawaii who always told the American story as one of continued progress toward living up to the original ideals of the Declaration of Independence.

As he said in his second inaugural address:

“What makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.”

Michelle is the hard-headed realist from the South Side of Chicago who suggested in her memoir that Trump’s election confirmed some ugly truths she had always harbored about the United States. In many ways, the Democrats are still the party of Barack, but they are living in Michelle’s world.

Source:politico.com