Michelle Obama’s DNC speech shows how desperately America will miss her

If there's a First Lady who'll go down in history as the definitive spouse-in-chief, who has set the bar so high that even the first African-American president of the United States of America has a tough time matching up, it's Michelle Obama.

FLOTUS, at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, was not just a revelation: she was the story - the Great American Story that has been sold again and again to the rest of the world. She was power, grace, accomplishment, humility, political liberalism punched with a floating ease of carpool karaoke. She was the ballad queen of American political music.

Michelle Obama, while endorsing Hillary Clinton at the DNC, gave us a glimpse of what a real leader could be. She might as well be running for president now. She would win.

Instead, what she did was to bring the high-voltage rhetorical war in the US of A down to a digestible level, gave it the clarity it needed so badly, without for once taking the name of the one and only. Donald Trump, whose every tweet is a snide, deeply sexist and racist remark aimed at either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, didn't get named by the wonderfully poised and passionate Michelle Obama.

She said: "When they go low, we go high."

And no, not a single reference to Melania Trump's latest gaffe - the plagiarised bits from Michelle's own convention speech, eight years ago. A speech where she unspooled how the Oval Office and the White House unnerved her, chiefly because of the latter's name. She - the black woman, the first black aspirant for the other tough job, FLOTUS; she - the immigrant's daughter, the Harvard alumna who fought her way up; she - the upstart's wife, the one forever made to feel the imposter; but also she - who transcended that feeling, and now was fighting to make that transcendence possible for others - black, LGBT, immigrant, woman - who embraced America.

She did so and how.

The global media is lapping her up, as expected.

There she was, eight years later. Actually four years if we count 2012 as well, and we should, because reminders of her alienness to White House have been the most cherished weapon of mass distraction for those who kept "binders full of women" in their office drawers (read Mitt Romney, but perhaps every Republican, including Sarah Palin).

This time, at her last convention speech as FLOTUS, she hit the bull's eye once again. But this time, she raised the stakes to include her children, and the children of those who come to make a life in America, like her husband did once, though he was born there. She touched the children who look up to Barack Obama and ask "Is my hair like yours?"

She said:

I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just seven and ten years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those big men with guns. And I saw their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, "What have we done?"

She didn't have to "play mother". She was, effortlessly enough, the mother of politically-inclined, opinionated, tough, amazing, hilarious, professionally ponderous, skin-wise-a-minority mothers. Her brethren fight for affordable medical care, depend on affirmative action to get ahead beating centuries of oppression.

She said: "I wake up every day in a house built by slaves."

She didn't hesitate to weave in that complicated history - that White House, until not long back, allowed black people mostly to clean up the place and work as butlers and maids and attendants to history, not the writers. She did not hesitate to touch upon her roots that trace back to a plantation in South Carolina, to slave trade, to Middle Passage, to wrecked ships in the cold waters of Atlantic for two centuries.

She didn't hesitate to insert race in the American political discourse at a time when ALL the political candidates across party lines are once again white. At a time when race is being erased to suit a post-emergency scenario brought about by exploding gun violence and urgent black lives matter demonstrations and a Republican candidate who is not just tone deaf to history, but perhaps its most uncouth agent. Who perhaps wants to turn the great global shingle into a giant casino, and play Russian roulette with Vladimir Putin.

She said:

That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight - how we urge them to ignore those who question their father's citizenship or faith. How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel, or acts like a bully, you don't stoop to their level - no, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.

Michelle Obama was, of course, endorsing Hillary Clinton, not her husband, or herself for matter.

And there lie both the rub and the grace. Was it "brilliantly phoney" as some sceptics reasoned, not without a few bullet points, of course?

When Michelle Obama, in the 2008 campaign, had to square off the phenomenon that was Bill Clinton, former US president, second handsomest after John F Kennedy (by some standards) and a world famous lothario, she had tough competition. Not only because the white liberal male is the American ruse for all things deeply discriminatory and entrenched and upsetting at the "id" of our times.

It was also because the Democratic party was forked - for the first time ever - between choosing its first African-American candidate and first female candidate.

Michelle had the difficult task of pitching for the black man in a country that seemed poised to appoint a woman commander-in-chief. After eight years of George W Bush-era machismo, after devastating foreign policies among which the Iraq War stood out like a bleeding, inflamed, puss-filled thumb, Michelle had to pitch in for an Iraq War opposer. Only, he was black.

What did she do?

Instead of circumventing race, she decided to embrace it. And in doing that, she underscored what was until then talked about only in jargonised academic language or in the oped pages of left-liberal magazines, not even the New York Times.

Iraq War was a graveyard of foreign policy and it was racially-inflected, driven and engineered to further worsen race relations, both within and outside America. Michelle could see the writing on the wall.

Hence, the "phoney brilliance" that some talk about could be said of her when she uttered the following line:      

"Don't ever let anyone tell you that this country isn't great, that somehow we need to make America great again, because right now this is the greatest country on Earth."

But is it fair to pin this transference of responsibility to Hillary and a consequent whitewashing of this Iraq War supporter (as well as a chief architect of the ongoing Syrian mayhem) as only being "phoney"?

Nope.

There are diplomatic niceties and compulsions which though slow and steady and unbrilliant in their own tiny embedded ways nevertheless make the world go around. Michelle's powerful endorsement of Hillary therefore trudged the line in which Hillary does have a proven record. Benefits for single women, for children, for affirmative action, for the rights of disabled, for LGBTQ people, for various other minorities that make America if not great, at least the original rainbow nation.

On a personal level, she endorsed Hillary because Hillary is the comeback queen.

Hillary has had many political downs - when her husband's got synonymous with sexual scandals and she chose not to leave him, she was dubbed regressive by many - mostly liberal progressive women who couldn't fathom that decision. Was it only about political calculation?

Michelle endorsed Hillary because she saw the latter swallow her pride in 2008 and help Barack Obama - till then a mere senator, of Illinois - make history as the first black president of a deeply divided, racially splintered America. That, after a defeat more insulting than anything she had ever known.

Hillary was bruised, but she fought back. Then became the third female Secretary of State of the USA. (The first was Madeleine Albright and the second, Condoleezza Rice.)

Michelle said:

And when she didn't win the nomination eight years ago, she didn't get angry or disillusioned. Hillary did not pack up and go home. Because as a true public servant, Hillary knows that this is so much bigger than her own desires and disappointments.

So much can be learnt from Michelle Obama.

She's really the ideal outcome of the Civil Rights Movement, what Martin Luther King, Jr dreamt of in his famous "I Have A Dream" speech.

More so, because Bernie Sanders and his aggressive, socialistic but quasi-militant campaign to clinch the Democratic nomination, despite all the revolutionary potential it had churned up, failed to remain graceful. And let's not even go to what happened at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week, where chants of "lock her up" at the mention of Hillary Clinton alternated with Donald Trump's Hitleristic unbridled megalomania.

Michelle warned America not to entrust nuclear codes to a raging mad man with a penchant for psychobabble in 140 characters and without information, grace and dignity, but without once taking his name.

Why wouldn't Barack Obama - POTUS to all - say he loves her, at the most public forum ever?

Does America deserve Michelle? Yes, she's come out of its bloodied loins.