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Taking on her critics with a fist bump

— Photo: AP

All smiles and softness: Michelle Obama (third from left)… not one to duck a controversy.

Say what you like about Michelle Obama — and people have been saying a lot about her recently, much of it unflattering — but the woman who could become the next first lady of the United States is not one to duck a controversy. She showed that on Wednesday when she took to the set of The View, a TV chat show for women.

The most extreme comment lobbed at her to date was the jibe this month that the “fist bump” she gave her husband Barack on the night of his victory in the presidential primaries — placing her clenched fist against his — was a secret terrorist handshake. So how did Michelle greet The View’s panel of five women waiting to quiz her?

With a fist bump, naturally.

“Should I be worried about doing that with you?” the comedian Whoopi Goldberg quipped.

“Let me tell you, I’m not that hip,” replied Ms Obama. “I got this from the young staff — it’s the new high five.”

For the ensuing hour, the set of ABC’s popular daytime show resounded to the noise of stereotypes about Michelle Obama popping.

Elitist with a $300,000 salary? She talked about her working-class father and her roots in poor south Chicago. Black revolutionary? She revealed that one of her inspirations was the current first lady, Laura Bush. Out of touch with ordinary Americans? She explained why she gave up wearing pantyhose years ago (“it feels better”) and how “it’s fun to look pretty.”

Not that it wasn’t all carefully choreographed. As the New York Times made plain, her appearance on The View, together with a long interview she granted the newspaper, are part of an elaborate rebuttal exercise to counter her portrayal in the rightwing media as a hatred-filled black separatist by showing her softer side.

Over the past four months the attacks on her have intensified. It began with her unguarded words in February, that “for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country...” The phrase has been replayed endlessly on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, omitting what she went on to say: “... because I think people are hungry for change.”

Then Rush Limbaugh, the talk radio host, ran with rumours circulating on the internet that she had ranted against “whitey” at the pulpit of her former church in Chicago. The Conservative magazine the National Review said she was “America’s unhappiest millionaire” and dubbed her “Mrs Grievance.”

Even the left-leaning Slate web magazine picked up the theme, with a piece by Christopher Hitchens asking whether Michelle was to blame for Mr. Obama’s troubles over his radical former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in which Hitchens referred to a college dissertation she wrote in 1985 which alludes to black “separationism.”

Put all that together, and it spells trouble for the Obama campaign. But the fight-back has begun. In her New York Times interview she dismissed the “whitey” story as ridiculous. “Anyone who says that doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived.”

On The View she told Barbara Walters, the veteran TV current affairs presenter, that she took the attacks in her stride, rationalising them in her mind as the need for the 24-hour news cycle to fill up space.

“I wear my heart on my sleeve. At some level when you put your heart out there, there’s a risk that you take.”

As for her controversial remark about her pride in America, made at a rally in Wisconsin, she insisted she had merely being trying to say that people are engaged in the 2008 election “in a way we haven’t seen for a long time.” Echoing her husband’s mantra, she said her life story — born to working-class parents who worked hard and sacrificed to send her to Princeton — could only have been possible in America.

In the furore that followed the Wisconsin remarks she received support from Laura Bush who said her words had been misconstrued. Ms Obama returned the favour, saying: “I’m taking some cues” from her. “There’s a reason why people like [Laura Bush] — because she doesn’t fuel the fire.”

That summed up neatly the challenge now facing Ms Obama and the new team around her that has been set up to counter a growing impression that she is fuelling the fire. She has just taken on a new chief of staff, Stephanie Cutter, who as a former communications chief for Bill Clinton in the White House knows all about battling against negative imagery.

Before Ms Obama went on The View, sporting a sleeveless black and white floral dress (bought, she told us, in her favourite shop in Chicago), her husband gave her one simple piece of advice: “Be good.”

The couple never obsessed over politics at home, she said, because her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, insisted on talking soccer.

When her husband first raised the possibility of running for the White House her reaction was: “No! No! Please don’t do that.” She hadn’t even wanted him to enter politics in the first place “because I knew it was a mean business.”

The woman who emerged was all smiles and softness. But will it be enough to silence her detractors? — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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