In case you thought the “non-partisan media company” known as Politico was an objective news organization, playing politics right down the middle (as they promised they would when they started), think again. From today’s sob story about how the media is being mean to Michelle Obama:
It’s been a long time since Michelle Obama has been attacked like this.
The first lady’s lavish Spanish vacation was the lead story in the Drudge Report for days. Political columnists and commentators lampooned her as a 21st-century Marie Antoinette, unwinding at a luxury resort while unemployment lingers near 10 percent and President Barack Obama’s poll numbers fade. And headlines set off political sirens: Scandal! Tone deaf! Elitist!
Tone deaf? Elitist?
Yet still, those mean conservatives just won’t let the poor woman have her umpteenth vacation before the First Family, you know, goes on vacation again:
The attacks from right-wing commentators — and a handful of left-leaning pundits — produced the first harsh critiques against the first lady since the heated days of the 2008 presidential campaign when she told an audience that America had finally improved: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
The outrage from conservatives could foreshadow how Republicans might treat the first lady when she sets out to stump for Democrats during midterm elections. When Obama returns to the campaign trail, it could expose her to attacks by Republicans and jeopardize her new, more polished image as a modern woman balancing a career, children and marriage to the leader of the free world.
Ya think?
Yet at the same time, the GOP must walk a fine line in dealings with Obama, whose popularity rating is at 50 percent and whom many working women admire. It’s a risky move, Republican strategists say, to resurrect the fist-bumping, militant caricature of Michelle Obama that at times overshadowed her husband’s presidential race campaign.
Which Republican “fist-bumping, militant caricature” could Politico possibly be thinking of? This one, from that hateful, radical wingnut publication, the New Yorker?
If this is the level of fact-challenged political analysis Politico now deals in, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei might as well go back to the Washington Post, if the kiddie corps now running the place will have them back.
Obama’s Spanish holiday triggered a feeding frenzy among conservatives. The New York Daily News’s Andrea Tantaros claimed “Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation.” Fox News’s Greta Van Sustern suggested the first lady was “trying to torpedo” her husband with a “fancy foreign vacation.” Rush Limbaugh ridiculed her as “Mooch-elle.”
Even Joe Scarborough, the former GOP congressman-turned-MSNBC-television-host, said the controversy was “part of a bigger narrative … about Michelle Obama.”
John Feehery, a Republican strategist, told POLITICO the first lady brought it on herself.
“I do think that taking very expensive trips without [the president] is not particularly good judgment, especially when the country is kinda going broke,” Feehery said. “That’s fair fodder.”
Somehow, you know — you just know — that Politico doesn’t believe that at all.
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