Michelle Obama Had the Best Closing Argument of the Campaign
10/31/2024 04:00 AM
On the last Saturday of October, Michelle Obama appeared in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and gave one of the most remarkable political speeches in memory. It was expansive and nuanced, yet conveyed the most straightforward message imaginable, applicable not just to the presidential candidate she was supporting, but to the millions of people who will be voting in the 2024 election:
"I am asking you all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously," she implored. "Please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us. A vote for him is a vote against us. Against our health, against our worth." This is a question, she said, "about our value as women in this world."
I hadn't been watching Obama's speech at the time. I only knew she'd given it because of the blizzard of texts I began receiving from friends who were seeing the clips that immediately flooded social media. It was one of those rare speeches that sends an electric shock down the spine of those who hear it, and a particularly invigorating one coming at the end of a short and scary sprint toward an existential electoral choice.
Most people I love are doing the things they need to be doing —writing letters, phone banking, canvassing, giving money to Jon Tester — yet are also working hard to not let themselves feel anything, because the intensity of those feelings might leave them paralyzed. In recent weeks, I've developed a persistent pain at the bottom of my right rib cage that a doctor friend has suggested might be a diaphragm cramped by my recent failure to breathe normally.
Yet Obama's words roused many to sensation, permitted us to inhale and exhale. These words were more potent than the overpolled enunciations crafted by Democratic strategists, which have this fall rolled over airwaves like troubling theme weeks, built around Democracy, Freedom, Joy, Abortion, The Economy, and Liz Cheney. In the days following the Kalamazoo rally, the Trump and Harris campaigns would offer more official closing messages: Trump's sprawling, ugly gathering at Madison Square Garden and Harris's efficient and bright speech at the Ellipse, in which she reviewed her policy priorities, offered bipartisan warmth, and strove to offer a crisp contrast to the wrathful energies that led to the January 6 insurrection.
Obama's address — which, at 40 minutes, was long for a stump speech by someone who is not the candidate — was the real gift: the more vivid, deeply felt, blood-and-guts vision of what this election is about. At its heart was the simplest and most heartbreaking of contentions — that women are people.
Two nights later, Trump's dystopian open-mic night for Nazis would provide its own perfect distillation of the contemporary right's project: the dehumanization of vast categories of people. Yes, there was the horrific joke, told by the villainously named Tony Hinchcliffe, about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage. But also cracks about Latinos who "like to make babies" and "don't pull out … they come inside, like they're doing to our country," and Black people who "carved watermelons" for Halloween, and Palestinians who are born violent rock throwers, and Jews who are cheap. Trump's friend David Rem called Kamala Harris "the Antichrist," while Tucker Carlson referred to Harris as "a Samoan Malaysian low IQ" person. Trump adviser Stephen Miller crowed that "America is for Americans," echoing the mid-century German call nur für Deutsche, on which the eventual extermination of millions was predicated.
What is left in the face of this orgiastic festival of brutality and domination? When the New York Times is directly calling Trump's campaign racist and misogynist, and Trump's former chief of staff is calling him a fascist, it can feel like most people have simply run out of words to convey the alarm they are feeling.
What Obama did in Kalamazoo was to come at it from another angle: emphasizing not the cruelty of the opponent, but the humanity of those whose bodies are on the line.
Democrats have long loved her speeches. She is a passionate, motivating orator, who despite loathing politics has too often been named as the fantasy-football pick of electoral hobbyists who imagine her the sole, shiny answer to the question of what woman might be able to win the presidency. But her speeches have also been constrained in a way that this one was not.
Back in 2008, at the historic convention at which Barack Obama accepted his nomination, Michelle gave a speech in which she presented herself as a sister, a wife, a daughter, and a mother, surely a corrective to racist caricatures of Black women as ornery and to the unwillingness to celebrate them as maternal ideals. But the speech also forced her to blot out parts of her professional and intellectual identity, to present her powerful voice as exclusively in service to others, and therefore palatable to a nation discomfited by the meteoric ascent of a Black president and his dynamic partner.
In 2016, at the historic convention at which Barack's successor, Hillary Clinton, would accept the nomination to be the first woman major-party presidential candidate, Michelle gave a speech in which the famous takeaway was "when they go low, we go high," a pithy call to civility from powerful members of a party apparently unwilling to recognize that they had brought a dessert fork to a gunfight.
At the 2024 convention, at which Harris was nominated, Michelle gave a barn burner, exhorting people to "do something." In Kalamazoo, she was heeding her own advice, with oratory that was winding and complex, offering a view of women and their bodies miles away from the careful messaging around abortion that Democrats deployed for too long and have only recently begun to amend. Instead of characterizing women as satellites of men, she centered them as the moral concern around which our political choices should orbit.
She started with a plea to not "buy into the lie that we do not know who Kamala is or what she stands for," noting that the media has two sets of standards for the two candidates on the ticket. "We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs. But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals."
"So I hope you'll forgive me," Obama went on, "if I'm a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior, his obvious mental decline, his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse. All of this, while we pick apart Kamala's answers from interviews that he doesn't even have the courage to do."
Admitting she's "a little angry" was a risky choice for Obama, who has long been caricatured and devalued as a stereotype of Angry Black Womanhood. Indeed, coverage of her Kalamazoo speech quickly homed in on that single admission, featuring images of her with an aggrieved finger in the air. But Obama had accounted for that response in her speech, lamenting that Harris had been unjustly asked to "never show too much anger."
She also had an invitation to extend, without rancor, to "the men in the arena." She did not scold them, as her husband had a few weeks ago, when he told a roomful of Harris volunteers that he suspected that Black men were not voting for Harris because they didn't want a woman president. Instead, Michelle asked the guys "to bear with me on this" as she began to talk about women's bodies, explaining that she didn't blame anyone for not knowing much about the reality of having these bodies, since even women and girls "have been taught to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work."
She explained out loud — and it is impossible to overemphasize how rarely this has been discussed in the context of a major political contest — that many women "suffer with severe cramps and nausea for days on end every single month." She added that "too many women my age have no idea what's going on with our bodies as we battle through menopause and debilitating hot flashes and depression," another utterance that has no precedent in a presidential context, in a country that devalues women and especially devalues older women.
In fact, the previous startling reference to menopause in this race came during an unearthed 2020 interview with J.D. Vance, in which he explained how his mother-in-law had become a primary caretaker for his newborn baby when his wife, Usha, had taken a high-powered clerkship. His interviewer had asserted that "the purpose of the postmenopausal female" was to raise grandchildren, a sentiment Vance had appeared to agree with.
But here was beautiful, brilliant, powerful Michelle Obama, identifying herself as a postmenopausal female who understood her function differently: to expose the many risks posed to bodies by politicians like Trump and Vance.
Obama described the fear caused by "an unexpected lump, an abnormal Pap smear or mammogram," noting that as OB/GYN care is decimated by the post-Dobbs legal regime, so is access to all kinds of testing and treatment. "I don't expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel," she continued. "In all honesty, most of us as women don't fully understand the breadth and depth of our own reproductive lives. That's because our experiences are often neglected by science. There's a huge disparity in research funding for women's health. And if you happen to look like me and report pain, you are more likely to be ignored, even by your own doctors."
Here Obama was laying out the racial and gendered exclusions in medicine, which for too long has not treated women's bodies, and especially not Black women's bodies, with the same seriousness it has applied to men's bodies. It was a metaphor for how our political system has excluded women, robbing them of their civil rights and their rights to bodily autonomy, which are really one and the same.
She laid out a picture of loss and pain and fear, urging men to see the women in their lives not as subsidiary beings, but as loved ones whose suffering would be devastating. "Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out of state or overseas," Obama said. "Your wife or mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer. Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she's bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy. Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away."
The bonds between men and women — both romantic and familial — are imperiled by the systemic devaluation and forced control of women's bodies, Obama was arguing. "This will not just affect women," she said, "it will affect you and your sons": men forced to become fathers too early, men whose futures are derailed, men who will fear for the lives of their partners and the well-being of the families they love. "You'll be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something," she said. "You might be the one left to raise your children alone."
Contra the claims that Obama was participating in a kind of misandry, it wasn't just women whose humanity she was recognizing. She was addressing men as people with hearts and emotions, as fathers and sons and lovers capable of grief. That is its own refreshing frame on masculinity, especially in the same days in which Carlson had given a twisted speech about "daddy" Trump spanking "bad girl" Democrats; the MSG crowd had chanted "Tampon Tim" as Vance mocked Tim Walz; and North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson's spokesman had responded to Democrat Josh Stein's call to "treat others with dignity and respect" by saying, "Shut up, you lying beta male."
Obama reminded the crowd that Harris supported abortion rights "not because she's a woman, but because she's a decent human being," a distinction that hits a nerve as we stand, once again, at the brink of electing a woman president for the first time in American history.
In Obama's entreaties to recognize the existence and value of women's (and men's) lives, there were centuries of reverberations, stretching back to Sojourner Truth's assertions that her pain was every bit as real as a white woman's: "I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me." There was the parallel with Hillary Clinton's less emotional yet somehow still revolutionary point in 1995 that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." And Ruth Bader Ginsburg's blistering 2007 dissent in Gonzales v. Carhart, in which she spoke of a "woman's autonomy to decide for herself her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature."
The need to endlessly reassert the humanity and civic existence of people who have not been counted as complete creatures of God or country feels so basic. But everywhere we see that it remains a necessary point to make, such as when Trump's running mate devalues "childless cat ladies" as "sociopathic," or when the government attempts to police women's bodies. At Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Harris asked him, "Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?" His answer was "no."
Of course, calls to recognize the humanity of women might be heard as hollow or incomplete coming from a party that, even in these dire months, alsohas refused to treat certain categories of people as legible civic participants. Michelle Obama was speaking, after all, on behalf of a candidate who has not offered Palestinians a voice, platform, or meaningful recognition of their suffering during her campaign.
Obama may have made oblique reference to this in her speech, speaking to the "disillusioned people out there upset with the slow pace of change," assuring them that she gets it. "We all know we have a lot more work to do in this country," she said. "But to anyone out there thinking about sitting out this election … your rage does not exist in a vacuum. If we don't get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage."
The bodies of Palestinian wives, daughters, and mothers are already collateral damage, and I can offer no exculpatory but, only a series of ands. Tens of thousands have been killed in Gaza, and Madison Square Garden was full of people who would gleefully destroy more, while deporting, detaining, and denying health care and housing to millions here. And this is the presidential choice on offer. And the Harris campaign is the only chance to preserve access to the levers of dissent with which to continue the work of ensuring more people gain freedom, safety, and dignity.
The project of electing a woman — one imperfect woman — does not reverse the systemic exclusions of the past or in itself create a more just future. Yet failing once again to elect one will cement a ghastly and exclusionary future, rooted deep in the erasure of millions. This presidential election offers two options: one promises the obliteration of bodies and systems of democracy, packaged as cruel punch lines; the other begins with an aspirational recognition of shared humanity and our only chance to gain another day in which we can fight for better.
