Michelle Obama, whose husband never paid hush money to a paramour during either of his winning campaigns, knows a thing or two about poor leaders.
She once sat three seats away from Donald Trump.
This past Sunday, Mrs. Obama was interviewed by Stephen Colbert in London to promote her autobiography, Becoming, which has spent 20 weeks as number one on the New York Times’ bestseller list. The Independent released video footage of the forever-FLOTUS’ remarks, in which she compared the current White House tenant to the leather jacket-clad father who shows up to Little League games with “Kool Aid” in a clear water bottle.
While comparing America to a confused teenager during an exchange with Colbert, Obama, who refuses to adopt any of us, told the Late Show host that America was “a little unsettled.”
“Sometimes you spend the weekend with divorced dad. That feels like fun but then you get sick. That is what America is going through. We are living with divorced dad,” she said to laughter from the crowd of more than 15,000.
Obama, who never once had to deal with an adult actress describing her husband’s junk on late-night television, isn’t totally off-base. While her husband’s tenure featured its fair share of drone strikes and deportations, its cabinet members carried themselves with a level of dignity unseen from this administration, and its top black women had wigs appropriate for the occasion.
Naturally, white news pundits had more than a few feelings. CNN’s Dana Bash called Obama’s comments “remarkably unawake” in a segment that aired Tuesday. CNN, who never bothered to ask a panel of Mexican-Americans how it felt to be “bad hombres,” aired a segment wherein divorced dads spoke out against Obama’s characterization, to which they had taken serious offense. Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who has never met a Muslim he could not link to extremism, also decried the remark, saying it reinforced a negative stereotype of divorced daddies.
Obama, for those keeping score at home, has been depicted as a terrorist by a major publication, a constant target for racist attacks on her appearance, and married to the only modern president to have his citizenship called into question. Beyond the ridiculousness of the lip-service paid to Obama’s off-hand remark about a man who doesn’t read intel briefs without pictures is the fact that the analogy holds. Eight years of lucid speeches, general competence and Al Green snippets from stepdad-in-chief feel like progress to Americans and teenagers alike, until a 3-year weekend at other dad’s place reveals that 53% of the milk has gone bad and no one can find the press secretary.
Still, for all the hoopla surrounding her characterization of the man who signs Melania’s body double’s checks, Michelle’s first bar might have hit the hardest.
“For anyone who had any problems with Barack Obama,” Obama told the crowd in London, “let’s just think about what we were troubled by – there were never any indictments.”