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By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Obamafiles | Spring of Pain | The Best Democratic Primary EVER — Comments (25) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

And so we greet a lovely Monday morning in the Spring of Pain.

Michelle Obama: Barack has hit boiling point

Michelle Obama lifted the lid on the irritation felt by the leading Democrat candidate for the White House at the way anti-American outbursts by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, have dogged his campaign.

He is said to be itching to turn all his fire on John McCain, the Republican candidate, who is benefiting most from Mr Obama's protracted tussle with Hillary Clinton.

Mrs Obama told a rally in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday that only her husband's desire to change US politics had helped him to control his feelings: "Barack is always thinking three steps ahead – what do we need to do to make change."

Her husband was thinking "I can't let my ego, my anger, my frustration get in the way of the ultimate goal," she said.

Permit me to quote from Bob Heinlein's - a writer who I am morally certain that Michelle Obama would never read voluntarily - quite good and habitually misunderstood Starship Troopers:

I may have given the impression that boot camp was made harder than necessary. This is incorrect.

It was made as hard as possible and on purpose.

Read on.

It's one of the funny little accidents of history, really. You see, some time in about, oh, 1951 or so it suddenly dawned on the American voting public that whoever they elected President of the United States of America would have the shiny new ability to destroy entire countries in an afternoon. That later got "upgraded" to being able to wreck civilization above the township level and very possibly exterminate the entire human race. This naturally can alarm a people - even Americans, who are widely considered to be insanely optimistic Pollyannas with no in-the-bone appreciation of how bad things can get. So we quietly changed things around a little.

Now this is of course all my own opinion. Still, it really does help to think of the American electoral system as one big test-to-destruction: we take a group of self-confessed egomaniacs and run them through the wringer every four years. Not enough sleep, not enough exercise, constant exposure to disease and discomfort, a blizzard of information to be instantly memorized and discarded, and the constant threat that every mistake made - and mistakes will be made - will be splashed across the front page of every paper on the planet. And, just to top it all off, at some point somebody will come up to you and smash you in the face with a lead pipe, just to see how you react to that.

So what's happening to Senator Obama is not a failure of the system. It is the system. It is, in fact, overdue. The reason why his wife is upset - besides the fact that it's her husband and the father of her kids being whacked around - is that from her point of view it came pretty much out of nowhere, which is... reasonable, if both irrelevant and meaningless. The American voting public needs to know if he can take a punch; it's a shame that it's apparently never happened before, but that's a matter for the Illinois Democratic Party itself to address, frankly.

So, Barack, when James Carville - surrogate of a candidate that has already gone through this process - says things like "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two", here's a free hint: smile. Shrug. Maybe roll your eyes. Don't acknowledge the hit.

And don't use your wife to say the things that you can't. That's what anonymous staffers are for.

Moe Lane

PS: By the way, Michelle, Tom Maguire would like to bring up some bare-knuckle electoral habits exhibited by your husband during his State Senate campaign. You know, that guy knew how to brawl; so what happened?