Michelle Obama's Task

Columnist Robert Fulford, National Post, has an interesting perspective on Michelle Obama's speech last week at the Democratic presidential convention. In his view, Ms. Obama had to demonstrate her ordinariness despite a lifetime of achievement and accomplishment that suggest otherwise. He writes in The Tyranny of Stereotype,

Ms. Obama's chore, when she gave her speech the other night, was not to reveal herself but to reassure voters about their own values. She was there to reassert what the public needs to believe, or thinks it should believe. TV commentators who analyze speeches such as hers judge public figures according to a formula that has already been tested and found acceptable. And they judge themselves in a similar way. Not one of them dares to show more than a flicker of originality. They want to sound shrewd, they want to avoid repeating what someone else has just said, they may hope to insert a slightly fresh thought into the debate. But they never stray far from what everyone else thinks. They are there to say the right thing, which usually means a version of the national consensus. They will not be welcome on television if they are overly original, if they sound odd or weird.