Frustrated by their inability to successfully call Barack Obama's character into question, his opponents have seized on the next best option -- attacking his wife.

Paul Waldman | June 24, 2008 | web only

From the moment Barack Obama began contemplating a presidential run, conservatives saw one thing about him they didn't like a bit: his wife. She had a career of her own. The way she kidded her husband about his morning breath suggested that theirs might actually be a marriage of equals. And most of all, she was black. Way, way too black.

So it shouldn't have surprised anyone when a phony story started making the email and Internet rounds claiming that a videotape existed of Michelle Obama giving a speech in which she supposedly said something or other about "whitey." When asked about it, she told The New York Times, "I mean, 'whitey'? That's something that George Jefferson would say." And who else says "whitey"? Virtually no one under the age of 60 -- the term is a relic of the 1960s, that primordial ooze from which all cultural conflict continues to seep.

Let's remember why some conservatives were briefly so enamored of Barack Obama: in right-wing eminence grise William Bennett's words, "he never brings race into it." But in most of the conservative movement, race was never out of it. While the Jeremiah Wright controversy failed to convince sufficient numbers of Americans that Barack is an Angry Black Man, there was still an option open to stoke the fires of racial resentment. Michelle Obama could become the Angry Black Woman.

She's angry, angry, angry, they said. Christoper Hitchens pored over the thesis she wrote as a 21-year-old college student to ferret out a secret crush on Stokely Carmichael. The far-right "news" site World Net Daily ran a column titled, "Michelle Obama: Angry Black Harridan." Michelle Malkin wrote, "Barack Obama better hope his bitter half has a change of attitude if she expects to assume the title of first lady in November." A columnist at the conservative site Townhall.com called Michelle a "nasty, bitter, openly racist ingrate."

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