What a candidate’s spouse says in a campaign is an insight into what may be the view from the White House in the near future.

Michelle Obama has given another revealing talk that reflects her view of America. It is not inspiring.

By her husband’s logic, Michelle Obama must be a heavily armed xenophobic religious zealot, because boy is she bitter. This C-SPAN video of a speech delivered by Mrs. Obama in North Carolina last
Friday is characteristic of her peculiar recent performances on the
stump. It is an hour-long talk to supporters who just want something to
cheer about, and who get some opportunities at the outset, but then
find themselves treated to a profoundly and relentlessly negative
vision of American life.

There’s a lot in these talks about victimhood. And oppression.

In Michelle Obama’s America, everybody’s suffering, no
one has time to make any friends, no one earns enough to eke out a
living anymore, and the bar of success is always being moved just out
of reach. “Folks are struggling like never before,” she says, and in a
nation struggling like never before, society cannot stand the strain.

It’s a really bleak picture of a struggling nation. Here’s a snip from her speech.

What happens in that nation is that people do become
isolated, they do live in a level of division, because see when you’re
that busy struggling all the time, which most people that you know and
I know are, see you don’t have time to get to know your neighbors, you
don’t have time to reach out and have conversations to share stories,
in fact you feel very alone in your struggle because you feel somehow
it must be your fault that you’re struggling that hard, everybody else
must be doing ok, I must be doing something wrong, so you hide…What
happens in that kind of nation is that people are afraid. Because when
your world’s not right no matter how hard you work, then you become
afraid of everyone and everything, because you don’t know whose fault
it is, why you can’t get a handle on life, why you can’t secure a
better future for your kids.

Levin calls the Obamas’ message a ‘gospel of bitterness’,
which recalls the senator’s recent remark about angry, bitter working
class people clinging to their guns and religion.

Pointing to a better future, as Levin suggests here, need not be so
doggone depressing. It needs, in fact, to be visionary, and to speak
for aspiring Americans who believe they can do better while not
bemoaning what America is now. Identity politics divides, and the
politics of victimhood embitters. Who’s bitter now?