Is Michelle Obama Running?

Her "Becoming" documentary signals "yes"

Is Michelle Obama Running?

Everybody is talking about it, in light of the cratering Biden-Harris approval polls. This question has intrigued me since I saw “Becoming,” the documentary on her book tour in 2020. Yup, she’s running, I thought, no doubt -- the biopic and chronicle of her book tour, is all pre-campaign battle field prep. The documentary looks a lot like biopics of the past, with a touch of rock tour, complete with pre-performance prayer circle. So yes, I say she is running. For someone’s VP, for crypto president to a failing 2024 Biden, or maybe the Senate. Or maybe she only means to sprinkle a little of the Obama magic dust on a next candidate’s effort, but she’s running.

The first half is mostly Michelle talking about “becoming” herself, from her childhood in Chicago, her loneliness as one of the first Black girls at Princeton, to marriage and motherhood and how those roles limited her, and finally to how her stint as First Lady stopped her ever-evolving self in its tracks. This is what she relates to young kids about her emotional evolution, and they are inspired. She exudes charisma and empathy, surely, but where is she leading them? By the end of the film, I had concluded that she is leading them backwards.

Dilbert cartoonist and author Scott Adams talks about the “fog of the last mile” that falls upon us as we try to solve societal issues like racism. White people were the problem, he says honestly, so White people went to war to cure it; they joined with civil rights greats to change the legal structure of racism as well as introduce new laws to abolish even informal racism. Today we shame people, rightly so, who express any sort of racial cruelty. Yet racism persists. White people have done just about all they can within the structure of law. So while White people may have been the problem, they are not now the solution. But what is?

The truth is, Adams avers, that no one knows what to do in the last mile; we’re all a bit in a fog about that. Michelle doesn’t know either, and so she falls back on her husband’s hope-and-change and her own iteration of 1970s Black activism. Yet we all know this paradigm did not accomplish much in the way of prosperity or violence reduction, so the doc at times sounds like an apologia for Barack’s failures.

She presents herself as an emotional touchstone, at least in the first half, in a Oprah chat style to a rapt audience; she delights them with great humor about raising kids in the White House, meeting the powerful of the world and being less than dazzled -- her Mom in Chief persona. Yet she was a very politically involved First Lady, the most trusted advisor to her husband, a successful Chicago machine politician. She was the fixer of the Kevin Johnson problem. She dispatched her own chief of staff to his mayoral office to take over. She gathered under the government wing much of the food industry, with her school lunch federalization and the “healthy” alternative food push. So if she’s running why doesn’t she talk about this part of her life in the White House? That would have been immensely interesting.

She has a tell: When she says something she doesn’t quite believe, her usually animated face falls, as if she is struggling to repeat the script just right. She of course references the hope-and-change slogan so masterfully utilized by her husband. “Nobody’s talking about hope and change anymore,” she recounts sadly, with that look. Hope for what, change into what? It was Mr. Trump who raised the prosperity for Black America.

Then the show begins to set off political pings, when she turns explicitly to several tragic, controversial incidents of Black people who died in police confrontations. We see portraits of Black people who were shot by police in recent history. Then we see an image of a man with hands up as police cars encircle him.

Who is he meant to be? We cannot help but surmise that these two images are linked purposefully. But even the filmmaker knows that it is established beyond doubt that Michael Brown did not stand with his hands in the air or say “don’t shoot.” If Obama wants to move forward, though, why not at some point discuss the nuances of these events, or the solutions or progress, if any, since then? For instance, the Freddie Gray incident is complex. He was dragged into the police van and transported by six Baltimore police officers, three of whom are Black, in a city with a Black police chief and mayor, a city whose last Republican mayor was elected in 1967. This is significant.

A true debate must be had about all relevant facts, about Democrat governance, of any race, of one-party rule, if this city and all the other one-party cities can ever move forward. Especially now as American cities run by Democrats have homicide rates zooming towards records. But maybe a political candidate doesn’t want to move forward.

The voiceover also notes that shots were fired at the Obama White House on an occasion, yet no mention is made that those shots came from a Hispanic man who hung out with the leftist Occupy DC before unloading six bullets.

Finally, she recounts how disappointed she was that “our folks” did not show up to vote in the midterms. Why should they, if they didn’t want Obamacare or if they wondered where the promised jobs were.

As Michelle O visited the colleges, the young girls she counsels, the Native American college kids she comforts -- terrified by the mere sight of MAGA hats -- are being taught to identify as oppressed in an oppressive nation, to burnish every micro aggression until it shines like a diamond, to note every slight and fight for more “rights” to overcome them. The students who were frightened by the mere sight of a MAGA hat on campus need to be taught to reach out, to engage, to debate. And most of all, in the end, to live bravely and well in this well-intentioned nation.

And the personal testimonies of additional people over the credit roll reinforces the whole idea that we are all victims recovering from this terrible society.

The faces of her rapt audience telegraph that the prospect of her “becoming” is thrilling—and deeply American. That’s her subtext even if she doesn’t realize it. Her disappointments in life, her grumbling – sometimes good-natured, sometime not -- bring to mind a news segment I saw right before the onset of one of our wars post 9/11. I can’t forget it. The reporter was talking to a group of young sailors aboard a Navy destroyer somewhere near the Straits of Hormuz. He spied a Black sailor and immediately thrust the mic into his face. “How do you feel,” he asked apologetically, “having to go to war for a country that treats you so badly?” The young sailor answered, exasperated, “We love our country! Why can’t you people get that?” 

Why can’t Michelle Obama and the radical Democrats get that? Kanye West does. Even pretend-Black Shaun King is getting it. Yet it seems like Michelle is stuck, stuck at the end of a beginning, a place where she knows the rules by heart but doesn’t understand the end game. As enmeshed as she is in a persona impossible to escape, her last mile will be tough -- but then again the last mile is always a place of foggy confusion, as Adams says. However, surprising things can happen. Adams predicts that when this fog parts a golden age appears. I hope this for Michelle and the multitudes who respect and love her. I hope this for the country. I might even join those throngs. Her later venture, though, into the public space is When We All Vote on MTV, and continuing this project to register voters before the midterms to support the latest voting rights act, which would federalize election rules such as mass mailings of ballots, doesn’t bode well. Yes, MTV.

I don’t know if her message is enough to win an election but her partisans hope that what worked for her husband will work for her too.