GALVESTON — Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama, told a Galveston audience Monday that in her lifetime, many things have gotten more difficult for average Americans and her husband was the best candidate to help change them.
Michelle Obama spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of about 600 at the The Grand 1894 Opera House.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each have barely more than half of the 2,025 delegates they need to secure the nomination, so the 228 delegates at stake in the March 4 Texas primary are vitally important to both campaigns. Ohio, with its 161 delegates, votes the same day.
The importance of Texas — and Galveston County with its relative wealth of Democratic and independent voters — has been in evidence. Former President Bill Clinton was in town last week to stump for his wife and John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, came to town in support of Barack Obama.
But more than the other two Democratic dignitaries, Michelle Obama, 44, detailed what she saw as the problems confronted by average Americans.
She’d come under heat in recent weeks for saying this was the first time in her adult life she’d been really proud of her country. The campaign later clarified her remarks, saying she was speaking of the politics of the United States.
On Monday, Obama was careful not to stir up similar controversy.
She described a childhood in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side. It was a childhood in which her father’s income as a city employee could support the family and she could get a good enough public-school education to go on to Princeton University and Harvard Law School.
“We’ve come a long way in this country and we should be proud of that,” Obama said.
But, she said, many of the opportunities she grew up with are moving out of the reach of normal Americans.
“Folks are hungry for change,” Obama said. “They’re engaged in this race in a way they haven’t in a while.”
Some of the reasons are economic, she said.
“Folks aren’t asking for much,” she said. “People want to know that if they get up and go to work every day, they can make enough to support their families. ... People want to know that if they get sick, they won’t go bankrupt.”
Also, college has become so expensive that it is out of reach for some Americans and it saddles others with crushing debts when they leave school, Obama said.
She said Americans have also been made cynical by the way the Bush administration started the Iraq War without asking the public to sacrifice.
“We are fighting a war right now, but the only people who are suffering are over there fighting and dying and their families,” she said.
The Clinton campaign has sought to diminish Barack Obama’s opposition to the war from the outset. One argument has been that his opposition was easier because he wasn’t yet in the U.S. Senate, so he didn’t have to vote on a resolution authorizing President Bush to take the country to war.
However, Michelle Obama pointed out, her husband was in the midst of a seven-way race for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat when the war began.
Michelle Obama said that her husband’s story — and the performance of his campaign — show that he’s the best candidate to be president.
Barack Obama, 46, was born to an African father and an 18-year-old white mother. His parents separated when Barack Obama was two and they later divorced.
Through much of his childhood, he was raised by his white, middle-class grandparents, but he has a paternal grandmother still living in a village in Kenya, Michelle Obama said.
Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first black student to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. But instead of taking a job in a Wall Street law firm, Obama took a job with a Chicago firm, representing community action groups.
And since he mounted his presidential campaign, he has consistently exceeded pundits’ expectations and outperformed his more established opponents, his wife said.
She said that the country needed a leader who could get it past the cynicism of the recent past.
“We need somebody to challenge us to be a better nation, and I believe the only person in that race is my husband,” Michelle Obama said.
