Today's Wall Street Journal has a great profile of Michelle Obama. As a reader, your eyes will probably immediately drift to this graf, parts of which I hadn't heard before:
But sometimes her approach can backfire. When she told audiences that her husband is "snore-y and stinky" in the morning, doesn't put the butter back in the fridge and one morning "put on his clothes and left" while she juggled her own schedule to deal with an overflowing toilet, some voters and observers cringed that she was emasculating her husband.
I'd describe it less as "emasculating" than as "too much information" for some voters (though I personally find it refreshing). That said, it wouldn't be fair to single out those few lines. If nothing else, you should read Michelle reflecting generally on her role in the campaign, which puts the previous graf into context:
Her role, Mrs. Obama says, "is to give people yet another slice of who Barack is, making him even more multidimensional," because people picking a president "want to know not just about policies...but who are you? What do you believe in? Can I trust you?" Her comments about his foibles were meant to prevent "deifying" her husband, she says: "He's a gifted man -- one of the most brilliant politicians you'll see in this lifetime -- but in the end, he's just a man."
Hear, hear.
--Noam Scheiber