Surprise, surprise--Michelle Obama's negatives go up, and Barack Obama blames...

...his own version of "the vast right-wing conspiracy":

"Senator Barack Obama blamed the right-wing media for attacks on his wife, Michelle, that have driven up her negative ratings. In an interview with Glamour magazine , Mr. Obama pointed to “the conservative press — Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk,” and said they “went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way” and that they “treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans.” He suggested that spouses be off limits, calling them “civilians” and saying “they didn’t sign up for this.”


Really, now, Senator? Off-limits? Who was it who had her out campaigning for you? Was it the "right wing" that forced her to be out there on the campaign trail? The fact is, that was your decision, and hers; and if someone is going to be out there on the campaign trail, then that person and what he or she says deserves to be open to analysis and criticism, if warranted.

And it wasn't the "right wing" who told her to make rather outrageous statements on the campaign trail, about how this was the first time she'd been proud of the United States in her life, about all the things Obama would "require" his followers and others to do should he be elected, about how terrible life is for both she and her husband and how much everything costs (in a desperate attempt to bond with ordinary folks, one suspects)---never mind that subsequent investigations demonstrated that she alone in her job made over $200,000 a year.

Pathetic, Senator Obama. Quit whining. And quit borrowing from the Clinton playbook; you can't blame some evil, mythical "right wing" for the messes you get yourself into.

The Democrats: what's wrong with Barack Obama

Actually, it has a lot to do with something his wife said recently.
She claimed that, because her husband is now the front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination, "for the first time" she was "proud" of America. Really? For the first time?
Peggy Noonan recently laid out just why we should worry that both she, and her husband, really believe that:

"Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?...Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be?"

Indeed. Is Senator Obama ashamed of American power?
Fundamental: Anyone ashamed of that power, will be unable to wield it effectively.