In her pre-recorded speech for the Covid-limited 2020 Democratic National Convention, former First Lady Michelle Obama explained one of her standard lines about dealing with your opponent: "Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, 'When others are going so low, does going high still really work?' My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight." She went further, saying, "But let’s be clear: going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty...Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God...And going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth." And then she said her harshest line of the speech: "So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country," which isn't all that harsh, really, although she gave reasons why she believed that, especially highlighting the chaos caused by Trump during the pandemic's early days.
I've been critical about Obama's belief in "going high" because it simply seems quaint and unsuited to the moment, part of an imagined time in politics that really never existed but we like to pretend it did. But that speech demonstrated a small but significant shift in tone for Obama, from a seeming refusal to denigrate an opponent to stating, essentially, that Trump is a motherfucker and he will fuck mothers because that's what motherfuckers do.
Last night, in person while getting a deservedly worshipful reception at the 2024 DNC in Chicago, her hometown, Michelle Obama's version of "going high" evolved even further. I don't think she gave up on the notion, as some have said. I just think she showed how to disembowel Trump with a stiletto rather than a chainsaw. You can do it without calling Trump "weird" or "crazy" but by demonstrating how he's both of those things. You can do it by treating him like a petulant child in need of a long time out (preferably in a small cell) and you can do it by showing how this shit is personal.
Obama eviscerated Trump's entire career with a simple phrase: "the affirmative action of generational wealth." It's got a side benefit of eviscerating RFK, Jr., too. She put it in terms that everyone there could understand, explaining how capitalism privileges those with that kind of wealth: "If we bankrupt the business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No. We don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top."
Yes, the Obamas are extremely rich now. But they didn't inherit it. They busted their asses from humble beginnings. Obama pointed out how Trump's skewed sensibilities make him so vile: "For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working and highly educated, successful people who happen to be black. I want to know, who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those black jobs? Look, it’s his same old con, doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better." Obama wasn't holding back, but she was carving Trump up in the most "going high" way possible: using the insults to pump everyone up and hit them in the heart and the brain. It was kind of brilliant, as was the pivot to how Kamala Harris is the very opposite of that decadent, louche, ignorant asshole.
Again, like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton the night before, here was a party elder (I know she's just a few years older than Kamala Harris) saying, "Yes, go for Trump's neck and bite into those saggy orange labial folds and take him down." They took different routes there, Biden more personally angry, Clinton with more of a done-with-his-shit attitude. But Michelle Obama's speech, which will likely be the most-remembered from this convention (not the least because she is an electrifying speaker), asked us to turn away from Trump and all his petty shit and lies and bloviation and turn to each other to finish the job, that electing Harris has the effect of watching someone who has been sliced with a stiletto come to realize he's been gutted before he could do anything to stop it. That's some going high I can get behind.
