Michelle Obama is doing a book tour…..
Her book ‘Becoming’ has sold more than 3 Million copies….
Not bad for a Black woman’s book sales….
Of Course?
Being the wife of America’s first mixed race/Black President IS part of the sale….
FiveThirtyEight looks beneath the surface to bring up the political smell of her traveling road show in the name selling a book and reminding women of things other than Donald J. Trump times…
“If you make me miss Michelle, that’s grounds for breaking up,” a young woman said into her phone Wednesday night in Brooklyn. She was crossing the street to get to the Barclays Center, where former first lady Michelle Obama was speaking. While most authors struggle to corral their mother’s friends into a bookstore, Obama is a month into a six-month-long worldwide stadium book tour. The events are political rallies masquerading as pop culture phenomena. The talk brought out vendors selling bootlegged T-shirts with her face on them and “Black Is Beautiful” pins. Women, many of them dressed to the nines, some still in workwear, streamed into the stadium.
To these attendees, Obama’s life story and public image have merited all that enthusiasm, and they aren’t alone in thinking so. Her memoir, “Becoming,” is massively successful, having already sold 3 million copies. It has also provided Obama with a vehicle for her Trump-era cause: appealing to the better angels of the Democratic base. The book itself, meanwhile, digs into her life pre-politics with surprising candor and introspection.
“When they go low, we go high,” Obama said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office. It’s a speech and phrase that have been invoked many times by Democrats during the Trump presidency, sometimes to refute the premise of the quote. Earlier this year, Eric Holder, who served as her husband’s first attorney general, memorably said, “When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about.” Hillary Clinton said of Republicans, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”
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Obama herself embodies a refutation of Trump’s America — she is one of the world’s most famous women, and she is black. She has been savvily using that to her advantage. Her talk in Brooklyn was backlit by photos of her from her time in the White House, in which she hugged children, military veterans and her husband. She spoke about her rise from the black middle class of Chicago to Princeton and Harvard. She talked about empathy and open-mindedness, but also about how “hope is not a passive word — it doesn’t just happen, you have to actively work for hope.” The Brooklyn crowd, many of whom were black women, could hardly miss Obama’s point. Especially when she added that “the people who want something else are going to the polls too.”
One can easily imagine Michelle Obama as a star surrogate for a 2020 presidential candidate (though she likely won’t be a candidate herself). The book talk, moderated by a breathless Sarah Jessica Parker, felt like a stump speech in places, as Obama emphasized her work with military families and her accomplishments in bolstering nutrition awareness in schools. She was funny in person, even while telling jokes I’d seen before in news clips, and it struck me that the tour was a canny way for Obama to continue to demonstrate her influence — and her husband’s influence — on not just the Democratic Party, but on American culture….
image…The Root