Normally, in the guarded world of presidential campaigns, interviews are tightly controlled.
“Bring it on,” Michelle Obama told me in Boulder on Wednesday.
Normally, it’s out of bounds to admit that you’re tired, even in the final weeks on the stump.
“It can be exhausting,” she admitted, as visibly fatigued as her husband appeared Monday in Adams County.
As Michelle Obama tells it, “it seems like a lifetime” since she was last in Colorado and her daughters slumber-partied with buddies in their suite at the Westin Tabor Center.
“It was like a wedding,” she says of the convention in Denver. “All your friends and family are there, and you don’t remember any of it.”
Since then, Obama’s girls have returned to school, she has rallied across the country and her husband’s candidacy has sagged, then rebounded while a nation wrings its hands about the tanking economy.
Now it’s crunch time.
Coloradans have until Monday to register — a message she hopes will resonate among youth who tend to vote Obama. The estimated 170,000 young people not registered here could tip a state that George W. Bush won in 2004 by 99,523 votes.
Michelle Obama also is pushing registration in minority communities the campaign likewise aims to turn out in November.
In a race lingering at or near the margins of error, the strategy quietly seeks to counterbalance what’s known as the Bradley Effect. Named after Tom Bradley — an African-American who lost his 1982 gubernatorial bid in California despite being ahead in the polls — the theory goes that latent racism leads some voters to voice support for a minority candidate, yet choose a white opponent in the privacy of the voting booth.
It’s a prospect that terrifies staffers who discuss it daily in their war rooms, yet only whisper about it publicly.
“It’s theoretical,” Michelle Obama told me. “The Bradley Effect occurred at a different point in history, a different economy. It anticipates something that there’s been no sign in the past 20 months will really happen. . . . Barack has a 50 percent chance of becoming president of the United States. . . . We’re asking people to look into their hearts about what they want for the future of their country.”
“It was never supposed to be easy,” she told her crowd at CU. “This is a man who was not supposed to even be here.”
In all of Michelle Obama’s stops along the campaign trail, history may most remember her comments during February’s early primaries that for “the first time” in her adult life she was proud of America.
However artless her phrasing, I know what she meant. And so, I imagine, did everyone on Farrand Field on Wednesday when a student organizer asked those in the crowd of 9,700 to raise their hands if they weren’t registered to vote.
I counted fewer than 10.
This on a campus where, after only eight students caucused in the 2004 primary, more than 400 turned out last winter to caucus for Barack Obama.
Normally, I’m cynical about campaign theatrics. I’ve covered too many registration drives and get-out-the-vote rallies to be moved easily by words like “Every day, every hour, every minute counts.”
But this election isn’t normal, and this time they really do.
Michelle Obama may have been preaching to the choir Wednesday. But the “fierce urgency of now” her husband mentions so often was never more evident than in the unraised hands of 9,690 people who wouldn’t dream of sitting this one out.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
