Michelle Obama shares husband's vision of future
Candidate's wife makes campaign stop despite heavy fog.
By KILEY MILLER
kmiller@thehawkeye.com
On a night when fog hung heavy and ominous, Barack Obama's wife said the nation must push aside fear and the "veil of impossibility" it creates.
"We have become insular because of our fear, and it has given us an excuse to be ignorant and timid," Michelle Obama told her audience Thursday at Autumn Heights Apartments in Burlington.
If there remained a need for proof of Barack Obama's ascendancy in the Democratic presidential race, it may well have been met by the fact that the Illinois senator's wife drew about 100 people on such a brutal evening.
Michelle Obama was late to arrive in Burlington because of poor visibility on the highway from Mount Pleasant. There was an irony to that for a campaign that so frequently asks Iowans to find a new vision for the future.
"We are still a nation in 2007 that is still too divided," Obama said, "and we are still too cynical as a nation. We fold our nations in disgust as if we don't have anything to do with it, and we don't want to engage ...
"And we are still a nation that is too mean," she continued. "We tend to mistake meanness for toughness."
Toughness was one of several winning characteristics Obama listed for her husband.
She described him as brilliant and independent, a legislator who "cut (his) teeth on Illinois state politics" and who spoke out against the Iraq War before it began, despite public support for an invasion.
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