So Michelle Obama killed it last night. Not surprising. She has the highest approval ratings of any figure in American politics, and pretty much every intellectually-honest Republican (read: not tea bagger) will concede that whatever you think of the Obamas and their politics, they have done a fine job raising a family and being parents. I think the passage of time has made this much easier on Michelle than it was on Hillary.
What was also interesting to me was to see my Vanderbilt football Twitter timeline blowing up with players going off about how great Michelle Obama was, that she should run in 2016, that if all women were like that men would have no shot – and then Josh Grady, the WR/recruiting coordinator from Florida, opined that if you do the math, Romney has no shot, simply because if Obama’s supporters are fired up to turn out the math doesn’t work for the GOP.
And this is why Vanderbilt is the school of brilliance all around – because he nailed something demographers have been pointing out all along. By 2020, it will no longer be possible to win the White House exclusively with white votes, as Romney/Ryan are attempting to do this year. Demography alone will either usher in an age of Democratic hegemony or force the GOP to broaden its base and nudge us back toward two broad-based parties. In other words, exactly what we got in The Emerging Democratic Majority a decade ago.
But our redshirt freshmen wide receivers can intuit this. Which is why, SEC, we are better than you in every way that matters off the field. =)
Meanwhile, we just have to hang on as a nation for another decade or so without letting the Old Ones run the world into the ground…