Heslam: Michelle Obama hammers women voting for Trump

Jessica Heslam Thursday, September 28, 2017

Former first lady Michelle Obama had been pretty quiet about last year’s election until yesterday, when she dropped a bombshell in Boston, lambasting women who voted for Donald Trump as gender traitors.

“As far as I’m concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice,” Obama said as the crowd erupted into applause at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. “Everybody’s trying to wonder, ‘Well, what does this mean for Hillary?’ No, no, no. What does it mean for us as women?

“That we look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, ‘That guy — he’s better for me. His voice is more true to me.’ Well, to me that just says you don’t like your voice. You like the thing that you’re told to like,” she said.

Obama was the headlining speaker at INBOUND, a marketing conference that drew people from around the world, and she fielded questions by writer Roxane Gay spanning her move into and out of the White House, her two daughters, the book she’s working on — and of course, Trump.

The crowd adored her.

She and her husband, former President Barack Obama, are writing books — and working on hers has been like therapy, she said.

“It is all about voice. It’s all about us believing in our authentic self,” she said.

At one point, she spoke directly to women.

“I know you have sat, women who have sat in a classroom, or in a boardroom or around a conference table and watched a man go on and on and on and on and on, maybe saying something, but a lot of times saying not a lot, but taking up a whole lot of space,” she said.

“We have been socialized to sort of sit there and be quiet. We can’t afford to just sit by and let other people run roughshod because we are living that reality right now,” she said.

During the presidential campaign, Michelle Obama was a scathing critic of Trump in the wake of the release of a 2005 video that caught Trump bragging about assaulting women.

“In our hearts we all know that if we let Hillary’s opponent win this election, then we are sending a clear message to our kids that everything they’re seeing and hearing is perfectly OK,” she told a New Hampshire campaign crowd weeks before the election.

“We’re telling our sons that it’s okay to humiliate women. We’re telling our daughters that this is how they deserve to be treated.”

Obama insisted she and her husband “want the sitting president to be successful” and they have to “balance” how they respond.

“You can’t just be the talking head,” she said. “Barack is not going to turn into what this president was — just somebody tweeting in the wind and stirring up a mess without really knowing what they were talking about.”

Looking back on her husband’s eight-year tenure in the White House, she added, “The bar was always high and with every success the bar just got higher. I’m looking at low bars these days and it’s amazing how low these bars have gotten.”

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/col...ting_for_trump