Michelle Obama received warmly at Haverford

"Am I out of touch?" Michelle Obama asked several times - with tongue firmly planted in cheek - during a "Stand for Change" rally at Haverford College yesterday.

The laughter from the audience seemed to assure her that she wasn't - and gave her the go-ahead to continue veiled references regarding recent comments about her husband, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, by his Democratic presidential foe, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton.

In addition to her stump speech about how Americans struggle to catch a "shifting and moving bar" of expectations, Obama spent time debunking Clinton's recent comments that her husband is an "elitist."

"Barack didn't grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth," she said.

Obama said that she sees the world through the working-class Chicago neighborhood she grew up in and the public schools she attended more so than the Ivy League universities from which she later graduated.

She suggested that her husband also was shaped more by his life as the black child of an 18-year-old white single mother from Kansas than he was by his Ivy League education.

"You know that woman was a dreamer. You know there was a lot of hope in that house," she said of Barack Obama's mother. "She dared to dream before dreaming was ever in."

The only reason the Obamas are not in debt, like many college graduates, she said, is because of Barack Obama's best-selling books, which helped to pay off the couple's student loans in the last few years.

"When is the last time you've seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt?" she asked.

Obama said that "truth and honesty" matter, even if it is a "hard truth." Shortly thereafter, she hypothesized that it's not in a person's best interest to play dirty politics.

"You don't tear your opponents into bits and pieces because you never know when you're going to need somebody," she said.

In her well-received conclusion, Obama said that people can handle hearing the truth, so long as they have trust in the truth-teller.

"He knows that if he wins with you, he cannot lead without you. We need you Pennsylvania," she said. "We need you to set aside your cynicism . . . to come out of isolation . . . to lay down your fear." *