Michelle Obama “not Proud of Her Country” Before Her Husband’s Election - no Grain of Truth?
This is an example of an utterance that politifact has rated as false, thus being “not accurate”. You can find the whole thing on http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2017/feb/23/david-clarke-jr/david-clarke-says-michelle-obama-said-she-was-prou/, but let’s look at the sum up:
“Clarke says Obama "said she was never proud of her country til they elected her husband POTUS."
He provided us and we could find no evidence of such a statement.
What Obama said -- nine months before her husband was elected president -- was that for the first time in her adult life, she was proud of her country not just because Barack Obama had done well in pursuing the presidential nomination, but also "because I think people are hungry for change."
We rate Clarke’s statement False.”
I’d argue that there’s a little bit of truth in this, given that Obama actually said that she was proud of “her country” for the first time during Barack’s election campain, thus events very closely connected to his election. Though this is not completely the same thing, or at the same time, as him actually being elected, but for my intuition, I’d say it’s close enough for this to be considered mostly false. Granted, the literal statement is indeed false, there are things that are extremely similar to this statement that are true. It is reasonable to expect that Clarke’s purpose with saying this was that Obama did not feel patriotic pride until it made her husband a big shot (at least this is what he seems to imply). And this does seem to have at least some truth to it, at least it’s possible to glean from the utterance mentioned in politifact’s ruling (though she herself would probably not agree with putting it in those words). Then this utterance would be more at home in the mostly false-category
The clever reader might object that this can be seen as the same kind of excuse that I made in the media/congress approval rate-post, but the other way around. There I may have seemed a bit nitpicky, while basically accusing politifact to be overly nitpicky in this post. That objection would indeed be correct (I do think that there’s more reason to interpret things a little looser here than there though). But a point of this is to show that politifact’s rulings seem to be made inconsequently. Part of my whole point is that it seems strange that this utterance is judged so harshly, while Trump’s comparison less so, even though there’s similar excuses or accusations to be directed at both of the examples.