Very serious journalists: Michelle Obama's 'delicate task' of being awesome as usual

You just have to keep being popular and awesome. Think you can handle that? It wouldn't be Very Serious Journalism if the Very Serious Journalists weren't performing Olympic-level acrobatics to create laughably false equivalencies in their preview and analysis of this week's Democratic National Convention. At last week's Republican National Convention, the candidate's spouse did have a difficult job to do (as the Romney campaign repeatedly told us)'trying to make voters, and especially lady voters, not hate the hell out of Mitt Romney. She did a lousy job of it too.

So of course now Michelle Obama must have the exact same burden as Ann Romney because that's the only fair and balanced way to report something as only a Very Serious Journalist can.

Washington Post, step right up:

Michelle Obama comes to the 2012 Democratic National Convention with a delicate task: helping her husband's campaign reach out to women, who are a vital part of his coalition, without veering too far into an increasingly polarized battle over women's issues.

Funny'President Obama doesn't seem to need help reaching out to women. He seems to be doing pretty well with women, actually. There's that pesky, persistent gender gap Mitt Romney can't overcome. It gets worse for Romney among lady swing voters in battleground states if they happen to catch one of the devastating and highly effective ads from Planned Parenthood Action Fund. And as for unmarried lady voters, see above re: it gets worse for Romney.

Yet somehow, Michelle Obama has this "delicate task" tonight when she addresses the convention. Yup, sounds like a difficult task, especially considering, as noted in the Very Serious article:

As she prepares for the convention, Obama is one of the most popular political figures in the country, viewed favorably by nearly seven in 10 Americans.

Yes, an extremely popular woman is going to take to the stage to say, "You know how you prefer my husband's policies to Romney's? Keep doing that." Yeah, that does sound tricky.

The Serious Journalists may want to pretend that the bloc of women voters are "up for grabs," as the New York Times put it, but that's not really true. The Republican Party worked very hard last week to pretend it doesn't have a blatantly anti-woman agenda, but lady voters are pretty clear on which party stands for them and which party wants to amend the Constitution to strip them of their most basic rights of autonomy.

So Michelle Obama, who is already very popular and well-liked, has the "delicate task" of telling Americans tonight what they already know and believe: that women should and will continue to prefer President Obama when it comes to their rights.