The whole controversy about Michelle Obama’s recent private vacation in Spain with her daughter was really just about “optics,” the pundits decided. It didn’t look good. Bad politics, dontcha know.
“In politics and pop culture, optics are all,” wrote The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, as she embraced the right-wing attack on the First Lady as an out-of-touch elitist. “And Michelle's optics sent a message that likely made some in the White House and the Democratic Party wince."
That “optics” word as everywhere as Beltway sages conceded the vacation in and of itself was not inherently evil, but that it looked bad and that every First Lady has to understand that she’s always under scrutiny and that “optics are all.”
They were just fine because nobody in the Beltway press corps ever cared about Laura Bush’s “optics.” Instead, for eight years she was, without question, deemed off-limits to any sort of sustained scrutiny.
First Lady Bush was off-limits in a way that her Democratic predecessor, Hillary Clinton, was not. And she was off-limits in a way that her current Democratic successor most,
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