The lemmings turned?

Over the last few days, the tone of the Democratic contest seems to have shifted, with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign more buoyant and Senator Barack Obama’s more defensive.

That shift may be traceable in part to the “Saturday Night Live” show on Feb. 23, when, back from the writers’ strike, it mocked the news media for treating Mr. Obama more gently than it treated Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton amplified that view later in a debate, and her aides stoked it all week, practically browbeating reporters.

They are so little sure of themselves?  So much with finger to the wind?  The public press is a public trust and all that, but who can withstand Saturday Night Live?

Of course, this is NY Times reportage, ignoring Chicago newspaper coverage of B.O., which did not begin only this week to press him on important issues.

Michelle Obama laid it on heavy in recent campaigning about how bad we have it.

In a New Yorker profile, she is quoted in a stump speech made throughout South Carolina as characterizing America as “just downright mean.”

She said the country is divided, life is not good, the people are “guided by fear” and cynicism.

“We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she told churchgoers in that primary state. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime.”

She ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Wait till the mainstream reporters really get warmed up with their Rezko qq.  Then she’ll really howl.

“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America!” she exclaimed.

Especially when U. of Chi Hospitals are your option.  Lots of insurance needed to help cover her $316,952 salary there as an administrator — up from $121,910  once her man became a U.S. senator.

She’s — ahem — conflicted about her success, or was in 1985 when she wrote her undergraduate thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” in which she makes a heartfelt cry:

Princeton both humiliated her and corrupted her, Michelle Vaughn Robinson complains in an undergraduate prose that is all the more touching for its clumsiness. By condescending to the young black woman from a Chicago working-class family, the liberal university made Michelle feel like an outsider. Worse, by giving her a ticket to financial success, Princeton caused her to feel that she was selling out to the institutions she most despised.

We call it guilt.  She’s made it big, and that ain’t bad, but she feels bad about it and wants us to feel bad too.  Grrrrrr.