The first lady tried to enlist “Families for Obama” at an event with tickets starting at $500 a pop at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on Friday.
The pool reporter estimated that there were a couple dozen kids in the audience of about 350, and Michelle Obama spent much of her speech talking to them.
“I mean, I can’t tell you in the last election how many grandparents I ran into who said, I wasn’t going to vote for Barack Obama until my grandson talked to me, until my great-grandson talked to me, and talked about the future he wanted for this country,” she said.
“You can get out there with your parents. You guys can knock on doors. I had one young lady who brought me a petition — she’s already working. You can convince wrong people. Sometimes we don’t listen to ourselves, but we will listen to our children.”
That petition was handed to her by a Code Pink activist who bought a ticket and handed Obama a “no war on Iran” with a purported 20,000 signatures. The antiwar group said the signatures included Gloria Steinem.
The first lady spent much of her speech talking about the standard campaign themes of fairness, touting the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, healthcare reform, education and killing Osama bin Laden.
“And let’s not forget how my husband appointed those two brilliant Supreme Court justices,” Obama said. And let’s not forget how, for the first time in history, our daughters and our sons watched three women take their seats on our nation’s highest court. And we are now feeling the impact of those court decisions and what effect that will have on our children’s lives for decades to come — on their privacy and security, on whether they can speak freely, worship openly, and, yes, love whomever they choose.”
For a cool $38,500, a family of six could get a photo with the first lady at the event.
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