One Big Happy Riot. The Democrats try to spin dysfunction as triumph. By Matthew Hennessey.

The task before them is formidable: to sell Americans on the notion that eight years of Democratic rule have left the country better off, while at the same time convincing swing voters in Ohio and Florida that a host of ills — from patriarchy and institutional racism to corporate greed and police brutality — plague us still, and require ever greater levels of government intervention to solve.

They are trying to convince middle America that even though things are obviously deteriorating fast for them,  yet another term of the global elite’s agenda will make things better? Well, it’s been good for some:

Consider Michelle Obama, who wowed convention-goers with her primetime speech and earned predictable rave reviews. Eight years ago, she was a 44-year-old hospital executive earning a six-figure salary, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, a resident of one of Chicago’s toniest neighborhoods, and the wife of a United States senator. Yet she felt justified in peddling the notion that America is a kind of prison for those unlucky enough to be born female and black. In February 2008, she told a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, that seeing the support for her husband’s presidential campaign made her feel proud of her country “for the first time in my adult life.”

Monday night, as the outgoing first lady, Obama sang a different tune. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that America isn’t great, that we need to make it great again,” she implored the crowd. “This is the greatest country on earth.” That’s some turnaround. Perhaps she would consider delivering that message at a Black Lives Matter rally, or putting it in an e-mail to her former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who thundered “God damn America” during his sermons at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

Michelle Obama is the Marie Antoinette of modern times, a symbol of the elite’s unearned success and hauteur.