The next national pastime by pundits and politicians will be The Makeover of Michelle Obama.Recently, ignorant conservatives interrupted my idyllic daydream of seeing this brilliant, elegantly clad African-American woman presiding over state dinners and influencing policy matters, along with the Obama children hosting Easter egg hunts on the White House lawn. What interrupted my revelries was Fox News calling Michelle “Obama’s baby mama,” a derogatory term for unwed mother. What gall! Conservatives spin lies about Mrs. Obama but hide the truth about Cindy McCain, an heiress whose wealth, estimated at $100M, comes from her late father’s beer distribution company. Well-meaning handlers, responding to polls that Cindy McCain is more likeable than Michelle Obama, have set out to soften Michelle’s image. Hopefully, her recent appearance on The View (where she tackled the pressing issues of why she wears panty hose and eats bacon) smooched up her “likeability” enough so she won’t have to talk about that minutiae again. My fear is that too much tampering with her will smudge up a person who is loved exactly the way she is. Why try to turn a Sojourner Truth into a Stepford wife? Much is made out of a sound bite where, in response to her husband’s historic campaign for president, she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” If any of us have always been proud of our country, we need psychiatric evaluation. Have we always been proud of a country that once enslaved and lynched blacks within the protection of law? Are we proud of the nation’s almost total destruction of Native American populations, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the present oil war being waged in Iraq under false pretense? Michelle Obama will make waves one way or another to help the world’s left behind, just as she did at her six-figure position as vice president at a Chicago hospital. As the New York Times reported, when it was proposed that a certain vaccine to prevent cervical cancer should be tested on black teenage girls, Mrs. Obama stopped it. Many would be more comfortable with the role of First Lady as all fluff and puff. Certainly, Mrs. Obama will chart her own course in history, but the mantle of Eleanor Roosevelt is worth considering. She was the first First Lady to give a press conference, to testify before Congress, to write a newspaper column and to become a political figure in her own right, and was an ardent champion of civil rights long before it was popular. That’s the kind of Michelle Obama the world awaits.