First lady Michelle Obama praised her husband Barack on Saturday as the kind of person who always maintains the high ground in the dirty world of politics.
"Do what Barack Obama has always done," she said at a commencement address for Jackson State University. "As he says, 'When they go low, I go high.'"
This was a nice sentiment, but the president's career of petty, condescending attacks on the opposition belies the idea that he takes the high road in political combat.
Obama has been unable to resist spiking the football about his two elections to the presidency, for instance. During a 2010 summit about the Affordable Care Act, 2008 GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) laid out several objections to provisions of the law, before Obama couldn't help himself.
"Let me just make this point, John, because we're not campaigning anymore," he said. "The election's over."
McCain chuckled at the rude remark, saying, "I'm reminded of that every day."
Then, at his 2015 State of the Union, congressional Republicans lightly cheered when Obama announced yet again that he would never run another campaign.
"I know, because I won both of them," he said, drawing howls of approval from Democrats in the chamber. The media, not surprisingly, loved it, despite Obama's party having just taken a brutal drubbing in the midterms two months earlier.
In addition, Obama's referred to "bitter" people in the heartland who "cling" to guns and religion, compared GOP opponents of his unpopular nuclear deal to hardliners in Iran and suggested the GOP House of Representatives had a "gun held to the head of the American people."
And who could forget his 2008 dismissal of then-rival Hillary Clinton as "likable enough" during a Democratic debate? The quip did not endear him to voters, who dealt Clinton a victory in the New Hampshire primary that revived her campaign.