Former first lady Michelle Obama on Wednesday offered a frank assessment of women who voted against failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
“As far as I’m concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice,” Obama said at Inbound, a marketing and sales conference held this week in Boston.
Obama, who acted as a surrogate for Clinton on the campaign trail, made the remarks as part of a candid conversation with author Roxane Gay.
The pair touched on everyday discrimination that women face and the importance of being authentic, the latter being the crux of Obama’s forthcoming book.
“What does it mean for us, as women, that we look at those two candidates… and many of us said, ‘That guy? He’s better for me. His voice is more true to me,'” Obama continued, citing the 2016 cycle as an example. “Well, to me that just says you don’t like your voice. You like the thing you’re told to like.”
While Obama said her family were “breathing for the first time” since leaving the White House after eight years, she admitted she missed the work and the people.
Obama implored activists to allow their work to speak for itself in order to elevate the tone of the nation’s political conversation.
But Obama said she and her husband had made a conscious decision to only enter the fray at opportune moments because they understood how difficult it is to lead “when you have a peanut gallery of people who don’t know what they’re talking about second-guessing what you do.”
“We want the sitting president to be successful because we live in this country,” Obama said. “He is our commander-in-chief. He was voted in. We may not like it, but it happened.”
Obama also discussed how the Affordable Care Act was “the country’s legacy,” not Barack Obama’s legacy, before adding her favorite song on Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album was “Love Drought.”
