So, Michelle Obama is getting a makeover. She’s hired a new strategist, will be doing all sorts of appearances, and giving speeches emphasizing her patriotism and her humble roots. Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor, writing in today’s New York Times, observe: “Mrs. Obama has already had to check her brutally honest approach to talking about race.”

Brutal honesty on race? To what can Powell and Kantor be referring? For all the hoopla surrounding Michelle Obama’s gaffes, she hasn’t really said much directly about race. But in terms of brutal honesty about America, she’s been heavy on the brutal and pretty light on the honesty. This is from a New Yorker profile earlier this year:

[Michelle] Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said.

This makeover is not about the unfortunate need to silence a speaker of truth, so as not to offend the public’s naïve sensibilities. It’s about reining in a woman who aggressively flaunts her indignity over this or that American crime. Moreover, it’s about getting her to stop playing fast and loose with the facts and admit the truth: America is not all that bad. Mrs. Obama’s new strategist Stephanie Cutter has all her work ahead of her.