Opinion: Did you hear what Michelle said?

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Remember that childhood birthday party game where, before the cake got cut, a parent whispered a phrase in a child ear’s at one end of the table and it got passed all around, whisper by whisper, until it came out on the other side completely unrecognizable from how it started?

Political campaigns can be a lot like that. People hear what they want to hear, and partisans play on that because the idea of campaigns is to divide people into us and them and pretty soon what’s being repeated and argued about bears no resemblance to what was originally said. But that doesn’t matter anymore because it’s taken on a new, often useful false reality of its own.

As The Times’ Noam Levey noted in a brilliant recent piece, it is now in the parties’ interests to boost partisanship and not work together, regardless of resulting negative polls. And the media, always alert for conflict, can play an unfortunate inflammatory role in all this.

Consumers of political news -- that is, the voters -- need to be aware of that as they sift through the now overwhelming amount of information that bombards them constantly, even 15 months out from Election Day. Of course, if you’ve already made up your mind, you can skip to the comics.

Take Michelle Obama’s obvious attack on Hillary Clinton the other day. The accomplished...

lawyer and mother, profiled in a piece in today’s Times by Maria La Ganga, is one of numerous feisty candidate spouses on the campaign trail these days.

She was speaking to a campaign rally for her husband, Barack. She actually said, ‘If you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.’ Or maybe, according to another version, she actually asked the question, ‘How can you run the White House if you can’t run your own house?’

Either way, it was a clear knock on Clinton’s overly-documented marital problems with husband Bill. You may recall them. If you’re a Clinton backer, that’s ancient history, was just sex, doesn’t matter and everyone saw the couple holding hands during that Fourth of July parade in Iowa.

If, as polls indicate, you’re like a majority of Americans who have an unfavorable feeling about Sen. Clinton, then the remark may bring to mind four or eight more years of sordid soap opera sagas, which may be as good a reason as any to vote for someone else, say, maybe the fresh Obama.

The Michelle Obama insult was actually ignored for several days. Turns out she’s said it so often, no one remembers its first utterance. But a Chicago columnist interpreted them as a ‘swipe.’ And then the Drudge Report posted: ‘Obama wife slams Clinton.’ And then cable TV, notably Fox News Channel, got hold of it.

According to a chronology by Media Matters for America, a watchdog group, ‘Fox & Friends’ devoted a segment to the quotation with headlines like ‘the claws come out’ and dueling interviews between Susan Estrich, a Democrat and Fox News contributor, and Jennifer Millerwise Dyke, a ‘Republican strategist.’ Estrich found the remarks a normal part of Mrs. Obama’s stump speech. With some experienced insight Dyke saw it differently:

‘Good campaigns do not put spouses out there without determining exactly what they’re going to say.... They’ve used her smartly to say things about her husband. You know, ‘A lot of people are talking about this great Barack Obama, but I live with a guy who leaves socks on his floor and I’m wondering if it’s the same person.’ She can give an insight and add some personality to him that no one else can, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you saw that they were also using her strategically to do a thinly-veiled attack.’ After all, Elizabeth Edwards took on Sen. Clinton.

But was it really an attack? Barack Obama denied it today. It turns out that in context Michelle Obama was talking about her own family and the demands that campaigning puts on it. How she tries to do day trips to be home at night with their children. How her husband reads Harry Potter books at bedtime. And the juggling they both do to maintain a family equilibrium because, after all, ‘If you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.’

The truth probably doesn’t matter much now. Two realities are out there to be believed; the flap could, in fact, help Obama, who trails Clinton. It may even have been an Obama operative who spotted the innocently-uttered phrase and saw an opportunity to point it out anonymously as a swipe to that Chicago columnist; newspaper writers are not noted for closely studying on their own the everyday remarks of candidates’ spouses.

However it got blown up, it sure has changed the topic of political conversation away from Obama’s unilateral plans to bomb our ally Pakistan. Such can be the intricacies of big-league politics.

The whole episode could be a useful lesson for honest news consumers to remember in coming months, as tensions and news cycles heat up even more, that each time they hear such stories, they need to question them, whatever their political allegiance.

That would, of course, require a memory beyond last night’s news and also some thinking.

-- Andrew Malcolm