Michelle O. on Fox, the Hated Network!

How do you send ratings through the roof when you’re the First Lady? By appearing for the first time on the network you “hate” the most. And by speaking about the battle against obesity in American children. Michelle did it on Saturday. Knives sheathed for the larger national interest. Well played.

By making the problem of childhood obesity one of her top priorities, Michelle Obama made it clear that she was putting her organizer’s hat back on, if she had ever taken it off. This week she was blunt in underlining the fact that if one in every three white children is obese, the figure jumps to one of every two children in black and Hispanic communities. And we can do something about it. There is proof.

After having hammered in the idea of “eating better and moving” that is the foundation of the “Let’s Move” campaign, she decided to emphasize examples that set the tone of what’s strategic and effective. Abstract principles are great, but if you don’t create the means to implement them, they don’t make any sense. And so, for the last 10 years, the mostly black suburbs of northern Philadelphia didn’t have any big places to buy fresh food.

Since December, that’s been fixed. The store Fresh Grocer, which cost $15 million and created 270 jobs, 97 percent of which were within the community, has completely changed the deal and allows the “neighborhood” to stock up on perishable fresh food, the basis of the First Lady’s whole war against obesity. It’s exactly what must happen. She also tackles the question of security in urban zones and the difficulty of getting kids to move other than taking a bus or getting in the car.

On Saturday, she was the guest of Mike Huckabee on the Fox News Channel, the network reviled by the White House because of its hateful and degrading comments during the presidential campaign and afterward. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, and a formerly overweight man himself, is a significant ally for the First Lady. He’s been fighting the war against obesity since the Clinton era and wrote a best seller on the subject. He showed himself to be very courteous to the First Lady, and expressed regrets about the past as they conversed about the necessity of merging the resources of all public and private efforts to reduce the epidemic.

And then it was on to the question of Michelle’s arms. Since she doesn’t lack for humor, she confessed that she needed to keeping working on that part and others, and ended the interview by provoking Huckabee. “Next interview, shirt off!” A totally red Huckabee!