Obama, in his sit-down interview with that hard-hitting political journal, Glamour magazine:

SENATOR OBAMA: It’s infuriating, but it’s not surprising, because let’s face it: What happened was that the conservative press—Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk—went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way…and treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans. And I’ve said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn’t sign up for this. They’re supporting their spouse. So it took a toll. If you start being subjected to rants by Sean Hannity and the like, day in day out, that’ll drive up your negatives.
Everybody who knows Michelle knows how extraordinary she is. She’s ironically the most quintessentially American woman I know. She grew up in a “Leave it to Beaver” family. She is the best mother I know. And our kids are a testimony to that, because she’s really had to raise them, oftentimes without me being there. She’s the most honest person I know, she’s smart, she’s funny, so yeah, it infuriates me. And I think that it is an example of the erosion of civility in our political culture that she’s been subjected to these attacks, and my attitude is that the people who have attacked her in the ways that they have…if they’ve got a difference with me on policy, they should debate me. Not her.
GLAMOUR: You said before that your campaign would never take aim at Cindy McCain. Do you believe that the McCain campaign has had a hand in these attacks on Michelle?
SENATOR OBAMA: I wouldn’t say the McCain campaign itself, but I would say that the apparatus of conservative columnists, blogs and the like. Talk shows, talk radio….When you see in the span of two or three or four weeks essentially the same talking points being used on a whole variety of shows or a whole variety of columns, over and over again….Hillary Clinton was subject to this, others have been subject to this in the past…It is part of our political environment that I’d like to change.

I’m going to quote the Lexington column in The Economist, (a magazine that, as you’ll recall, endorsed Kerry in 2004):

Mr Obama says people should lay off his wife. Laura Bush agrees. And one has to sympathise with Mrs Obama. She was always a reluctant political wife. Her husband’s crazy hours and long absences impose a hefty burden on her and on their children. In dark moments, she fears for his physical safety. And all the while, both she and her husband are subjected to maliciously false gossip online.
But not all criticism is unfair. If Mr Obama is president, his wife will have the ear of the most powerful man on earth. So her political views matter. And if she expresses them forcefully in speech after speech, she can hardly cry foul when not everyone likes what she says.

I don’t see how Barack Obama can send out Michelle Obama as a surrogate, have her declare that the country is “downright mean” or that Americans are spending their stimulus checks on earrings or lament her need to spend “$10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements” for their children or Americans’ inability to afford fruit or that “everything that’s in a bottle or a package is like poison in a way that most people don’t even know” or that what she “notice[s] about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first” …

… and then expect the rest of the country to stifle its objections.

UPDATE: Dang it, Byron types faster.