Ladies rule: Michelle Obama DNC speech marks a Pop Political Moment

Hillary Clinton may have plenty of challenges as the first major party female candidate for president. “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones was trolled off Twitter. Democratic National Committee chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced out of her job in the email leak scandal.

But as the Democratic National Convention rallies the troops and roils Bernie supporters in Philadelphia, you can also detect a surge of pop political female empowerment. Michelle Obama’s heartfelt speech at the convention Monday night has inspired an online fan fest, with #FLOTUSforPOTUS tweets, gleeful dancing gifs and Facebook love letters. The lines “when they go low, we go high” and “I live in a house built by slaves” are going viral. The Atlantic called it “a speech for the ages” that will be “replayed, quoted, and anthologized for years” and a Huffington Post photo caption riffed on the all-conquering Muhammed Ali with “FLOTUS Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee.” (Obama’s astutely timed carpool karaoke with James Corden and Missy Elliot, with nearly 32 million Youtube views, hasn’t hurt either.)

Fusion Interactive offered up eight female cartoonists’ wryly feminist advice to Clinton, ranging from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post political cartoonist Ann Telnaes (Do: Lock Bill up. Don’t: Start another war) to Liza Donnelly of The New Yorker (lose the pastel pants suits for black, but don’t rock out because “Women over 50 still can’t dance in public. Not a barrier worth worrying about now.”) (Although dancing in public hasn’t been a problem for Michelle Obama, whether because she’s got the better moves or a presidential candidate just has to have more gravitas and less swing.)

Oh, and Fusion also served up this video on Puerto Rican artist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez’s super-heroine La Borinqueña, a mix of Wonder Woman and Super Girl inspired by activist young Boricua women. Dream of power, girls, and don’t wake up.

This story was originally published July 26, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Ladies rule: Michelle Obama DNC speech marks a Pop Political Moment."