In the biblical Song of Solomon, the voice of the turtle(dove) is a sign of Spring. But in the siren call of Michelle Obama -- who emerged last week from her nine-million-dollar beltway mansion to deliver a speech in Boston -- the voice of the lady birds who voted for Trump is a sign of Fall -- the fall of womankind, to be exact.

Being every bit the scold as her husband, Michelle verbally attacked those she thinks deserve it most: the women who dared to vote for Donald Trump. This is not a small group, moreover, since Trump garnered 52% of the women’s vote compared to Hillary’s 54%. The husbands of both former First Ladies fared much better with the ladies. So the discrepancy is assumed to have something to do with the sex of the candidate.

Not that Michelle is likely to seriously know any of the ladies she chastises, since her gal pals are all rock-ribbed liberals. I doubt if she predicted that the pushback against her remarks would be so swift and sincere. 

The most important line of Michelle’s diatribe was this: “Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice.” She went on to say that “we look at those two candidates as women and many of us said, ‘That guy. He’s better for me. His voice is more true to me. Well, to me that just says you don’t like your voice.”

As far as I’m concerned, she might as well have been speaking in tongues. At the very least, she could have come hewed to conventional noun-pronoun agreement as well as logical consistency in the tense of her verbs. But Ms. Obama is no silver-tongued orator like her husband. In her ability to work up ire among some voters, in fact, she seems to be more like The Donald than like Barack.

When president Trump “colorfully” chastised a few NFL players for “taking a knee” during the national anthem, the press pounced on him as a racist intent on denying caring people the right to their own opinions. But when Michelle Obama insulted every woman who voted Republican in the last election as being pawns incapable of recognizing their own best interests, the press ate it up.

It has been that way since the surprising results of the last election. The most insulting things shouted out by those on the Left are given a free pass. It’s “free speech, after all. Not content to call Trump supporters “deplorables” during her campaign, Hillary has since labeled them “trolls” responsible for denying her victory. Now Ms. Obama has taken this accusation one step further to suggest that these same women not only betrayed the candidate, they betrayed themselves, their better judgment, and their principled “voice.”

If a female Republican candidate were running for the presidency, Michelle would find it wholly acceptable to vote for her Democrat male opponent. There would be no rhetoric about “true voices” and the unconscionable abandonment thereof. So it isn’t the gender issue, alone, that is prompting Michelle to lecture recalcitrant women.

Nor could it be her belated desire to toot Hillary’s fading horn. The Obamas have never been particularly fond of the Clintons, and they hardly went “all out” during her campaign

So why is Michelle now wearing her allegiance on her sleeve? As I see it, her intention is largely self-serving. This may not be apparent yet, but the “true voice” in my head tells me she is gearing up to be her own woman and run for her own public office. Thus it becomes imperative for her to advise females everywhere that, were she to need their support, she clearly expects to get it. One mistake is enough, she would argue. Tune out the bad voices and listen to hers.

In fact, the political reality is there could be a number of reasons why Michelle might be a Democrat candidate. In January, when the Obama administration ended, a Gallup Poll found she topped both her husband and Joe Biden with a 68% favorable rating. This falls just short of Laura Bush’s when she left the East Wing of the White House. But it is more than 20% higher than Clinton when she did. 

This could change when and if Michelle climbed into the political ring, but it’s currently to her advantage. And since the prospects in a Democratic field of candidates represent slim pickings and, in some cases, an overripe yield, she should not be written off.

During her terms as First Lady, Michelle chose popular causes to champion, like serving nutritional school lunches and cultivating home vegetable gardens, though there is no present evidence to suggest she is spading the earth around her new digs. Instead, her most recent involvement with “dirt“ goes no further than throwing it at women whose politics are different from her own. Even if my inner voice were to tell me to plant rows of beans and broccoli and put them in lunch pails, I’m sure I would not meet with Michelle’s approval.

It would seem, in fact, that Mrs. Obama is moving on from a past of counting calories to a future of counting votes. And she is well aware that support from the usual constituencies will not be enough for the Democrats to regain the White House. It certainly wasn’t for Hillary last time. So it behooves Michelle to get errant women who voted for Trump to next time vote for a woman. And it might be her.

Another reason Michelle might listen to the voices telling her to run for office is because one of them is her husband’s. Barack Obama would like nothing better than to see his wife become the first female president of the United States. He’s as eager to get back into the White House as Bill Clinton was. He is already deeply involved in a shadow government that recognizes him as the legitimate leader of his party. A tantalizing taste of frosting on the political cake would be the ability of the Obamas to pull off something the Clintons could not.

And how could Michelle propel herself to a shot at the presidency? The same way Hillary did. Run first for U.S. Senate in a state she could easily win. Chances are that would be Illinois, her home state, but carpetbagging in other liberal territory is not out of the question.

When I suggest to my liberal friends that Michelle might have intentions of becoming a political figure in her own right, they assure me she’s not so inclined. But these are the same folks who told me Donald Trump had no path to becoming Potus. So why would I listen to their voices?

Dick Durbin has been commuting to Washington D.C. from the Land of Lincoln for the past 35 years. He’s currently the second-ranking Democrat, having been reelected to his fourth Senate term in 2014. That means, if he’s so inclined, he would be up for reelection again in 2020

Could it be that Michelle Obama is be planning to run for a congressional seat somewhere in Illinois next year and then run for Senate in 2020 replace or challenge aging Durbin for his seat, which, assuming she won, would put her in the catbird seat for the 2024 presidential bid.

If the 2016 elections told us anything, it‘s that anything is possible.

In the meantime, Michelle is beginning to sound her megaphone. Even if her last garbled message resulted in somewhat of an uproar, she’s a woman who bears watching.