Michelle Obama tells us what to like.

The former First Lady said this to a crowd in Boston last week:

As far as I'm concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice in a way. To me, it doesn’t say as much about Hillary ― and everybody’s trying to wonder. Well, what does it mean for Hillary? No, no, no. What does it mean for us as women? 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. You like the thing we’re told to like.

I'm using the transcription from "Millions of American women disagree with Michelle Obama: Donald Trump is their voice," by Eugene Scott, who "writes about identity politics" for The Washington Post. He says, "But what Obama and other critics may not understand is that Trump's voice actually IS the voice of many of his female supporters — the traditionalist voice that speaks out against a liberal culture that many conservative women feel has left them behind."

I first read the quote here at The Federalist, in a piece by Inez Feltscher, who rejects the idea that conservative women fail to think for themselves and says: "[I]magining that women on the Right are mere sock puppets for their husbands, sons, and fathers is a crucial illusion for an ideology that has constructed a political paradigm entirely upon identity."

I just want to note the irony: Michelle Obama is herself telling women what to like.

What I'd like to tell women (and other people) to like is endlessly asking: What do I like?

It's not easy to know, especially since part of the propaganda that surrounds us is about our "own voice." But those who tell us to be in touch with our own desires are often merely trying to make us believe that what we want is the thing that they are selling. We see that in endless TV commercials for food and cars: You know you want it. Like your insides are crying out for this sandwich. This car expresses what you, deep in your heart, have been trying to say. This shirt is you.

We're used to that kind of persuasion, for political candidates as well as commercial products.

It's harder to play this game out in the open, the way Michelle Obama is doing. Once you call attention to the way the other side drew people in by making them feel that their candidate expressed what they really felt inside, you're waking us up to the fact that you were doing that too, and you seem rather pathetic complaining that your depiction of the customer's internal desires didn't work on many people.

Complaining about your ineffective sales pitch won't make it more effective: We said true women vote for women, and those women who did not feel what we meant to make them feel are inauthentic women. Our "voice" was their "voice." If they rejected us, they rejected themselves.

Said openly, it sounds absurd.

I think I've seen ads for commercial products that play with this idea of misunderstanding your own true desires. You see a guy happily eating a sandwich, and his inner voice prompts him about some other sandwich, superior to this sandwich in so many ways, until he stops mid-bite, looks at the sandwich, and drops it and goes running off and is suddenly seen getting a sandwich at the advertiser's store.

That might be funny and persuasive, but now try to imagine a Democratic Party commercial that depicts a pro-Trump woman, enjoying what she thinks are her true desires, then realizing how Democrats really are better, and running off to join the liberal crowd and finding happiness at last. Hard to picture that being handled well. From what I've seen, it's better to keep it subliminal: