"MICHELLE OBAMA DEFENDS HUSBAND'S RECORD"

First Read (MCNBC):

FLORENCE, S.C. -- After this weekend's furious back and forth between the Clinton and Obama campaigns over the consistency of Obama's anti-war record, the Illinois senator's wife is jumping to his defense.

"His opponents will say that he wasn't always against the war," she said today here. "I'm like, 'Where have you been?'"

Obama went on to say that her husband's rivals base the claim on the fact that he did not have to cast a vote during the 2003 authorization of the war because he was not yet a senator. "What they fail to tell you," she said, "is that where Barack was trying to get to the U.S. Senate." The tough Illinois primary race he faced, she added, made his opposition to the war all the more politically risky at the time.

Despite that risk, she said, "He looked at everything everybody else looked at, and he said this is going to cost us millions of dollars and thousands of lives," she said.

Speaking to an audience of more 300 mostly black voters at Francis Marion University here, Obama scoffed at the notion that the choice between her husband and Hillary Clinton (whom she did not mention by name) is a nuanced one.

"I get confused when people are like, 'We have so many choices. I'm so confused. I don't know, who should I vote for?'" she said, mimicking a waffling voter with a babyish tone. "I'm like 'Huh?'

"We have two choices: One, same old thing. Same thing that hasn't worked for my lifetime. Same people, same game, same thing. And then we have Barack. Those are our choices."

Barack Obama