Just 18 days from election day, the Obama campaign is beginning the final push for votes in the most critical “fire wall” swing states on their electoral map. To that end, First Lady Michelle Obama gave a rousing and impassioned speech in Racine, WI last night to a fervent and committed crowd of core supporters.

The speech, and the First Lady’s delivery, was at times shrill and desperate as false straw man after false straw man was hoisted up before the devoted crowd only to be struck down by Mrs. Obama with passionate force. “Don’t let anybody talk down your country!” she implored the crowd, not specifically citing any example of how her husband’s opponents have done such a thing.

Instead of just focusing on the positive and personal traits of her husband, Mrs. Obama spent most of the 34 minute sermon on policy issues.

Count the hysterical straw men Mrs. Obama dwells on when she wades into policy: From taxation “teachers and firefighters should not pay higher tax rates than millionaires and billionaires, not in America,” to deficit spending “we know good and well that cutting Sesame Street is no way to balance the budget,” to health care, “we believe in an America where no one goes broke because someone gets sick,” to pabulum that is not related to any specific policy but sounds a lot like socialism “we believe in an America where no one loses their home just because someone lost a job.”

“Do you hear me?” Mrs. Obama kept asking the supporters, “Do you understand me?” The animated and preacher-like delivery was not the standard speech often delivered by first lades. Sometimes shouting, often begging, Mrs. Obama showed herself to be just as effective an orator as her husband utilizing the same rhetorical techniques and passionate demonization of the invisible opponent trying to stand in the way of progress as she and the President define it.

Watch this final 4 minute climax of the speech, including desperate pleas for early votes and on-sight registration in a state that should have been comfortably in her husband’s column by this time, and you can see that in Camp Obama, there is no confidence but a slow unravelling of the hope for a second term.