I hope you'll forgive me if I've been lagging a bit on my blog entries. With so much going on, it's difficult enough to do my day job reporting on everything, much less my night patrols as a masked and caped crime fighter.

Anyway, of course I'll give you full reports on both the Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy visits.

But for now, to give this blog at least a semblance of chronological order, I'd like to tell you about Michelle Obama's visit on Tuesday.

Michelle, Barack Obama's wife, spoke for about an hour at the Strand-Capitol in downtown York. (NOTE: I hope you don't mind if I lapse into the informality of first names here. I used "Michelle Obama" every reference in our print edition, as per our style, to make a distinction between her and her husband. But frankly, I find that a little tedious.)

A lot of people have rightly praised Barack for his oratorical skills. Michelle, I discovered, is also a very good public speaker. Perhaps it's her training as a lawyer.

When she first took the stage, someone from the audience called, "We love you Michelle." She jokingly chided him not to make her cry at the beginning, because she's usually in tears by the end. She never did cry, but her voice did seem to tighten with emotion several times in the course of her talk. Yes, it might have been just a performance. But if so, it was a very good one.

During his introduction, York Mayor John Brenner referred to the Clinton campaign's attempts to stir up anger at Obama over the "Pennsylvanians are bitter" comments. Brenner said something to the effect of, "yeah, you're darn right we're angry with the status quo!" He got a big cheer from the crowd on that one.

That controversy seemed to serve as the underpinning for much of Michelle's talk. Yes, she did speak about Barack's policy objectives, But much of her talk centered on their respective upbringings -- hers as the daughter of a blue-collar city worker, and his as the son of a single, teenaged mother. Without mentioning Hillary Clinton by name, she dismissed attempts to present herself and her husband as elitist.

I'm not going to pretend that I have any kind of comprehensive survey information charting the attitude of Democrats in York County, much less Pennsylvania as a whole. But that particular controversy appears to have limped off and died an ignominious death somewhere.

Many local Democrats I've spoken to recently -- not party officials, but rank-and-file folks -- are of the opinion that Barack Obama actually hit the nail on the head with his characterization of frustrated Pennsylvanians.

In the aftermath of something like that, I find myself wondering: Was it even much of a controversy to begin with? Could it have just been the Clinton campaign trying to exaggerate a rather innocuous statement, and the news media going along simply for the sake of having something new to report?

Conversely, could the controversy's apparent subsidence be due entirely to effective spin on the part of the Barack Obama campaign?

This is the first intense presidential primary I've ever covered. (I'm a Pennsylvanian. Duh.) I'm starting to suspect that such chicken-or-the-egg questions are common at this level of campaigning.